I have never been brilliant at reading maps, which is a polite way of saying I once got lost in my own local Tesco car park for twenty minutes. So when my partner handed me the hire car keys at Split Airport and announced I was navigating us to Podstrana, I should have spotted the disaster looming like a storm cloud over the Adriatic.

The trouble began at a roundabout near Stobrec. I took what I felt certain was the coastal road, and within minutes we were climbing something that could only generously be called a lane. Olive trees scraped both wing mirrors. A goat gave me a look of profound disappointment. My partner, who had been peacefully enjoying the view, slowly lowered her sunglasses.

"Is this on the sat nav?" she asked.

I made a noncommittal noise that I hoped sounded confident. It did not. Ten minutes later, the lane simply stopped at a stone wall belonging to what appeared to be someone's vineyard. I performed a seventeen-point turn while a local chap watched from his terrace, sipping wine with the relaxed air of a man who had seen many idiots in hire cars before and would see many again.

We eventually found the proper road, and I will admit that my mood had soured somewhat. But then Podstrana revealed itself, and something in me softened. The place sits in a narrow strip between the mountains and the sea, and our apartment was one of those modern blocks that cling to the hillside with balconies pointing hopefully towards the water. Ours had a view of Brac Island floating on the horizon like a promise.

The funny thing about getting properly lost, though, is that you start noticing what you would otherwise speed past. That evening, hungry and slightly shaken, we wandered down a path I would never have found without my earlier navigational humiliation. It led to a tiny cove where locals were swimming, not a tourist in sight except us. An old woman sold grilled sardines from a stall that looked like it had been there since Tito's day. We ate them with our fingers, sitting on rocks, and I have rarely tasted anything better.

The next morning I deliberately got lost again. This sounds ridiculous, I know, but I had discovered something. Podstrana's main strip is perfectly pleasant, all pebble beaches and ice cream, but step inland even slightly and you find these ancient stone houses with fig trees growing through their courtyards. I followed a path that I thought looped back to our apartment and instead found myself in a village called Mutogras, which does not appear to have heard of tourism. An elderly man was repairing fishing nets outside his house. He spoke no English, I speak approximately twelve words of Croatian, and yet we had a perfectly satisfactory conversation involving much pointing and shared figs from his tree.

My favourite discovery came on our third day. I had set out for what the map called a beach and somehow ended up on an old Roman road, the genuine article, stones worn smooth by centuries of feet. It led me to a tiny chapel, locked but beautiful, with an olive grove beside it that dropped down towards the sea. I sat there for an hour. No one came. The only sound was cicadas and distant water. I thought about how desperately I had wanted to reach our apartment efficiently, to tick off the journey and begin the holiday properly, and how nearly I had missed all of this through sheer impatience.

On our final evening, my partner and I walked to that first cove again. The old woman was there, her sardines as excellent as ever. I told her, through gestures and my terrible Croatian, that I had got lost to find her. She laughed, a proper belly laugh, and gave us an extra fish for free. Some things, I have learned, you simply cannot navigate your way to directly. You have to take the wrong turning first.