I should have known the holiday was going to be characterful when I got my first proper conversation with a local before even reaching the cabin. I'd stopped at the Co-op in Suldalsosen for supplies, armed with a shopping list written in what I thought was perfectly acceptable Norwegian thanks to a translation app. The woman at the till, whose name badge read "GUNHILD" in letters that suggested she meant business, picked up my list and squinted at it. "You want to buy a 'moose bicycle'?" she asked, deadpan. Turned out I'd asked for "elg sykkel" instead of "egg smor" - moose bike rather than egg butter. Gunhild found this so amusing that she called over her colleague Jan from the back, a chap with a magnificent white beard who looked like he'd been assembled from spare Viking parts, and the two of them spent a solid ten minutes teaching me the correct pronunciation while a small queue formed behind me. Nobody in that queue looked even slightly impatient. This, I would learn, is simply how things are done in Suldal.

The cabin itself sat above Hebnes, and my first evening brought an unexpected visitor in the form of Tore, the neighbour from the property below. He appeared at my door holding a bottle of home-brewed something and wearing a jumper that appeared to have been knitted during the Napoleonic Wars. "You are the English," he announced, which I couldn't really argue with. Tore had heard about my moose bicycle incident from Gunhild, who was apparently his cousin, and felt I needed proper initiation to the area. Over glasses of his fearsome brew, which tasted of fermented pine needles and regret, Tore explained that he'd lived in Hebnes his entire sixty-three years except for one regrettable winter in Stavanger. "Too many people," he shuddered, as if describing a war zone. "Here we have space. And fish. And sometimes both together." He'd then produced a packet of dried fish from his pocket and insisted I try some, watching my reaction with the satisfied air of a man who'd performed this ritual many times before.

The following morning I met Inger at the small harbour, a retired schoolteacher who now ran what she called her "boat taxi service" though this mostly seemed to involve taking people out on the fjord and talking at them for hours. She was wrestling with an outboard motor and swearing colourfully in a dialect so thick I caught perhaps one word in four. "You look useful," she declared, though I suspect this was merely optimism. I helped her with the motor, mostly by handing her the wrong tools, and in return she took me out on the water and delivered a running commentary on every property visible from the fjord, complete with scandalous backstories about who'd built what without proper permits and which German tourist had tried to buy the old Jensen place. "We don't sell to Germans anymore," she confided, though whether this was policy or prejudice remained charmingly unclear.

By my third day I'd become something of a minor celebrity at the local petrol station, where a man called Per who worked the pumps had appointed himself my unofficial Norwegian tutor. He refused to let me leave without correctly pronouncing at least three new words, and would chase my car if I tried to escape mid-lesson. "You cannot run from language!" he'd shout, which felt unnecessarily dramatic for a Tuesday morning.

What struck me most about Hebnes and Suldal was how quickly these strangers became something like friends through sheer force of personality. There was no polite distance, no gradual warming up. Tore simply decided we were having dinner together. Inger determined I needed to know about the 1987 planning dispute at the end of the road. Gunhild and Jan treated my linguistic failures as community entertainment. It was overwhelming and slightly exhausting and absolutely wonderful in a way that city holidays never quite manage.

I left with a jumper Tore's wife had knitted me, a jar of something fermented from Inger, and a vocabulary that remained stubbornly terrible but enthusiastically deployed. The cabin had been lovely, the scenery spectacular, but it was the people who made the place feel like somewhere I might actually belong, given another decade or two of language lessons and perhaps a boat.