Getting to the northern most tip of Norway takes a little bit of doing. I fly from Sydney to London via Singapore; London to the Finnish capital of Helsinki; then north-west from Helsinki to Tromsø (Norway) with a pit-stop in Rovaniemi; then north-east from Tromsø, with another pit stop in Hammerfest. Finally arriving in the ferry and fishing port town of Honningsvåg, from where it is a 33km shake-out bike ride up to Nordkapp (North Cape).

North of Nordkapp there is simply no more Norway, nor indeed any Europe for that matter. Only the Barents and Norwegian Seas lie frigidly in wait for the hapless crab and cod fisher-folk. (*‘Hapless’ is old Norse for ‘without hap’ or luck). (*Please don’t mention the goat track just to the west of Nordkapp. It doesn’t count because I said so, and it’s my blog).

The Danish have a term ‘tandsmør‘ for spreading butter so thick that you leave teeth marks in it when you take a bite. These are people who take their butter seriously, and that has to be respected.

Smjör (butter) from Iceland, produced by Mjólkursamsalan, is rich and creamy. The word’s onomatopoeic glissando autologically conjuring the stuff (smjör), the spreading or smjör-ing of the smjör and, for me at least, the satisfying squelch as one’s teeth nestle luxuriantly into a soft inviting goo; Smmmjjöööör….. (Let us know how you feel about butter in the comments).

Why it is that any consider it worthwhile chomping down into something as bland as margarine or some other yellow half-butter muck that is often so nothing that it doesn’t even warrant a noun, is quite beyond me. ’Spreadable’? No proper smjör-ing to be had there. Only the inevitable disappointment of a damp squib of artificially coloured slop and the interminable trundling on of a drab wretched existence.

Sitting in Honningsvåg in late May I have the feeling that I might be a tad early in the season for this kind of thing as the campsites are still not open. However, you can camp anywhere up here with no need for ‘stealth camping’. The temperature is hovering between 5 and 10 degrees Celsius while the ‘midnight sun’ glows through the night as advertised. The mosquitoes arrive in July I’m told. The idea of these large nasty bastards are giving me flashbacks to the harrowing bug battles of the Alaska Dalton Highway back in 2011.

I never learned to put sunglasses on my face in a sensible manner so this all looks a bit skew-if. In my defence I’m well knackered at this point.