I travelled to the Arctic Circle to find the 'midnight sun' and it changed how I see the world

Beyond the Arctic Circle, where the rules of time don't apply, SARAH FALSON gets lost in the moments.

The yellow sun dips towards the horizon, casting pinks and blues through the clouds, the colours reflecting on the lazy sea below. A crowd is gathering quietly, photographing what could, on any other day, be an arresting sunrise or sunset.

We stand on the ship's deck, awestruck as the golden orb caresses the skyline, making as if to fall beneath it. But it stays there, and will begin to rise again. We are watching the midnight sun.

In Norway, between May and July, the sun doesn't set in the northernmost parts of the country. If you cross the Arctic Circle as we have done, the rules of the world, the way the universe aligns to give us day and night, don't apply. This is what it's like on top of the world.

"What do you think of this one?" I ask my sister, Maddie, who has her arms filled with skeins of knitting yarn. I am modelling a cardigan with an intricate Scandinavian pattern in oatmeal and brown.

"That's a good one," she says, nodding. I agree. It's $600 but I buy it, desperate to take Norway home with me. Maddie purchases her Norwegian wool, enough to fill half a suitcase. For an enthusiast knitter like her, Norway, with its cold climate and sheep farming, is the holy grail of yarn.

We walk out of the knitting store in Tromso, one of the world's northernmost cities. If we were here in winter, we would be plunged into darkness now, feet sinking in thick snow, hoping for a glimpse of the northern lights. But summer has its own majesty, the storied "polar day", and we are on a pilgrimage up the Norwegian coast, on Viking Jupiter's Into The Midnight Sun voyage, to find it.

Looking out at the Tromso port, the Arctic Cathedral sits in pride of place between majestic mountains capped with snow. Seagulls own the foreshore, fighting over food and nesting spots, and restaurants spruik whale steak, moose burgers and reindeer salami.

Our tour guide, Viktor, came to Tromso to photograph the aurora borealis and was so enchanted he never left. During "polar night", he explains, when the sun disappears for six weeks in winter, it's not pitch black but a kind of blue twilight.

A Scandinavian sauna on the edge of the water is a reminder of Norway's pride in embracing the cold and Viktor jokes: "If you sit on the toilet too long, you will miss summer."

The Norwegian concept of hygge is the feeling of being cosy when it's cold outside. But to explain hygge I have to go back to the beginning, back to when I landed in Norway, and was ensconced in a warm taxi driving into Bergen from the airport, the rain teeming down outside, mist clinging on the mountains around the city. Bergen is one of the rainiest municipalities in Europe and some locals say they have more names for rain in Bergen than anywhere in the world.

They are also known for their hot dogs. At Bergen's Trekroneren hot dog stand I choose the red chilli sausage topped with crispy onions and with lashings of mustard and barbecue sauce - a must-try.

We wander the Bergen fisketorget (fishmarket), a thriving hub where live king crabs swim in tanks and tourists and locals sample mussels and scallops. Seafood is big business in Norway with stockfish (dried cod) trade dating back to Viking times. The fish is preserved in cold winds and can last up to 30 years in this format, resembling jerky. Vikings took it on their journeys - just soak it in water for 30 minutes and then it is ready to fry.

On the other side of the port stands the city's old wharf, Bryggen, a UNESCO World Heritage Site steeped in history. The charming, brightly-coloured houses date back to the 14th century when the Hanseatic League took over the country's stockfish trading empire.

"It's the Viking blanket," an American guest declares, his wife nodding while a smiling waiter hands us a glass of champagne as we board the ship. "They wrap you up and look after you every step of the way." We are settling into the easy swing of "ship life", flopping among cushions for port talks, our favourite server never far away with a preferred glass of wine (he always remembers). We try local flavours: gravlax, lamb stew and orange krumkake, the desserts always a highlight.

Heading north, dramatic fjords begin appearing as steep mountains rise from the sea, and today our tour guide, Sagueva, will take us to the UNESCO-listed Geirangerfjord from our port in Eidsdal. Sagueva is wearing a bright, red and yellow Norwegian jumper she knitted herself, passing the cold hours indoors. "Some people call it meditation; we call it knitting. You are there, looking into the nothingness, it's beautiful!" she laughs. Later, Sagueva and Maddie will swap knitting notes.

We snake up the mountain, around 11 hairpin bends and into the clouds towards Geiranger Skywalk, Europe's highest fjord view from a road at 1500 metres. Surrounded by mist, the bus ride takes on a dreamlike quality before the clouds part and patches of snow and scrubby grass give way to a glassy lake on top of the summit. A charcoal-coloured house set on the edge of the lake and doubling as the visitor centre makes for a magnificent photo opportunity before we begin our descent.

Ninety per cent of the energy produced in Norway is hydroelectricity. Water can fall from anywhere - the sky, the glaciers, the mountains. Melting snow cascades down ridges into patches of foxglove. The haze clears for a rare glimpse of sunshine at Eagle's Bend Overlook, where we gaze down at green farms dotted among lush valleys and streams, goats sunning themselves on jutting granite overhangs in the cliffs. This is troll country, if you believe in the myths, which many of the locals do.

Today, the landscape looks lifted from a picture book, but Sagueva reminds us of the harsh lives of some of these farmers; pockets of the valleys never enjoy direct sunlight, hidden from warmth by the jagged peaks of the towering slopes - the region's beauty and its curse. People can spend months without touching another soul; they hibernate in winter and are used to being covered up with "only their eyes showing".

"What you call isolation for us is normal life. During COVID when the security distance was five metres, we were wondering, why so close?!" Sagueva laughs. In Geiranger, which is plunged into 22 hours per day of darkness in the colder months, it's not uncommon for local doctors to prescribe their patients trips to Spain for Vitamin D.

Back near the ship, in one of the pop-up shops, I buy another jumper: a blue and orange Scandinavian knitted design with a cute collar and three wooden buttons, inspired by Sagueva.

We make our way through the cocktail menu (think lemon drops and negronis) in the Explorers' Lounge of an evening, watching the sea and flicking through books on adventurers and ice. Come morning, we hit the buffet, fine-tuning our approach: walk its full length before making any decisions and always pile on less than we think we want (so we can try more things).

We have reached the Lofoten islands, a three-billion-year-old archipelago known for its cod fishing. At Lofoten Seafood Centre, we meet a young woman who sorts stockfish ready for sale, checking each fish's skin, meat and size and - most importantly - smelling it to make sure it's only the best quality.

We drive to one of Norway's rare white sand beaches, a jewel among the black granite boulders, smoothed by centuries of snow, rising from green valleys dotted with white and yellow wildflowers. The word Viking means "king of the bay" and the campers who have set up here (it is legal to camp wherever you want in Norway) must surely feel like royalty.

Reindeer have begun appearing on either side of the bus, horned and muscly, grazing on the grey grass of the Honningsvag tundra. We are driving to Nordkapp (North Cape), considered the northernmost point on the European mainland at 71 degrees of latitude, where royalty and explorers have long stopped for a traditional glass of champagne to toast their arrival at the final frontier.

The famous globe monument, erected in 1978 as a symbol of the North Cape plateau, sits on the edge of an impossibly high cliff. The wind is fierce (it can reach 250kmh in winter) and I dare not stand at the fenced edge too long. Looking down more than 300 metres, out into the endless water of the Barents Sea, I think about how this, to early explorers, would have felt like the end of the world.

And it is. Beyond the cliffs there are only islands home to puffins and cormorants and beyond that, Svalbard and the North Pole. This is where the Arctic and Atlantic oceans meet, home to orcas, whales and Greenland sharks that are said to grow seven metres long and live for up to 500 years. We join the throng taking selfies in front of the globe sculpture and I send a postcard home from the post office in the visitor centre, a delightful tradition from the end of the line.

The larger-than-life reindeer occupying the treeless plateau belong to the indigenous Sami people, semi-nomadic reindeer herders who thrived across Norway but have been driven over time to the north. We pass a Sami camp, a reindeer tied up next to a tent, and a man wearing a traditional red and blue costume waves at us.

That night, we meet North Cape again, but this time from the ship - hundreds of metres below where we photographed ourselves earlier - and peer up at the globe from its post on the cliff. How many ships has it watched over? How many adventurers? Viking Jupiter's horn blows, long and low: we are here, we have made it to the world's edge.

The sun is shining. Not as harsh as in Australia, but it is the same sun, glowing day after night after day, like a lighthouse illuminating the sea ahead for our passage. Further north is a journey for another day - we are determined. There is so much more to see on this Earth, to cherish. But for now, we close our stateroom curtains against the sun, shut our eyes and dream of adventures. I've never been so far from home, and then our boat turns around - such a long arc we don't even notice - pressing on through the ocean to take us back. Back into the night. Back to our lives. Back home.

The writer travelled courtesy of Viking