The satnav gave up somewhere past Haukeli, which I took as a sign we were properly in the wilds. My partner, ever the optimist, said it meant we were "off-grid." I said it meant we were lost. We compromised on "authentically disoriented" and pressed on through the Telemark valleys, where the hills roll about like sleeping giants and every other building seems to sell either wool jumpers or waffles, occasionally both.

The mishap came at a petrol station in Vinje. I emerged from the loo to find my partner attempting to explain to a very patient woman behind the counter that we needed "directions to the cabin with the red roof, near the big rock, you know the one." The woman, whose name badge read "Inger" and who looked like she'd seen this exact scene roughly four thousand times, simply pointed at a laminated map on the wall and said, "Rauland. Everyone is going to Rauland." She was not wrong. We bought two hot dogs that tasted faintly of smoked fish and followed her finger west.

The cabin itself, when we finally found it, sat tucked into a hillside with a view that made me forget I'd been clutching the steering wheel for three hours. Red roof, yes. Big rock, absolutely. But what the listing hadn't prepared me for was the neighbour.

Arnt appeared roughly six minutes after our arrival, materialising from behind a shed with a wheelbarrow and the kind of beard that suggested he'd started growing it in the nineties and simply never found a reason to stop. He spoke English with the confidence of someone who'd learned it exclusively from American crime dramas, which made every observation sound faintly threatening until you parsed the actual words.

"You got the damp room," he said, gesturing at the cabin. "Good. You will need it."

I assumed he meant the drying room for ski gear. He meant the drying room for ski gear. But the delivery, I tell you, had me checking for hidden cameras.

Over the next hour, Arnt delivered a comprehensive oral history of Rauland without my asking. The ski centre up the road, he explained, had been "better before the Swedes discovered it." The local shop had "cheese on Tuesdays." His cousin's dog had once eaten an entire loaf of brunost and survived, which Arnt considered "a miracle, but also typical of that dog." He told us all this while ostensibly fixing a fence post, though I never saw him actually do anything to the post. It was simply his podium.

Then came Kari, who walked past with two enormous dogs and stopped when Arnt shouted something that sounded like an accusation but was apparently just "hello" in local inflection. She was seventy-ish, wearing wellies that had seen actual agricultural use, and she looked at our hire car with the undisguised pity of someone who'd never once paid for parking.

"English?" she asked. We admitted it. "You drove through the tunnel?" We had. "Brave," she said, which I chose to take as a compliment.

The three of us stood there in the thin autumn light, two locals and two lost Londoners, discussing the practicalities of firewood. Arnt had opinions. Kari had better opinions. They disagreed about birch versus spruce with the intensity I usually reserve for arguing about Tube routes. I found myself nodding along, utterly out of my depth, strangely content.

What struck me, standing in that driveway with my hands in my pockets, was how thoroughly I'd misunderstood what this trip would be. I'd packed for isolation, for staring nobly at nature while contemplating my busy urban existence. Instead I'd been immediately absorbed into a tiny, bickering, utterly indifferent community. No one cared about my job. No one asked why we'd come. They simply assumed we had our reasons, and that those reasons were ours to manage.

Kari left with a warning about the compost toilet that I didn't fully process until later. Arnt vanished back behind his shed, his fence post still technically unfixed. My partner and I carried our bags inside, where the damp room waited, and the red roof creaked in the wind, and somewhere a dog was probably eating cheese again.

I thought about how I'd describe this to friends back home. "The locals were characters," I'd say, which feels accurate and also completely inadequate. They weren't performing quaintness for tourists. They were simply being themselves in a place too small for pretence, too remote for performance. I was the oddity here, with my satnav anxiety and my hire car and my desperate need to be doing something, seeing something, achieving something.

By evening I'd stopped trying. We cooked pasta on a hob that Arnt had apparently helped install, according to a note from the owner. We sat by a window and watched the light fade over the hills. We were, without having planned it, doing absolutely nothing in particular.

And it was then, in that nothing, that I finally understood what Inger at the petrol station had meant. Everyone goes to Rauland. Not because it's spectacular, though it is. Not because it's convenient, because it absolutely isn't. They go because somewhere between the big rock and the damp room, between Arnt's beard and Kari's wellies, you stop being a visitor and start simply being present. It's not a transformation you can photograph. It's not even a story that translates well to a dinner party.

But it's there. It's real. And I'm already plotting how to go back and lose the satnav on purpose.