Anders Manum wakes every morning to the tinkle of sheep bells in his meadows and the low relentless roar of Feigefossen, the nation’s second-highest free-falling waterfall, across the fjord. He checks the weather and hoons uphill on a tractor-trike to his farmhouse hotel, Nes Gard, where alongside his guests, he packs a schoolboy lunch of cheese sandwiches in waxed paper.
With his matpakke (literally “food package”), in winter he’ll head with his guests into the fjordland’s mountains and glaciers for a day of remote ski touring. There are no ski lifts out here, no ski crowds. In summer, he takes his guests into high forests threaded with hiking tracks. “We are lucky,” he says, in typically Norwegian understatement.
It’s difficult to overstate the small nation’s good fortune. Norway’s 5.6 million citizens are among the richest people in the world and consistently named in the happiest top 10 nations. Massive reserves of North Sea oil and gas and the rare foresight to invest that abundant wealth in public rather than private wellbeing has delivered the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, valued at $US2.2 trillion ($3 trillion). But it’s not just about wealth.
There are widely shared principles underpinning the world’s smallest income inequality gap, among them a measurable, deeply held belief in egalitarianism. And as I slip into Nes Gard’s lakeside sauna dominated by a direct sight line to Lustrafjord’s torrential waterfall, it occurs there might be something in the national packed-lunch routine – its simplicity and modesty – that helps explain Norwegian kos, a complex term that translates as something like intense, pure contentment.
