I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to unlock the wrong cabin. There I stood in Ullensvang, jiggling a key that clearly had no intention of cooperating, while a rather patient Norwegian woman watched from her window with the amused expression of someone who had seen this exact scene play out before. Turns out my actual rental was two doors down, hidden behind a rhododendron bush that had clearly been plotting my embarrassment for decades.

The drive from Bergen had already tested my composure. I had confidently ignored the satnav, convinced I knew a "better route" through Hardanger. This better route involved a single-track road, a tense encounter with a sheep that seemed personally offended by my presence, and a growing suspicion that I was technically in someone's farmyard rather than on an actual road. By the time I spotted the fjord glinting through the valley, I was ready to weep with relief or possibly just weep.

But nothing prepares you for that first glimpse of the Sorfjorden arm stretching out before you, with the Folgefonna glacier lurking in the background like a slightly standoffish celebrity. The cabin itself sat perched on the hillside with the kind of casual Scandinavian confidence that made my own attempts at interior decorating feel aggressively inadequate.

Within ten minutes of finally locating the correct front door, I met Oddvar. He appeared from nowhere, as neighbours in these parts tend to do, bearing a bottle of homemade apple juice and the immediate assumption that I would want to hear about his 1978 expedition to Greenland. I absolutely did want to hear about it, as it turned out. Oddvar spoke with the measured pace of a man who had spent forty years living alongside a fjord and had consequently stopped seeing any reason to rush anything. His wife, he mentioned, was currently up the road helping someone else who had also tried to unlock the wrong cabin. "Germans," he said, with the gentle satisfaction of someone whose own national embarrassment had company.

The apple juice was extraordinary. I told him so, probably too enthusiastically, and he nodded as if this were simply a statement of obvious fact rather than a compliment. "The trees are old," he said. "Older than your queen, I think." I wasn't entirely sure about the monarchical mathematics there, but I accepted the juice and the implied wisdom along with it.

By evening I had accumulated what felt like a small village's worth of introductions. There was Marit from the small shop, who explained that she stocked three types of brown cheese because "people get emotional about breakfast." There was a teenager called Einar who was fishing from the small jetty and responded to my polite enquiry with a fifteen-minute monologue about sea trout migration patterns that I understood perhaps forty percent of, but found completely captivating regardless.

Sitting on the cabin's small terrace that first night, watching the light do its prolonged Scandinavian fade into something that only technically counted as darkness, I felt that particular holiday sensation of being slightly outside yourself. The wrong-cabin incident already felt like a story that belonged to someone marginally more competent than I actually am. Oddvar's apple juice sat in my fridge. Einar had promised to show me his "proper" fishing spot, though he warned me I would need better boots.

I had arrived in Hardanger convinced I was embarking on a scenic escape, a fjord-themed retreat from ordinary life. What I had stumbled into, quite by accident, was something more complicated and considerably more human. The landscape was doing its spectacular geological business, certainly. But it was the people, emerging with their juices and their stories and their gentle observations about my questionable navigation skills, who were already making the place feel less like a destination and more like somewhere I might, with sufficient time and sufficient brown cheese, actually belong.

The sheep, I noted, had not followed me. Some boundaries, apparently, even I could respect.