I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I tried to put diesel in a petrol hire car at Pula airport. The nozzle wouldn't fit, thank goodness, but I stood there for a solid two minutes shoving it about like a determined toddler with a square peg. A Croatian man at the next pump watched me with the patient amusement of someone who had seen this many times before. "Wrong hole," he said, in perfect English, and I nodded as if this were profound philosophy rather than basic automotive knowledge.

The drive to Fazana took twenty minutes, which I spent in dignified silence, gripping the steering wheel and refusing to look at my partner, who was making little exploding noises beside me.

We found the property down a narrow lane that my phone insisted was a footpath. The sat nav had given up entirely somewhere near Vodnjan, so we had been navigating by instinct and a crumpled paper map from the airport that showed approximately three roads for the entire peninsula. I took a wrong turn at what I thought was a junction but was actually someone's driveway, and there we were, suddenly face to face with an elderly gentleman tending his grapevines. He didn't seem surprised. He simply pointed left, then right, then made a winding motion with his finger, and smiled. We smiled back. It was like a very polite charade.

The house appeared around the next bend, half-hidden by fig trees and the kind of overgrown garden that suggests someone sensible has better things to do than manicure shrubs in thirty-degree heat. A stone wall, weathered the colour of old parmesan, enclosed a courtyard where a tortoise was making its way across the terrace with the air of someone who had seen many confused tourists arrive and would see many more.

The key was where they said it would be, which felt like a small miracle. Inside, the place smelled of lavender and something else I couldn't place, something dry and woody and foreign. The floors were terracotta tiles, uneven enough that I tripped on the threshold carrying in a suitcase, which my partner found hilarious until he did the same thing five minutes later. We stood in the kitchen, rubbing our shins, and laughed in that slightly hysterical way you do when you have been travelling since four in the morning and nothing quite makes sense.

I had planned to unpack properly, to establish order, to be the sort of person who hangs clothes immediately and finds the local supermarket before dark. Instead I found a bottle of local Malvazija in the fridge, left by the owner with a handwritten note I could only half translate, and we took it outside to the terrace as the light began to soften.

That was when we noticed the path.

It started at the corner of the garden, barely visible between two olive trees, a narrow track of compacted earth that seemed to lead nowhere in particular. The tortoise was heading that way, slowly, with purpose. We followed, because it was that sort of evening, because we had wine and time and no particular plan.

The path wound through someone else's vineyard, then through a small wood of oak and pine where the ground was springy with needles, then suddenly opened onto a cove I could not find on any map. A shingle beach, perhaps thirty metres across, with water so clear I could see fish darting between the rocks. An old rowing boat pulled up at one end, half-full of rainwater and leaves. No one else there. No road access that I could see. Just the sound of the water and the last warmth of the sun on the stones.

We sat on a flat rock and passed the bottle back and forth like teenagers, not talking much, watching the light change on the water. I thought about how I had nearly ruined a hire car before even leaving the airport, how I had driven down someone's garden path, how I had no idea where I was and no signal to find out. I thought about how this had become, somehow, exactly the right way to arrive somewhere. Not in control, not informed, not prepared. Just present, slightly lost, and willing to follow a tortoise.

We walked back in near-darkness, using the phone torch, missing the turning twice and ending up in a different vineyard altogether before recognising a particular bent olive tree. The tortoise, presumably, made its own way in its own time.

That night we slept with the shutters open, and I woke once to the sound of something moving in the garden, probably the same tortoise on another slow expedition. I did not get up to check. Some mysteries, I decided, were better left alone, at least until morning.