The sat nav gave up on us just outside Pula, which should have been my first clue that this holiday would involve a bit more improvisation than I'd bargained for. We'd been driving for the better part of three hours from the airport, winding through Istrian countryside that grew progressively more olive-grove-and-vineyard with every kilometre, and my partner had developed that particular set to her jaw that meant either profound serenity or barely contained irritation. Reader, it was not serenity.

The mishap, when it came, was entirely my fault. I'd confidently announced that Krnica was "basically just past Rakalj," which is rather like saying Brighton is basically just past London if you've never consulted a map. We found ourselves in somebody's courtyard, surrounded by chickens who looked deeply unimpressed with our life choices. An elderly gentleman emerged from what I initially assumed was a shed but turned out to be his kitchen, wiping his hands on a tea towel and regarding our rental car with the expression of someone who had seen many such idiots before.

"Krnica?" he said, before I'd even wound down the window fully. He made it sound like a diagnosis.

I admitted our destination with what dignity remained. He scratched his chin, looked at the chickens as if seeking counsel, then launched into directions that involved three left turns, a distinctive rock, and something he kept calling "the big tree" with evident confidence that we would know it when we saw it. My Croatian extends to approximately seven words, six of which are food-related, but between his gestures and my partner's increasingly desperate map-checking, we pieced together a route.

We found the property eventually, down a lane that felt more like a suggestion than a road, and the first thing that struck me was the profound quiet. Not the awkward silence of a dinner party gone wrong, but the proper hush of a place where human noise hasn't yet colonised everything. The stone house sat there looking thoroughly settled, as if it had been patiently waiting through several centuries for our particular brand of incompetence.

Our neighbour appeared before we'd finished unloading the boot. She introduced herself as Marija, though she immediately said we would mispronounce this and she was absolutely right. She'd brought us tomatoes from her garden, which she pressed upon us with the urgency of someone disposing of evidence. They were, she informed us through a combination of broken English and emphatic pointing, better than anything in the shops, and we would understand this presently. She was not wrong about the tomatoes.

That evening, seeking provisions, we encountered the local shopkeeper, a man whose name I never properly caught but whose personality required no translation. He had approximately eleven items in his entire shop, arranged with the care of a museum curator, and he treated each purchase as a consultation. Buying olive oil involved a ten-minute discourse on pressing methods, during which I understood perhaps one word in twenty but nodded with increasing conviction. He threw in a handful of dried herbs with our bread, refusing payment, with a gesture that suggested we were clearly in need of culinary intervention.

By the second day, we'd developed something of a routine with the locals. The morning brought the baker in his van, honking his horn at precisely the sort of hour that suggested he knew exactly who was on holiday and who had proper work to do. He sold us burek that we ate on our terrace, watching the light change over the olive trees, and I found myself reflecting on how thoroughly I'd misunderstood the rhythm of this kind of place. I'd packed for activity, for sightseeing and accomplishment, and instead found myself slowing to something approaching the local tempo, where conversation was itself an event and nobody rushed anywhere without excellent reason.

I think the moment that best captured it came on our third evening, when we wandered down to the small harbour at Krnica itself. An old fisherman was mending nets with the patience of a man who had never once considered efficiency, and he looked up at our approach not with suspicion but with something more like mild curiosity, as if wondering what had taken us so long to find him. He didn't speak much, but he showed us his catch, naming each fish with a pride that made them sound like personal achievements, and when he learned we were staying up near Rakalj, he nodded slowly, as if this explained something fundamental about our character.

We never did learn what it explained. Some things, I suspect, are better left as local knowledge.