I have never been so grateful for a cup of tepid petrol station coffee in my entire life. Three hours out of Bergen, winding through the sort of scenery that makes you wonder if you have died and woken up inside a particularly tasteful postcard, I realised with a sinking feeling that I had left my phone charger plugged into the wall of my hotel room. Back in Bergen. Where we were not.

My partner, who had been navigating with the sort of calm that only comes from not being the person who packed the charger, simply said, "Well, that's that then." And it was. No maps, no translation apps, no ability to pretend we knew what we were doing. We were properly, gloriously at the mercy of whoever we happened to meet.

The first such person was Oddvar, who ran the petrol station just past Norheimsund. He spotted us staring at his wall of chargers with the desperation of two people who had never considered that Norway might use different plugs. He did not speak so much as rumble, a low continuous sound like a distant fjord ferry, and he insisted on testing each charger in his personal phone before he would sell us one. "Cannot have you stranded," he said, though his expression suggested he found the idea faintly amusing. He told us about his brother who kept elves in his greenhouse, not the decorative sort but "the ones who steal your good socks," and he said this with such absolute sincerity that I found myself nodding along, wondering if I had perhaps misunderstood something fundamental about Norwegian horticulture.

We reached Kvamskogen as the light was doing that extraordinary thing it does in Hardanger, turning everything golden and slightly unreal. Our cabin sat among birch trees with a view down toward the fjord that made me actually laugh out loud, the surprised sort of laugh you make when beauty ambushes you. But the real discovery came the next morning, when I went looking for bread and found instead Ingrid.

Ingrid ran the small shop in Kvam village, though "ran" suggests more organisation than was evident. She operated by a system I never fully decoded, involving handwritten notes stuck to various surfaces, a large dog who may or may not have been hers, and extended conversations about the weather that were actually, I slowly realised, conversations about everything else. The weather was simply the agreed-upon code. "Rain tomorrow," meant "I am worried about my grandson's mathematics." "Clearing by afternoon," meant "Have you tried the walking path past the old school? There are blueberries." I bought bread from her four times in a week and never once managed to leave in under twenty minutes. By the third visit she was calling me "the English who cannot pack properly," which I chose to take as affection.

The walking path itself delivered Torbjorn, an elderly man who appeared to be maintaining the trail single-handedly with a scythe that looked older than both of us combined. He spoke English in the manner of someone who had learned it exclusively from mid-century American films, which created the disorienting effect of a white-haired Norwegian farmer saying things like "hot diggity" and "you betcha." He was scything around a particularly muddy patch when we met, and he stopped to demonstrate the proper technique, which involved a hip movement I was absolutely not going to attempt in front of a witness. "The young ones use machines," he said, with the particular contempt reserved by the elderly for all progress since approximately 1967. "They do not know the conversation of the blade." I still do not know what he meant, but I have thought about it at least weekly since.

Evenings in the cabin, we took to walking down to the small jetty where a man called Geir kept a boat he claimed was seaworthy, though the evidence was mixed. He was there most nights, not fishing exactly, just sitting with a rod in the water and a thermos of something he offered us once. It was not coffee. That is all I will say. Geir spoke almost not at all, which in the context of our other encounters felt almost theatrical, like a character who had wandered in from a different sort of story. But on our fourth evening, as the light finally gave up and turned properly dark, he said simply, "You are staying at the red cabin. The one with the leaking window in the bedroom." He was not asking. "The woman before you, she painted the door blue. I do not know why. It is red again now." And that was all. A complete history, a whole previous life of the place, delivered as fact without interpretation.

I think about that leaking window now, back in my properly sealed English flat. I think about Oddvar's elves and Ingrid's weather reports and Torbjorn's conversation with his blade. I went to Kvamskogen expecting mountains and fjords, which I got, but what I did not expect was to feel so constantly, gently observed by people who had no particular reason to be kind to two disorganised tourists, yet were. The charger mishap that had seemed such a disaster became the mechanism that forced us out of self-sufficiency and into all these small, strange, genuine encounters. I cannot recommend carelessness as a general travel strategy. But I can say that arriving in a place slightly broken, slightly ridiculous, with no screen to hide behind, turned out to be the most honest way I have ever travelled.