Tim Warrington journeyed from Oslo to Oslo over eight enjoyable days and nights...  

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

TS Eliot's narrative seemed somewhat prophetic about my time in Norway.

I journeyed from Oslo to Oslo over eight days. I came across the dog-eared copy of Eliot's poems at a hotel in Lom, a small town capturing the essence of the Scandinavian countryside.

Surrounded by grass-roofed log cabins, mountains and cascading streams – across from the 12th-century wooden Stave Church – I half expected a hoard of marauding Vikings to appear.

We took a boat trip on Geiranger fjord, considered one of the most beautiful in the world, Unesco-listed since 2005. Cascades of thundering water from almost vertical mountainsides broke the still of the glassy ocean below.  

The Seven Sisters waterfall shimmied airily on one mountain while the Friaren waterfall (The Suitor) gazed wistfully from across the fjord. We were mostly silent aboard the vessel, awestruck, a time for quiet reflection. Norway's like that – visual impact at every turn that steals your breath, as epic landscapes, sculpted by ancient ice and wind, unfurl before you.  

From the fjord we ascended more than 1.5 kilometres to Northern Europe's highest and arguably most striking mountain pass, Sognefjellet. Pitched among a symphony of jumbled stone, innumerable glaciers snaked through the otherworldly landscape in one of nature's most stunning spectacles. Even superlatives pale when describing Norway's ancient landscape.  Surrounded by so much beauty, and again lost for words, there remained only one logical thing to do: jump for joy.