There are weeks in a Nordic summer when the light does not leave. The sun drops toward the horizon sometime after ten, hesitates, and returns without the sky having ever really gone dark. For certain travellers, and for certain moods, there is nothing else quite like it.
We send clients to Norway in July for precisely this. A private cabin on a fjord, reached by small boat, with the water still and the mountains vertical around you. A fisherman at the pier at four in the morning, selling you the cod caught an hour before. A chef who comes to the cabin for a night, cooks it simply, leaves before dessert. The afternoon that does not end.
The Lofoten Islands are perhaps the country’s most photographed corner, and they are photographed for good reason — fishing villages painted red against grey stone cliffs, beaches the colour of raw silk. We like Lofoten best in a small private house rather than a hotel, and best in the last week of June or the first of July, when the light is longest and the tourists are at their lowest ebb.
Further south, the Sognefjord country gives the slower version of the journey. A private stay at a small country hotel on the water, a full day on the fjord in a private boat, a walk up into the apple country above. A country that does not hurry its travellers, in a month that does not end its days.
A note on pace. The midnight-sun weeks disorient the body. We plan around this: late starts, long mid-days, early-evening rooms ready for a nap. The nights that never fully arrive are easier borne if the mornings are not rushed.
For travellers who can read the light as the country reads it, a Norwegian summer is one of the most restorative journeys we arrange. A week of it is enough to carry for a year.
