This week’s dream: Norway’s midnight sun
In far-north Norway, 200 miles inside the Arctic Circle, the sun doesn’t set for the whole of June and July. Of course, there’s “nothing supernatural” about this, yet knowing it and experiencing it are “two different things”, says Paul Bloomfield in The Times. Being in 24-hour daylight alters your “psyche in unexpectedly uplifting ways”. The island of Sommarøy (“Summer Isle”) made headlines recently with a campaign to become the world’s first time-free zone. On this “gorgeous speck 35 miles west of Tromsø”, residents want to be free to “paint their house” at 2am if they please. With a “solarcharged spring in my step”, I set out to hike Sommarøy and neighbouring Senja.
With glittering fjords and “winsome fishing villages”, the region has all the appeal of Norway’s more southerly Lofoten Islands, but without the Instagrammers and cruise ships. This is “terra incognita”; I barely see another soul. A rocky scramble gets me to the summit of Hillesøya, a 300ft-high headland, where “gleaming” beaches are “fringed by the clearest of jade-green waters”. I can see why this is known as the “Arctic Caribbean”, although dipping a toe in the water reminds me how far north I am. Later, I climb Ørnfløya, a “mini-mountain” from which I can see colourful clapboard houses clinging to the coves of nearby isles, and all is “silent save for the swoosh of waves below”. I’m entirely alone. With a “wistful sigh” I wish this day will “never end”. And it doesn’t.
A short ferry ride will take me to Senja, where “the roads are quieter, the paths wilder”. The island’s “most photographed landmark (which isn’t saying much)” is Segla, a “dramatic” monolith of a mountain. On my final evening – “at least, so my watch told me” – I sat on my veranda in Senja, “gazing west at the honeyed sun hanging low” above a nearby archipelago. Inntravel.co.uk provides walking holidays to northern Norway. Early booking for next summer is recommended.