This summer we will be sailing to the North Troms islands based at our relais on the island of Vannoya, so in case of bad weather our guests will be accommodated in our oceanfront villa.

Among the wonders that we will discover:

• Fugloya, the island of birds, eagles, gurnards, puffins, seagulls, woodcocks and so on and so forth, anthropophobic with its vertical coasts that connect a black sea to always white peaks, does not offer any welcoming corner, yet they used to go there by rowing, from Vannøya, to make hay with nets, yes, with nets, which they nailed around the grassy lust fed by guano to collect it when they cut clinging to the very steep sides, before oil made the country rich.

• Vanna, the island of water, a 40-kilometer mountain range with slopes for all tastes and peaks for all ice axes, yet capable of sliding into an emerald green sea creating a coast full of gulfs, ports and coves, you fall in love with it at first sight, just take a walk among the sea lions, reindeer and ptarmigans, or skiing down from the valleys to the beach. The path that embraces it all is one of the most beautiful in the country.

• Arnoya, born from the abyss with three bladed mountains, has left two very gentle valleys and has bordered a coastline that offers definitive visions of a south of shaggy white as far as the eye can see that floats sometimes on the stringy sugar of the stormy sea, other times on the unheard-of indigo of the calm sea, other times it peeps out just on gray clumps always hurried. And people had fun surrounding the whole island with one house after another, all the same but all different, with windows that distill envy like glass the rays of the sun, always low, always grazing, always silent.

• Kagen is an island without half measures, three prohibitive peaks that descend to the sea, and man has just made a road and a bridge to connect it to two gentler and less anxiety-inducing peninsulas, capable of embracing the best port in the area, Skjervoy, almost unpronounceable.

• Then, towards the east, another mountain range on the border with Finnmark makes you discover that it is not over there, that the show continues, with other tattered peninsulas, other islands wedged into the waves, other capes that you can double every other day, but that time you pass it repays you for the hours spent in the kitchen making poached eggs to be gently placed on the slice of salmon.