The man suddenly appearing in front of me is a giant, well over two metres tall. He also looks like a troll. He sports a mohawk/Rasta hairdo that defies all description, and he is the first person we have met in Bergslagen. As he towers over us, my travel companion, Miss Adventure, is understandably somewhat taken aback. Tales of troll abductions have reached her ears, and now she has stepped into the creature’s lair!

Luckily, he is all smiles. We are customers, after all. The proprietor of the lodge and kayak rental in Kloten, where Bergslagsleden begins, has probably not seen many customers over the last weeks. Autumn has settled in, and although it is very pretty, wind and cold ensure that we are the only visitors*, and so he is very forthcoming in his shuffling, trollish way, and we are soon off on our first adventure, kayaking the Kloten lakes for an afternoon.

It is a gorgeous day and I enjoy myself thoroughly. My American friend is less pleased – having escaped the troll encounter, the wind now catches her kayak repeatedly as she tries to stop and take pictures, so she ends up having to paddle a lot more than I. On top of that she has declined to wear a protective skirt (for fear of drowning), so she gets very wet, very quickly. After two hours she has had quite enough – it’s a good thing the original plan was amended, as paddling for days with camping equipment would have made this a miserable week.

Instead we have a late lunch, and then head out on the trail. It is a glorious day, and it feels like setting foot in a painting by Bauer. Or it would, if gravity hadn’t asserted itself. With a cool thirty pounds on my back, the hilly terrain doesn’t retain a fairy tale feel for long. A seasonal cold germ doesn’t help, either.

Be that as it may, the air holds that crisp quality that only autumnal days can bring, the forest floor is full of blueberries and lingonberries, and it’s good to be in Sweden. I have promised to show Miss A my wild and wonderful homeland, and Dalarna delivers in spades. The only things missing are mooses (much hoped for) and bears (much feared), but otherwise it is picture perfect.

We hike until dusk, when we find ourselves in a backstuga, a type of lodging used by the poorest of the poor in centuries gone by. It is a cottage, but instead of building all four walls, the denizens dug into a likely-looking hill, and erected no more than a facade and a roof, thus creating homes straight out of Hobbiton. Unlike Bilbo Baggins’s home, however, the backstuga is cold and coarse, with nothing of the charm of the former. But it is right by a picturesque tjärn** (forest lake), there is a table and a couple of benches, and a raised platform where we roll out our sleeping mats, and when the moon rises over the lake right outside, and we sit indoors and make our evening meal, it still feels quite wonderful.

It also helps that my co-hiker is a great cook, and has dehydrated all manner of food for us to bring on the trail. We dine on roasted vegetables and spicy rice that evening, and when morning comes with an unappetising drizzle, we stay inside and feast on egg frittata and dried cherries and strawberries.

Thus fortified, we set out on the trail, deeper into the enchanted forest. The rain has abated to a fine mist, which lends another layer of magic to the landscape – and a very real layer of slippery moisture to the many wooden planks we have to traverse to get across the boggier parts of the trail, which are legion. It’s not so much Bergslagsleden as bog slog leaden, if you’ll pardon the pun.

At least we don’t encounter any traces of bears, like I have further north. What we do see are mushrooms, thousands of them, and none more visually appealing than the fly death caps. Apparently they account for 95% of all mortalities in connection with mushroom poisoning, although how you can mistake it for anything else is beyond me. They are enticing, though, and it’s easy to see why people have always pictured them as little houses – for everything from pixies to smurfs.

On we trundle, scaling the heights of the highest peak at noon, when the sun has turned the damp forest into a steam room sauna, only to find the Klitten outdoor centre closed for business. There’s nothing for it but to continue, but we lose track of the trail and end up getting off the map altogether, and only arrive at the nearest shelter after a long detour that involved an utterly incongruous Danish spirituality centre in the middle of the forest – it might have been the mushrooms, of course…

Be that as it may, we’re thoroughly knackered when we get there, but my ingenious chef friend has a great treat up her sleave: authentic Merkin ‘smores – seared marshmallows served sandwiched between biscuits with half-melted chocolate. We sit and grill these aptly named treats over open fire, watching sunset come over the lake in front of us, and the stars coming out in the sky above, and it’s perfect.

The next day is supposed to be our last on the trail, but after a morning of getting lost again, and then finally arriving in the old mining town of Kopparberg only to find that there is no public transport back to our point of departure, things are looking a little grim. There are no taxis around either – the nearest company is thirty kilometres away, and they’re not picking up the phone – and the prospect of having to spend another two or three days retracing our steps seems very real, when suddenly a bit of trail magic happens! It comes in the shape of Ewa, an old lady who happens to overhear our ordeal, and simply offers to drive us back to Kloten.

It’s a twenty kilometre drive one way, we’re smelly and penniless, but she does so without any hesitation, and doesn’t even balk when Miss A hugs her in a moment of sheer (if grubby) gratitude.

And so it is that we find ourselves back in Kloten a quarter of an hour later. It almost feels like cheating, but only almost. Having profusely thanked our driver (and handing over the Belgian chocolate that was meant to be a birthday gift) we wave goodbye to trolls and moose and set off on adventures of a different kind.

* Apart from three German lads, who get in a single canoe and head off in the opposite direction to ours – never to be heard from again.

** The only thing my foreign friend cannot come to terms with are the many sch-sounds.