I'd driven the E39 from Alesund with that particular mix of excitement and mild dread that comes from navigating Norwegian fjord roads in a hire car the size of a small boat. The Sat Nav had given up three tunnels ago, leaving me to squint at road signs while my partner, Mark, insisted he "knew exactly where we were" despite having never set foot in More og Romsdal in his life.

The mishap came at what I can only describe as the world's most optimistic petrol station. I pulled in for diesel, got distracted by a display of local brown cheese, and somehow managed to lock both sets of keys in the boot. There we stood, in a car park overlooking Storfjord, with our luggage visible through the glass and our dignity rapidly evaporating. Mark tried the old coat-hanger trick he'd seen in films. I tried not to laugh at the sight of him wrestling with a Norwegian hire car that clearly had more sophisticated security than the Bank of England.

Enter Gunnar. He emerged from the petrol station with the unhurried pace of a man who'd seen every possible tourist catastrophe and had long since stopped being surprised by any of them. Sixty-ish, wool jumper that had seen better decades, and eyebrows that seemed to operate independently of his face. He didn't offer to help immediately. Instead, he leaned against our car, produced a flask of coffee, and asked whether we'd come for the hiking or the "indoor weather appreciation."

"Bit of both," I admitted, gesturing at the grey fjord.

Gunnar nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something he'd suspected about the English. Only after he'd finished his coffee did he produce a slim metal tool from his pocket and pop the boot open with a single, almost insultingly casual movement. When I tried to pay him, he waved me off and asked instead whether we knew how to use a waffle iron. This, apparently, was the true test of character in these parts.

We followed his directions to the Sykkylven cabin with renewed purpose, arriving as the afternoon light was doing that particular Norwegian thing of hanging around for hours without actually committing to being daylight. The place sat above the fjord with the confident modesty of somewhere that didn't need to show off. Red wooden walls, a veranda that creaked reassuringly underfoot, and windows that framed the water like paintings someone had thoughtfully hung for us.

But it was the neighbours who made the first impression stick. Astrid appeared over the fence before we'd finished unloading, bearing a Tupperware of something she called "lefse" and a thorough interrogation about our driving route. She'd lived in the adjacent cabin for forty summers, she told us, and had developed strong opinions about which tourists would survive the local hiking trails and which would need rescuing by "that nice helicopter man." She assessed us with the frankness of someone who'd seen too many ill-equipped visitors attempt the surrounding mountains in supermarket trainers.

"You've got the walk of people who've already had one disaster today," she observed, which felt less like a question and more like a medical diagnosis.

Her husband, Per, emerged later with a fishing rod and a running commentary on the fjord's moods, delivered entirely in Norwegian despite knowing we understood perhaps three words. This didn't discourage him in the slightest. He'd gesture at the water, make what I assumed were observations about cod behaviour, and wait for our enthusiastic but meaningless nods with the patience of a natural teacher.

By evening, we'd accumulated three more visitors without really understanding how. There's something about Norwegian cabin culture that operates on an unspoken open-door policy, or perhaps an open-veranda policy, since nobody actually entered our cabin. They simply materialised with advice, leftover baked goods, and assessments of our fire-lighting technique that ranged from encouraging to frankly disappointed.

Mark attempted to demonstrate his scout-honed skills with the wood burner while a small audience of locals offered contradictory guidance. "Too much paper," said one. "Not enough birch bark," said another. Gunnar had reappeared somehow, settling into our outdoor furniture with the comfortable assumption of a regular, though we'd known him approximately four hours. He said nothing about the fire, merely raised those independent eyebrows whenever Mark added another log with excessive optimism.

The fire eventually caught, more through collective will than any particular skill, and someone produced a bottle of aquavit that made the rounds with democratic informality. We learned that Astrid had once chased an elk from her vegetable patch with nothing but a broom and what she termed "appropriate language." Per had opinions about Swedish fishing regulations that he expressed at length, though I understood perhaps one word in twenty. A younger man called Erik, who'd wandered over from a cabin further up, explained his seasonal work repairing boats with the particular satisfaction of someone who'd found his exact niche in the world.

What struck me, sitting on that veranda as the fjord darkened and the conversation meandered through subjects I sometimes couldn't follow, was how quickly these strangers had absorbed us into their evening. There was no performance of hospitality, no tourist-facing version of local life. They simply treated us as temporary neighbours, with all the obligations and casual intrusions that entails. When I mentioned this to Gunnar, he shrugged those remarkable eyebrows and said something that Mark later translated: "You were already interesting when you locked the keys in. Everything since has just been confirmation."

We went to bed that night with the fire still warm and the sound of Per's boat knocking gently against its mooring, already feeling less like visitors and more like people who'd stumbled into a community that operated on its own generous, slightly eccentric terms. The brown cheese sat untouched in the fridge. Some things, I suspected, would require more preparation than we'd yet received.