Farmland and forests and fjords are all very beautiful in their different ways, but today we finally climbed above the treeline and onto the mountain plateau of Dovrefjell. At which point the views reached a whole new level, both literally and figuratively.

There’s plenty round here that’s higher than us, but picking your way past crunchy clumps of pale green lichen towards the rusty mountain tops, you feel like you might be crossing the lid of the world.

You look out on untidy ranks of peaks, speckled with patches of snow and lined up haphazardly out to the hazy limits of your vision. And like some smug Olympian from Clash of the Titans you watch the rays of bright sunlight fall on one valley, while a dark, grey-brown sheet of rain slants grimly across another. You hear a deep, distant crumpling of thunder, even though the sun is still hot on the back of your neck and the breeze warm, and reflect that any one of these weather systems could be drifting towards you.

Sometime in the early evening, with an hour or two of walking still ahead of us, we sat cooling our feet in a stream that was a lot less icy than it looked, and a bit further up the trail we startled a large, dumpy, goldish rodent that we decided must have been a lemming, even though none of us knew what one looked like.

This stuff is what I came for.