I have never been particularly gifted with directions, which is how I found myself standing in a sunflower field three miles from anywhere recognisable, clutching a phone with four percent battery and wondering whether the nice man at Zagreb airport car hire had actually said left at the second roundabout or the third. The sat nav had given up somewhere around Varazdin, apparently offended by my decision to follow what looked like a shortcut on a map that turned out to be a farm track designed for tractors and optimistic rabbits.

Three hours of increasingly creative navigation later, I finally spotted the wooden sign for Cakovec Vucetinec half-hidden behind overhanging willows, and I will be honest, I nearly wept. The property sits in that gently rolling countryside of Continental Croatia where everything feels slightly undiscovered, the sort of place guidebooks mention in passing if they mention it at all. My host, a chap called Mirko who appeared from a neighbouring shed wiping engine oil on his trousers, seemed genuinely surprised to see me. "You came the back way," he said, which I have since learned is local code for "you are an idiot but welcome."

The house itself is one of those solid, unhurried buildings that have settled into the landscape over decades, not trying to impress anyone but quietly confident in its own existence. Terracotta roof, wooden shutters that actually close properly, a covered terrace where grapevines have been left to do whatever grapevines fancy doing. Mirko showed me round with the practised efficiency of someone who has done this many times but still finds it faintly amusing, pointing out the wood-fired oven in the garden with the air of a man presenting a sports car. "You can make pizza," he said, as if this solved something fundamental.

What struck me first was the silence. Not empty silence, but the busy, complicated quiet of a place where human noise is merely one thread among many. Somewhere nearby a dog barked once, considered its options, and fell silent again. Crows discussed matters in the treetops. A tractor passed on a distant road, its engine note rising and falling like breathing.

I had planned, in my organised London fashion, to visit Varazdin's baroque old town the following day, to tick off castles and coffee houses and properly appreciate the region. Instead I woke to mist and the discovery that I had parked the hire car with the driver's door wedged against a rhododendron bush, requiring an undignified climb across the passenger seat that my neighbour, an elderly woman tending chickens, observed with the expression of someone watching a particularly poor television programme.

By the time I extricated myself, the mist had lifted enough to reveal a footpath I had not noticed the previous evening, cutting between fields toward a line of trees. I followed it without particular intention, having left my useless phone charging back at the house, and this is how I found the lake. Not a famous lake, not a lake that appears on tourist maps, just a modest body of water held in place by earth and gravity, with a small wooden platform where someone had left a folding chair and a tin of fishing tackle. I sat there for two hours. A kingfisher visited. Dragonflies conducted their complicated negotiations. Somewhere in the reeds, something splashed with the deliberate casualness of a creature that did not need to be anywhere else.

I found the village shop by getting lost again, taking a lane that narrowed until grass grew between its wheel ruts, emerging suddenly beside a building that sold bread, beer, and fishing line with equal seriousness. The woman behind the counter spoke no English and I speak approximately twelve words of Croatian, all of them food-related and most mispronounced, yet we conducted a satisfactory transaction involving cheese, tomatoes, and something she indicated I should eat with bread that turned out to be spectacular honey. She drew me a map on the back of a receipt, which I followed with the same success rate as my previous navigational efforts, leading me to a chapel I would never have found deliberately, its interior painted in faded folk art depicting saints with expressions of mild concern.

That evening I attempted the wood-fired oven with Mirko's amused supervision, producing a pizza that was charred in places and underdone in others, which I ate on the terrace watching bats emerge from wherever bats spend their days. I had seen precisely none of the recommended attractions within my five-mile radius, unless one counts the chapel and the lake and the shop and the particular quality of light across sunflower fields at seven in the evening, which I increasingly think one should.

The following morning I tried to find the lake again and failed entirely, ending instead at a small vineyard where an old man pressed a glass of white wine into my hand and explained something at length that I did not understand but appreciated nonetheless. I never did make it to Varazdin's old town. I have no photographs worth showing anyone. My phone remained largely charged and largely unused, a small miracle in itself.

I left Cakovec Vucetinec with flour in my hair from the oven, mud on my shoes from paths that may or may not have been paths, and the certain knowledge that I had missed almost everything I planned to see and found almost everything I needed. The sat nav worked perfectly on the return journey, which I found almost disappointing. Mirko waved me off with the expression of someone who understood exactly what had happened, and probably why.