First stop: Sisimiut, Greenland's second largest city with a population of 5,500 -- the only port where the dock is large enough for our 370-foot ship. In others, a fleet of eight-man open-air Polar Cirkel boats will zip us ashore.

A few steps off our ship and we're hit with culture shock: freshly skinned seal meat stuffed into plastic, ready for the local fresh market.

''I don't want to see that!'' shudders a fellow passenger, moving quickly past.

Traditional Inuit ways are alive here, we quickly learn. Though the Greenlandic people are related to those in other Arctic zones, circumstances aren't always the same. In the tourist-friendly areas of Alaska, for instance, the 1800s gold rush and the more recent armada of cruise ships have brought prosperity. In remote Greenland, people may have TV, cell phones and Internet service, but the demands of a harsh and remote cosmos dominate.

Though tourism officials have upped promotion, now the country gets about 55,000 visitors per year, and in our entire week, we saw only a single tour group and a dozen souvenir shops.

``BIG CITY''

Sisimiut offers a ''big city'' experience. Houses and apartments painted in gleeful reds, blues, yellows -- an antidote to winter doldrums -- trickle down rocky hillsides to the harbor. No sight-seeing boats here; it's a working place, filled with small trawlers that dredge for the cold-water shrimp whose bounty fuels the town. The dockside Royal Greenland shrimp factory processed 18,000 tons last year.

A handful of shops line the street leading up the hill: video store, book-and-stationary shop, toy hut. The single supermarket is jammed with canned goods, reindeer steaks, Chilean wines and frilly lace underwear; the seal and shark and dolphin are found at the fresh market next door. As in the other West Greenland towns we'll visit, Sisimiut's European-style town structure dates from the 18th century, and a few historic buildings have been preserved as a museum.

GENUINE PLACES

The smaller towns of Qeqertarsuaq, Illulissat, Uummannaq and Ukkusissat seem a bit the same: simple square houses in anti-depression hues, a thriving fishing harbor, working dogs on summer holiday secured on rocky outcrops around the town next to a stack of dog sledges -- a surefire hedge against dangerously unreliable snowmobiles. The most important buildings are church, school and -- in bigger towns -- a recreation center.

Yet each town is unique -- and undeniably genuine.

The gentle slopes near Qeqertarsuaq, on Disko Island, flow with waterfalls and cascades of summer wildflowers -- puffy cottongrass, red herb-willow, violet harebells, buttery cinquefoil -- growing in the crumble of 4.5-billion-year-old rock. On the black beach edging the town we see our first icebergs: jagged castles in bluish ice dwarfing the odd fishing boat that zips between. A few massive cubes have drifted ashore, and the children from our ship clamber on them until their mothers catch sight, admonishing them to come along.

A strangling fog hides Uummannaq the morning we arrive, and it's noon before it lifts to reveal a magical 3,800-foot double-humped rock massif sheltering the houses perched on stony outcrops above the sweet anchorage. From here we'll pass over the pipes that carry water and sewage to and from the town -- in this frozen world, burying pipes underground would be disastrous -- and up into the hills for a hike to Santa's Summer Cabin, built courtesy of a Danish television station.

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