NUUK (Denmark), April 9 -- It's Friday night and the port in Nuuk is a hive of activity. Passengers loaded down with heavy bags hurry aboard a rusty red and white ship - Greenland's last ferry.

Among them are an ethnologist and a few Danish tourists, but most are Greenlanders from the 74 villages and settlements that dot the west coast, a thin strip of land squeezed between the ice sheet and the open sea just south of the Arctic Ocean.

Linking Qaqortoq in the south to Ilulissat almost 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) north, the ferry was for a long time the only means of transport in Greenland, until air travel took over.

With its old-fashioned charm and pervasive smell of linoleum, the vessel feels stuck in 1992, the year it was built.

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