{"id":28238,"date":"2026-04-18T11:47:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T09:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/voorbereidingen-voor-een-groenland-expeditie-de-papierwinkel\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T12:11:36","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T10:11:36","slug":"voorbereidingen-voor-een-groenland-expeditie-de-papierwinkel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/en\/voorbereidingen-voor-een-groenland-expeditie-de-papierwinkel\/","title":{"rendered":"Preparations for a Greenland expedition: the paperwork"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n<style type=\"text\/css\" data-created_by=\"avia_inline_auto\" id=\"style-css-av-1gwz1si-65b00dbab9504b8c861c7b322dfe2eba\">\n.flex_column.av-1gwz1si-65b00dbab9504b8c861c7b322dfe2eba{\npadding:0 20px 0 0;\n}\n<\/style>\n<div  class='flex_column av-1gwz1si-65b00dbab9504b8c861c7b322dfe2eba av_one_half  avia-builder-el-0  el_before_av_one_half  avia-builder-el-first  first flex_column_div  '     ><section  class='av_textblock_section av-mc64ztu3-ecb9863e6085779f3701ce94be0d98ca '  ><div class='avia_textblock' ><h2>Listen to the Greenland Expedition Update<\/h2>\n<audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-28238-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/grlnd2026-20260418.mp3?_=1\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/grlnd2026-20260418.mp3\">https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/grlnd2026-20260418.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n<p>\ud83c\uddec\ud83c\udde7 <a href=\"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/onderwerpen\/greenland-spring-2026\/\">Read all blogs in English.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\ud83d\uddfa\ufe0f <a href=\"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/en\/expeditions-overview\/groenland-expeditie-voorjaar-2026\/\">Our live position in Greenland.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\ud83d\udce2 <a href=\"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/en\/expeditions-overview\/groenland-expeditie-voorjaar-2026\/\">Read all previous posts.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n<style type=\"text\/css\" data-created_by=\"avia_inline_auto\" id=\"style-css-av-1bmxhhu-f5224d651b560eb192fac74ab38ea33f\">\n.flex_column.av-1bmxhhu-f5224d651b560eb192fac74ab38ea33f{\nborder-radius:3px 3px 3px 3px;\npadding:10px 10px 10px 10px;\nbackground-color:#f2f2f2;\n}\n<\/style>\n<div  class='flex_column av-1bmxhhu-f5224d651b560eb192fac74ab38ea33f av_one_half  avia-builder-el-2  el_after_av_one_half  el_before_av_hr  flex_column_div  '     ><section  class='av_textblock_section av-mc64zgdb-764a03b10f56dacf5f241b503f2c1109 '  ><div class='avia_textblock' ><h2>Sign up for the Expedition Newsflash.<\/h2>\n<p>Receive alerts of new blogs in your email during the expedition.<\/p>\n                <div class=\"ml-embedded\" data-form=\"HO1phZ\"><\/div>\n            \n<\/div><\/section><\/div><\/p>\n<div  class='hr av-s1j460-8b84e45465358f2aa3aef05aedecf6b4 hr-default  avia-builder-el-4  el_after_av_one_half  el_before_av_one_full '><span class='hr-inner '><span class=\"hr-inner-style\"><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<div  class='flex_column av-rnnpki-558c6bf59fdaafc19ab18598bf38c424 av_one_full  avia-builder-el-5  el_after_av_hr  avia-builder-el-last  first flex_column_div  '     ><section  class='av_textblock_section av-mc64ytx1-f782ba5f3613bbe73186e5a4eaf44b03 '  ><div class='avia_textblock' ><h2>Start of the preparations<\/h2>\n<p>We haven&#8217;t started the expedition yet, but I, Henk-Jan Geel, have been busy preparing for this expedition for a long time. In fact, I started all the preparations a day before my birthday, on December 12, 2025. It&#8217;s now April 18, so that&#8217;s about four months since I fully got started with this. But that&#8217;s about the paperwork.   <\/p>\n<h2>The paperwork and permits<\/h2>\n<p>Before you&#8217;re allowed to go to Greenland, you need permission from the Greenlandic government. You get that permission by obtaining a permit. But it&#8217;s not so much a matter of requesting a permit by email saying \u201chello, I&#8217;m going to Greenland, is that okay?\u201d, because there&#8217;s quite a lot involved. For example, if you take a weapon with you, you need a weapons permit. You apply for that with the Danish police. You need a radio permit because we&#8217;re taking a VHF radio, a marine radio, and a personal locator beacon. That&#8217;s all described in a previous post, but you do need permission to use them in Greenland. So the radio permit is coming along. We&#8217;ve obviously been working on an overview of the participants. Besides their name, address, place of residence, and date of birth, participants must also indicate what their experience is. If that experience isn&#8217;t sufficient, you&#8217;re not going to Greenland. So the participants&#8217; experience must be described in detail, and that&#8217;s been done. We have to send a route proposal to the Greenlandic government. That route proposal states where you start, where you end, the date you start, and the date you expect to finish. But it also states the places where you expect to set up camp. So I&#8217;ve tracked down the GPX coordinates of all 30 possible campsites and put them in a large overview for the Greenlandic government.               <\/p>\n<h2>Bank guarantee and financial side<\/h2>\n<p>That&#8217;s all paperwork I can do myself behind my laptop. But after that, we get to the more complicated things: the financial side of the matter, the insurance, and the bank guarantee. That bank guarantee wasn&#8217;t so simple. In previous years, it was enough to send a screenshot of your bank account and forward that, but that doesn&#8217;t work anymore. Now there has to be a bank guarantee from an external party. We eventually found that external party. Dutch banks often only issue a bank guarantee if you&#8217;re going to buy a house, so for the benefit of a mortgage. I&#8217;m not buying a house yet, although with all the costs involved in a Greenland expedition, you could put together a nice outbuilding. Anyway, the bank guarantee was eventually arranged. And I&#8217;m not talking about December 13. No, I believe I only got that bank guarantee sorted somewhere in March. So quite a bit of time passed there.           <\/p>\n<h2>Search &amp; Rescue insurance<\/h2>\n<p>During that time, I was also busy searching for, adjusting, and applying for insurance. We need what&#8217;s called Search &amp; Rescue insurance. The special thing about this insurance is that it&#8217;s not a standard travel insurance, nor is it a standard travel insurance with winter sports coverage. The Search &amp; Rescue insurance is a special insurance where the Greenlandic government is listed as the beneficiary. So I take it out, but if something goes wrong, the Greenlandic government gets the payout. Normally that&#8217;s not the case, because then the person who takes out the insurance gets the payout. But in this case, it&#8217;s different. That all has to be put on paper. An amount of about 250,000 euros must be insured. Most insurers in the Netherlands work in euros, but in Greenland, they have Danish kroner. So the proof of insurance must be drawn up in Danish kroner. That means you have to take exchange rate differences into account. By the time you&#8217;ve got an insurer to the point where they&#8217;re going to draw up a statement in English, and also with Danish kroner in it, you&#8217;re several thousand euros poorer. And then you hope you never use the insurance. This paper tiger took me, I think, about a month and a half to finally get done. But it worked. And without this insurance, you don&#8217;t get a permit either.                <\/p>\n<h2>The contingency plan<\/h2>\n<p>New for this year is a contingency plan. That&#8217;s actually a full write-up of what you&#8217;re going to do on this expedition. It states, for example, what you do if things don&#8217;t go according to plan, or in other words, how you&#8217;re going to adjust. The contingency plan includes the expedition overview: when is the expedition, how long does the expedition last, how many people are in the team, what is the route of the expedition, and who is organizing the expedition. In this case, Arctic Adventure is organizing the expedition. They also want to know what the command structure is: who is the expedition leader, who is the basecamp manager. In this case, I am the basecamp manager together with Wouter Plaatsman. But also: who is the medical officer, who manages the medical basecamp, and who is the meteorologist. It describes in detail what the decision-making principles are, or how decisions are made. It also states that the guide on-site always has the final say. In this case, that&#8217;s Karin, because she knows exactly what the location and situation look like and what decisions need to be made based on that. There&#8217;s a section on the weather: what happens in high winds, what happens in a white-out, in extreme cold, and what are the weather limitations we commit to. This expedition is carried out within the guidelines of the International Polar Guide Association, the IPGA, and we have adopted those guidelines in the contingency plan. It states when rest days are held. It states how you cross crevasse terrain and how you deal with those dangers. Once you&#8217;re on the other side, it says how you&#8217;ll be picked up from the place where you eventually land. It states how you deal with medical contingencies, with medical deviations, and what the evacuation scenarios are. For the first two days, evacuation by snowmobile is still possible. If we&#8217;re in the middle of the expedition, evacuation by helicopter is possible. And in the first fifteen days of the expedition, it&#8217;s still possible to return independently if it turns out it&#8217;s not going to work. The communication plan is discussed: when, with whom, and about what communication takes place. It also describes the reasons for aborting the expedition. That could be related to the weather. If the weather conditions are such that we no longer have a buffer, we abort the expedition. If there&#8217;s a medical incident, we abort the expedition. If we can no longer proceed safely, we abort the expedition. These are all matters described in the contingency plan. Naturally, it also contains the most important phone numbers for the basecamp, the participants, and all service providers in Greenland. All data for our inReach and navigation equipment is also in there.                            <\/p>\n<h2>Receiving the permit<\/h2>\n<p>So you see there&#8217;s quite a bit of paperwork before you&#8217;re allowed to go to Greenland. Eventually, we then hopefully received the permit. And I say \u201chopefully,\u201d but three days ago, the permit for the Greenland expedition spring 2026 finally landed in my mailbox.  <\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Henk-Jan Geel has been preparing thoroughly for an expedition to Greenland since December 2025, including permits, insurance, and a detailed contingency plan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":28239,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_joinchat":[],"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[311,513],"tags":[307,486],"class_list":["post-28238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-en","category-greenland-spring-2026","tag-expedition","tag-greenland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28238"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28242,"href":"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28238\/revisions\/28242"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcticadventure.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}