I have never been brilliant with directions, which is how I ended up driving the wrong way down a one-way street in Zadar before we had even reached the island of Vir. My partner sat in the passenger seat making that particular face she does, the one that says she is choosing between laughter and mild despair. A local bloke on a scooter just shook his head and pointed us toward the bridge with the weary patience of someone who has watched countless tourists make exactly this mistake.

The bridge to Vir itself is nothing dramatic, just a low concrete span connecting the island to the mainland, but crossing it felt like slipping through a threshold into somewhere properly separate. The sort of place where you might find something unexpected simply because you took a wrong turn. I was already planning my wrong turns.

We found our villa easily enough, a modern whitewashed place with a pool that caught the afternoon sun, but within an hour we were wandering without purpose, which is the only proper way to explore anywhere new. Vir is not large, perhaps ten miles around, and we had no intention of covering it systematically. That would have defeated the entire point.

The first accidental discovery came when I insisted on following a narrow track between two houses that looked like it led nowhere in particular. It ended at a tiny cove with no name that I could find, just a few flat rocks where an old man sat fishing with a handline and a tin of sardines for bait. He did not speak English and my Croatian extends to about six words, three of them food-related. We communicated instead through the universal language of pointing at fish and shrugging. He showed me his catch, three small sea bream glistening in a bucket, and I showed him the bottle of water I was carrying. We both seemed satisfied with this exchange. My partner took a photograph that she later described as "artfully composed" but which I suspect was mostly accidental.

Getting properly lost required more commitment. The next morning we set off on what I confidently described as "a bit of an explore" and promptly missed the turning that would have kept us on anything resembling a proper road. The island's interior is a maze of unpaved tracks between low stone walls and scrubby vegetation, everything smelling of wild rosemary and the sea somewhere nearby. We passed abandoned building projects left over from some earlier boom, their concrete skeletons now home to lizards and the occasional goat. Then the track simply stopped.

We got out of the car and walked, which is how we found the olive grove. Not a commercial operation, nothing with a sign or a shop, just ancient trees twisted into impossible shapes and a small stone shelter with a rusted press inside. Someone had left a plastic chair beneath the largest tree. We sat there for an hour eating the bread and cheese we had brought, watching a hawk circle above the pines. No one came. Nothing happened. It was perfect.

The afternoon took a more aquatic turn when we stumbled down a path that I swear was not on any map, though my partner maintains I simply was not looking properly. It led to a narrow inlet where the water was improbably clear, the sort of clarity that makes you realise how murky most seawater actually is. Local kids had tied a rope to an overhanging pine branch, and they were swinging out and dropping into the deep water with the effortless bravery of the young. I considered joining them and wisely did not. Instead I waded in from the shallows like the middle-aged man I am, yelping slightly at the cold before the sun warmed me through.

That evening, back at the villa, I attempted to find this inlet again using my phone's map. It was not there, or rather it was not marked as anything significant. Just another anonymous stretch of coastline on an island full of them. My partner suggested we might have imagined the whole thing, which seemed entirely possible until she produced a photograph of me looking startled in knee-deep water, a small fish visible near my left foot.

The rest of the week continued in this fashion. A bakery we found only because I was reversing away from a dead end and spotted a queue of locals outside an unmarked door. The best burek of my life, still warm, eaten on a wall overlooking a harbour full of small boats. A vineyard where we stopped to ask directions and left two hours later with a bottle of pošip and vague promises to return that we both knew we would probably not keep. A beach of rounded pebbles where we were the only people until a woman arrived with three dogs and a folding chair, stayed twenty minutes, then left without acknowledging our existence.

On our final day I tried to be methodical. I wanted to revisit the best of these accidental places, to say proper goodbyes. I failed completely. The track to the olive grove had changed somehow, or I had, and I drove past it twice without recognising the entrance. The nameless cove was occupied by a family with a large umbrella and a portable radio playing Croatian pop. It was not the same place anymore, or perhaps it was exactly the same and I was different, which amounts to the same thing in practice.

We ended up at a small harbour on the island's eastern side, somewhere I do not think we had been before, watching the sun lower itself toward the mainland mountains. A fisherman was mending nets in the last light, his movements practiced and unconscious, and I realised that this was probably how we should have spent every evening. Not chasing the places we had already found but waiting for new ones to reveal themselves.

I have the photographs, though I rarely look at them. They do not capture the important things anyway. The smell of rosemary on hot stone. The particular silence of that olive grove. The feeling of cold water on sun-warmed skin. These are not transferable, which is rather the point of going somewhere in the first place.

We crossed back over the bridge in the early morning, the mist still sitting low on the water, and I took one wrong turn before we reached the motorway. Old habits. My partner did not even make the face this time. She just pointed left and said "bridge" with the calm certainty of someone who has learned that getting lost is not the same as being lost, not really, not if you are paying proper attention.