I have never been so relieved to see a row of olive trees in my life. After three hours of driving from Pula airport, convinced my sat nav had developed a personal vendetta against me, I finally spotted the stone wall and terracotta roof of our Fazana Peroj holiday home. The mishap? I had spent the last forty minutes circling what I now realise was the same vineyard three times, each pass growing more desperate, each wave at the same confused farmer more enthusiastic. By the third loop he had stopped pruning entirely and was simply watching, arms folded, as if waiting to see how long before I admitted defeat.

The property itself materialised like something from a half-remembered dream. Perched between Fazana and Peroj, it sat quietly among ancient olive groves with that particular Istrian stillness that makes you lower your voice without quite knowing why. My partner unfolded from the passenger seat, stretched, and said nothing for a full minute. This, from someone who once commented on a sunset during a funeral, told me everything.

We had planned nothing. This was our conceit, our small rebellion against the tyranny of itinerary. We would get lost deliberately, wander without purpose, trust to accident. The first accident came that evening.

Setting out for what I insisted was a shortcut to Fazana's harbour, we took a left where perhaps straight might have served us better. The tarmac gave way to gravel, gravel to something resembling compacted dust, and suddenly we were between walls of dry stone so ancient they seemed to grow from the earth itself. The lane narrowed until brambles scratched both sides of the car simultaneously, a botanical car wash. We should have turned back. We did not.

The lane deposited us in a clearing where an elderly woman sat outside a shed no larger than a garden tools store, selling wine from plastic bottles. Her Croatian and our collective three phrases found common ground in gestures, in the universal language of raised eyebrows and sampled glasses. The wine was Teran, rough and honest and tasting of the iron-rich soil we had been driving over. She explained nothing, smiled at everything, and sent us away with two litres and directions that involved pointing at clouds.

Following her gestures rather than her words, we found ourselves on a coastal path entirely absent from any map I later consulted. The limestone underfoot had been worn smooth by generations of fishermen, and the Adriatic below shifted through blues that seemed almost competitive with one another. We walked until the path simply stopped, replaced by a scramble down to a cove where someone had long ago arranged flat stones into a rudimentary terrace, a private theatre facing the sea.

There we sat with our accidental wine, watching a heron work the shallows with the patience of something that has never once considered an itinerary. The sun lowered towards the Brijuni islands, and I understood something about getting lost that I had previously only pretended to know. It is not about discovery, not really. It is about surrendering the illusion that you were ever in control of what you might find.

The following days brought more accidents. A wrong turn after buying bread in Peroj led us to a cemetery where Istrian Partisans lay beneath stones carved with hammer and sickle, the inscriptions weathering alongside older graves marked with Venetian symbols, layers of history stacked like sediment. Another morning, attempting to reach the beach at Valbandon, we followed a sign to "stara kuca" purely because the words sounded pleasant, and found a farmhouse where a family pressed oil from olives their great-grandparents had planted.

Each time we abandoned intention, something emerged. A wellhead decorated with Roman fragments reused by medieval builders. A fig tree grown through the ruins of a dry-stone shelter, its roots gripping the masonry like a slow-motion explosion. An old man in Valbandon who spoke Italian from his childhood, German from occupation, Croatian from necessity, and who told us about the German soldier who had deserted in 1944 and lived in these hills until 1987, farming, marrying, becoming simply another local mystery.

By our final evening, I had stopped checking maps entirely. We drove inland on instinct, following the highest visible point, and found ourselves at a vantage where the entire western Istrian coast lay visible, from Pula's shipyards to the distant haze where Italy must somewhere exist. The olive groves below formed patterns of silver-green that only made sense from above, geometric where from within they had seemed chaotic.

I thought of the farmer watching my third circuit of his vineyard, my increasingly frantic waves. He had known something I was only learning. The landscape here does not yield to effort, to planning, to the anxious need to arrive. It offers itself to those who move slowly enough to be redirected, who can accept that being lost is simply another way of being present.

Our Fazana Peroj base became less a destination than a point of departure, a place to return with stories that began with wrong turns. The property's quiet terrace, its view of those same olive groves I had initially cursed, became the setting for evening recollections of accidental discoveries. We never did find that shortcut to Fazana harbour. I suspect now it does not exist, that the lane was never meant to connect but to distract, to lead the willing astray.

On our last morning, I woke early and walked without direction, letting the slope of the land guide me. I found a small chapel, locked, its door decorated with a photograph of a young man in military uniform and fresh flowers in a jar. Someone tended this place, remembered this person, maintained this private ritual in a landscape of limestone and stubborn vegetation. I stood there until the sun cleared the treeline, feeling the particular vulnerability of the unplanned encounter, the gift of something not sought.

We left that afternoon, sat nav programmed for Pula, both of us silent as the olive groves passed. At the airport, my partner finally spoke. "Same time next year?" she asked. "Somewhere we definitely won't find?" I agreed, already plotting my incompetence, my willing surrender to whatever wrong turns awaited.