Gotland in July, against my better judgement

The 11:00 sailing from Nynäshamn was full in the way that only a Swedish summer ferry is full: nobody actually shouting, but every horizontal surface claimed by a rucksack, and a queue for coffee that moved with the patience of people who have already accepted the next three hours. I had told myself for years that I would never do Gotland in July. I had said it out loud, to friends, with the confidence of a man who has never had to use his holiday allowance before it expires.

I took the commuter train down from Stockholm at 09:04, which sounds organised and was not. I had misread the boarding cutoff by twenty minutes and spent the last stretch of the platform walking fast enough to be embarrassing and slow enough to keep pretending I wasn't. The ferry terminal in Nynäshamn is a large grey room that smells faintly of diesel and sunscreen. Everyone in it looked better prepared than me.

The crossing was flat and bright. Twenty-two degrees, a thin northerly, the Baltic doing its pale green thing that never quite photographs the way it looks. I sat outside until my ears gave up, then found a seat by a window and ate an overpriced shrimp sandwich while a boy of about six explained to his father, at length and with real conviction, that seagulls have jobs. His father agreed that they probably did. I wrote it down. It's the kind of line I'll never manage to invent.

Visby at half past two was exactly what I had been warned about. The ring wall is still extraordinary — it does not stop being extraordinary just because four thousand people are photographing it — but the lanes below Stora Torget were shoulder to shoulder, and the medieval ruins had the mild, harassed look of a monument that would like a day off. I walked to Almedalen, sat on the grass for twenty minutes, and admitted to myself that I had come at the wrong time and would have to do something about it rather than sulk.

So I hired a bicycle. Nine hundred kronor for three days, from a shop where the man handed me the lock and said, without looking up, "Ten kilometres. After ten kilometres it's yours." I asked what he meant. He said, "The island. You'll see." Then he charged me extra for a pannier rack and wished me luck with the wind, which I thought was a joke until about four in the afternoon.

He was right, though. That is the whole trip, really. I rode east and slightly north, and by the time the last car park was behind me the traffic had thinned to a tractor and two horses, and then to nothing at all. Fields of ripe barley going the colour of weak tea. Stone walls. Churches every few kilometres, each one with a tower like a sharpened pencil, each one open, each one empty. I stopped at one near Dalhem to fill my water bottle and stayed forty minutes because the inside was cool and the only sound was a wasp working the window.

The coast the next morning was where the whole stubborn business paid off. I got to the sea stacks — the raukar, the limestone figures the sea has been chewing on for several thousand years — a little after five, mostly because I had failed to sleep properly and it seemed better than lying there resenting it. The light at that hour comes in almost horizontally and turns the stone the colour of unbaked bread. Nobody there. A dog, some distance off, considering the water. I worked slowly and badly for an hour and got two frames I actually like, which is a good ratio for me. The rest I took because I was there, which is a reason, if not a very good one.

I stayed two nights in a room above a bakery near Ljugarn. The arrangement was informal: an envelope with a key, a note about the shower, and the fact that the ovens go on at half past three in the morning. I had assumed this would be unbearable and it turned out to be the best part. You wake at three-thirty to warm bread smell and the sound of trays, decide you are furious, and then fall asleep again feeling obscurely looked after. The baker, Lena, sold me a saffranspannkaka on the second morning and said July was fine as long as you accepted that Visby is not the island, only its front door.

Coming back on the evening ferry I found I had stopped being annoyed about the crowds, which is not the same as liking them. The island is generous. It hands you a difficult harbour and then, quietly, ten kilometres later, gives you everything you actually came for. I have deleted the note in my calendar that says never Gotland in July. I have replaced it with one that says bring a better lock and leave the port faster.