A detour to Bornholm that lasted four days

The 08:30 out of Ystad was half empty, which should have told me something about how the island handles a Wednesday in early June. I had a return ticket for the evening sailing, a camera bag, and a vague plan to photograph the harbour at Rønne and be home in Stockholm before midnight. Eighty minutes later I was standing on the quay in flat grey light with a folded map I had bought on the boat for forty kroner, and the evening sailing was already beginning to feel like somebody else's appointment.

I rented a bicycle from a shed behind the tourist office. It was a heavy Danish town bike with three gears and a bell that worked only when it felt like it, and the man who handed it over asked how long I wanted it. One day, I said. He wrote something in a ledger, looked up, and said the daily rate and the weekly rate were nearly the same, so he would put me down for the week and I could bring it back whenever. I thought that was overly optimistic of him. It was not.

The road east out of Rønne runs through fields that were, in the second week of June, an aggressive yellow. The wind came off the water at a steady angle designed to punish anyone cycling north, which was the direction I had chosen. By eleven the cloud had broken and it went from twelve degrees to something closer to nineteen, and I took off two of the three layers I had packed for a day trip and strapped them to the rack with a strap that was too short.

Then I found the round churches, and the day quietly stopped being a day trip. There are four of them on the island, whitewashed drums with conical roofs, built somewhere around the twelfth century by people who apparently wanted a church that could also be defended. Østerlars is the biggest. Inside it smells of cold lime and old wood, and there is a thick central pillar with a passage running around it, so you circle the middle of the building rather than facing it. I stayed forty minutes and took eleven photographs, of which two were any good.

Lunch was in Svaneke, at a smokehouse with tall white chimneys that look like something between a lighthouse and a chess piece. I had the thing you are supposed to have: smoked herring on rye, raw egg yolk sitting in the middle of it, chives and radish, a glass of buttermilk beside it because the woman at the counter said I would want something to cut the smoke. She was right. I ate outside at a long table with a family from Aarhus who were arguing about whether their youngest could swim yet. He could not, and everyone agreed to find out later.

At around four in the afternoon I did the arithmetic and realised I had misread the summer timetable. The evening sailing I had a ticket for was not the last one out of Rønne but the last one with space, and I had not actually booked anything — I had a ticket for the outbound leg only and a half-memory of intending to book the return that morning at the kiosk. There was nothing until Saturday that would take a foot passenger with a bicycle at a price I was willing to accept, and by then it was too late in the day to argue about it with anyone.

So I found a guesthouse outside Gudhjem, up a lane with hydrangeas that had not yet decided to flower. Birgit ran it. She gave me a room under the roof with a window that would not stay open unless you wedged a shoe in it, and over breakfast the next morning she explained the island to me in the way people explain a place they have never seriously considered leaving. In summer, she said, we are twelve thousand people pretending to be forty thousand. In February the bakery opens three days a week and if you want a hardware shop you drive to Rønne. I asked whether that was lonely. She thought about it properly, which I appreciated, and said: no, it is quiet, and quiet and lonely are not the same thing, but you have to learn the difference or you move to Copenhagen.

The rest was accidental and better for it. Thursday I cycled the coast road to Hammershus and got rained on for twenty minutes with no shelter within a kilometre. Friday I did almost nothing, which is not a sentence I write often — I sat on the rocks below Gudhjem from about seven in the morning, watched the light change, and ate a bag of cherries I bought at a roadside table with an honesty box. Saturday I gave the bicycle back to the same man, who did not ask why it had taken six days to return a one-day rental, and caught the 14:50 with a proper booking this time.

The lesson is not that unplanned days are richer than planned ones. Sometimes they are, and this time they were. The lesson is duller: book the return leg first, then everything after it is a choice rather than a consequence. I have written this down before and I will probably write it down again.