I have never been so grateful for a cup of instant coffee in my entire life, and I say that as someone who once drank airport cappuccino at five in the morning. The journey to Omholtfjell had been the sort of driving experience that makes you reconsider every life choice that led you to rent a car with rear-wheel drive in Norway in late autumn.

The mishap came approximately three miles from the cabin, at a junction that I am convinced does not actually exist on any map. I had stopped to consult my phone, which insisted I was in a field, and in the process of reversing to turn around, I managed to wedge the rear wheels into a drainage ditch so thoroughly that the car achieved a sort of resigned tilt. The sort of tilt that says, "Well, we're here now, aren't we?"

I stood there in the drizzle, contemplating the walk ahead, when a tractor appeared from a farm track. The driver, a chap called Arne who looked to be approximately seventy and was wearing a woollen jumper that had seen several decades of faithful service, did not seem surprised to find a British person in a ditch. He said something in Norwegian, sighed with the weariness of a man who had pulled many tourists from many ditches, and produced a tow rope from somewhere in his tractor cab with the casual efficiency of someone who kept one specifically for this purpose.

"You English?" he asked, once my car was back on tarmac.

"Yes, sorry," I said, which felt appropriate.

Arne nodded slowly, as if this explained everything, and directed me to the cabin with hand gestures that involved several points on the horizon and one reference to "the big rock that looks like a grumpy man." I found it, eventually, and discovered that the key safe code I had been emailed did not work. I was standing there, thumbing it in for the fourth time, when a woman emerged from the neighbouring property. She introduced herself as Ingrid, explained that the previous guests had broken the safe and the new one had a different code, and produced the correct one from her pocket with the air of someone who had become the unofficial concierge for the entire mountainside.

"Come for the walking?" she asked, while I made my embarrassed thanks.

I admitted I had come for the walking, the solitude, and possibly to prove something to myself about self-sufficiency. Ingrid looked at my still-muddy car, then at me, with an expression of profound Scandinavian scepticism.

"There is a shop in the village," she said. "It closes at four. Today it is half-day. It is now ten past three."

I made it with seven minutes to spare, thanks to directions from a teenage boy on a bicycle who communicated entirely in gestures and the single English word "left." The shopkeeper, a round-faced woman called Bodil, seemed genuinely delighted to have a customer, and spent fully ten minutes explaining the relative merits of various Norwegian tinned fish products while I nodded along and bought bread, cheese, and something I later discovered was brown cheese, which is exactly what it sounds like and rather better than you might expect.

Back at the cabin, Ingrid appeared again with a torch, because I had not thought to bring one and the autumn darkness falls early at that latitude. She showed me how to light the wood-burning stove without filling the room with smoke, a skill I had not previously possessed and one I suspect she had demonstrated to dozens of incompetent visitors before me. We stood there watching the flames catch, and she told me about the German couple who had stayed the previous month and attempted to barbecue on the porch in a blizzard, and the Danish family who had locked themselves out twice in one afternoon.

"You are not the worst," she concluded, which I chose to take as genuine comfort.

That evening, sitting by the stove with my brown cheese and a cup of that blessed instant coffee, I could hear nothing but wind and the occasional creak of the cabin settling into the mountain. The ditch, the broken key safe, the frantic dash to the shop, all of it felt already like the necessary price of admission. I had come seeking solitude and found something slightly better, which was solitude punctuated by the kindness of strangers who expected nothing in return except perhaps that you would not require rescuing again. I made a small promise to myself that I probably would not keep, about learning basic Norwegian and proper winter driving skills, and finished my coffee while the stove popped and sighed in the darkness.