Is this the world's wildest Airbnb?

At this one-bedroom floating cabin in East Greenland, the nearest person is a satellite phone call away. Is it the ultimate expression of our need to get away from it all?

"If a polar bear comes," says Nicco Segreto, "you couldn't be in a safer spot. Just get inside and lock the door."

It's easy for him to say. A local glacier guide, Segreto is also the founder of the Floating Glacier Hut, a cabin moored in an uninhabited glacial bay in wild and remote East Greenland… and he's about to take off by boat and leave me to it.

It's not polar bear season and he's not being reckless, but after a week in this part of the world, I've heard enough stories to know that that doesn't always matter. A few summers ago, one was seen swimming in the harbour of a local settlement – and at the tail end of summer now, I'm keeping my wits about me. I think I'm on my own, but you can never be too sure.

I'm staying in one of the world's wildest Airbnbs, a small green hexagonal hut tethered to land by two strong ropes and an anchor but otherwise floating in a bay facing the Greenland Sea. While Airbnb has been criticised for its impact on housing prices in urban areas, the platform has made it possible for entrepreneurs like Segreto to create hyper-remote stays that find an audience among the world's adventurous travellers.

Vision Lodge

Amid its eight million listings, Airbnb includes nomadic yurts in Mongolia, a community guest house in Papua New Guinea, a tree house in the Amazon River between Colombia, Peru and Brazil, and a cabin stay on the Blaeberry River in the Canadian Rockies where you're unlikely to see another soul.

And then there's this place: a perfectly insulated Finnish-made aurora hut with a glass ceiling for watching the stars and the northern lights. Its geometric shape reminds me of the re-entry capsule of a rocket, and there's something of the loneliness of space to this place too.

But loneliness is just par for the course out here. If you follow the Greenlandic coast north from this spot along its east coast, you'll reach the settlement of Sermiligaaq, population 209 – and then nothing for 800km (497 miles) before you hit Ittoqqortoormiit, population 345, known as one of the most remote settlements on the planet. Then there are icebergs, polar bears and narwhals all the way to the North Pole.

In the other direction, due south, keep going for 7,600km (4,722 miles), roughly twice the width of the United States – and you'll finally make land in Brazil after crossing nearly the entire North Atlantic Ocean. It's a dizzying thought – but I'm not completely alone. The regional metropolis of Tasiilaq, population 2,000, is 45 minutes away by boat along an inlet to the west, and the airport town of Kulusuk, where I arrived, is a little closer.

Laura Hall

It's not just me seeking peace and quiet in the world's most out-of-the-way places: it's all part of a broader trend about getting away from it all. Quietcations have been one of the year's key travel trends, along with a rise in off-grid travel and digital detox retreats. This signals that, for many of us, the noise and stress of modern life has reached such a pitch that we need a complete break from it all. And by all, we mean nearly everything: tranquillity and relaxation are the watchwords. Even the previously excess-laden area of luxury travel has become about stripping everything back to exquisite essentials, the idea being that you don't have to make more decisions on holiday, but fewer. Less is now most definitely more.

Alone in the cabin, after feasting on honey-glazed barbecued salmon that Segreto caught in his nets on the way to the hut and then prepared for me, I'm left to my thoughts with just a satellite phone to keep me company. As well as a comfortable double bed, I'm provided with food, snacks and an eye mask to help me sleep – there are no curtains for the ceiling skylights and at this time of year, daylight lingers late into the night. 

It's incredible what you notice when you're on your own without a phone or Wi-Fi signal. Stripped of the digital world, I am completely immersed in the physical reality around me. I hear the seawater slowly thickening and turning to ice as the Sun sets behind the mountains. In the late evening as the stars come out, grey clouds form and break apart and become torrents of magenta light reflecting in the still, quietly icing sea. The colour drifts like smoke across the sky. I lie on the bed and gaze up at the lights, perfectly warm and quiet, until the early hours of the morning.

Laura Hall

When I wake, the sky is clear and pale blue and the entrance to the fjord is starting to ice over. Well rested and clean, thanks to a lightning-fast dip in the utterly freezing sea (the cabin has a toilet but no shower), I'm ready to explore.   

I'm also ready to speak to another human. 

Segreto picks me up in his boat and gives me a brief glaciology lesson before we strap on crampons to explore a glacial cave on the other side of the bay. He discovered it by chance 10 years ago and in the intervening decade, has taken around 400 people to it, largely as a tourist guide from Tasiilaq. 

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"I got goosebumps when I found it," he said. "I wasn't looking for it. It's really a hidden gem that I want people to see." After discovering the cave, he decided to make a small adventure company to create jobs in the local community and give him a chance to return. Next year, he's opening a luxury wilderness retreat, Vision Lodge, that will incorporate the cave and other local activities in a week-long trip. He notes, with sadness, that the ice is melting fast: a large boulder halfway up the hill we're walking was under the ice just two years ago.

Laura Hall

Inside, the vast cave has a ceiling of ice and a muddy, sandy floor that hasn't seen daylight since the Ice Age began. There's the sound of a river from somewhere – glacial caves are created by rivers running under a glacier through cracks or crevasses – and we walk into the wide caverns, ducking our heads as we go. It's raining – melting – as we stand beneath it and I marvel at the air bubbles trapped in the ice from millions of years ago, made from ancient, compressed snowfall. I'm not especially fond of dark underground spaces, but I am captivated by the idea of looking through time as I peer up through the ceiling, through the million-year-old snow to last winter's snowfall, the ice on the top.

Outside the cave, we eat focaccia and Greenlandic salmon in the sunshine, with a view of the glacial tongue and the floating hut beyond it. There are whales in the neighbouring bay and ravens roaming the mountain tops. Greenland's nature is confronting: its scale dwarfs nearly everything you've ever seen, and its roughness can feel daunting. Staying in the floating hut and visualising the passage of deep time in the glacier cave has shifted my perceptions, which feels like the ultimate promise of a "get away from it all" type of holiday. I’ve had time to think, to slow down and even to consider time itself. Now that I’ve disconnected completely from everyday life, the next step is to gradually re-enter it and see if I can take some of this perspective with me.

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