I have never been so relieved to see a goat in my entire life.

Three hours into our drive from Pula Airport, my partner and I were thoroughly lost somewhere in the Istrian hills. The sat nav had given up entirely, displaying nothing but a blank grey screen and what I can only describe as a judgmental little arrow. We had missed the turn for Koromacno not once but twice, the second time because I was absolutely convinced I had spotted a truffle hunter in the woods and demanded we stop for a chat. It was a man walking a very muddy terrier. He looked at me with the weary patience of someone who has dealt with lost British tourists many times before and simply pointed uphill with his walking stick.

The goat appeared around the next bend, standing in the middle of the road like a particularly unimpressed traffic warden. A woman in a faded blue apron emerged from a stone cottage, shooed it aside with a rolled-up newspaper, and peered into our window. "Labin?" she asked, before I could even open my mouth. "Or Koromacno? You have that face." I did not ask what face she meant. She gave us directions in a mixture of Croatian and theatrical hand gestures, the kind that suggested we were not the first hopeless cases she had rescued.

Twenty minutes later we found the property, a traditional Istrian stone house with a terrace that looked out over olive groves and, in the far distance, the glimmer of the Kvarner Gulf. The key holder, a chap called Davor with enormous hands and a permanent half-smile, was waiting on the doorstep with a bottle of local Malvazija and what he called "a small warning." The washing machine, he explained, had opinions. It worked perfectly, but only if you spoke to it politely. I laughed. He did not. "My grandmother's machine," he said, as if this explained everything. "She was from here. The house knows."

The neighbours appeared within the hour, as if summoned by some invisible network of rural telepathy. First came Marija from the adjacent property, bearing a plate of fritule and a thorough interrogation about our driving abilities, our cooking abilities, and whether we understood that the local shop closed at noon on Saturdays and this was not negotiable. She had lived in Koromacno her entire seventy-odd years and spoke of nearby Labin with the faint suspicion of a villager discussing the big smoke. "They have traffic lights now," she told us, lowering her voice. "Multiple."

Then there was Goran, who maintained the olive grove behind the house and appeared each morning with a different tool and a longer story. He had opinions about everything: the best time to harvest olives (never discuss this with someone from the next valley), the proper way to eat prsut (thin enough to read a newspaper through, though why you would want to do this he could not say), and the tragic decline of proper stone wall construction. "Young people," he said, gesturing vaguely at the horizon with a pruning saw, "they use cement. Cement!" He said the word the way another man might say "betrayal."

By our third evening, we had been adopted. Marija brought us her husband's homemade grappa, which I am fairly certain stripped several layers of enamel from my teeth. Davor returned to check that we had not offended the washing machine, and seemed genuinely pleased to find it humming contentedly. Even the goat woman reappeared, though she did not seem to remember us specifically, merely our general category of helplessness.

Sitting on that terrace with a glass of wine that cost less than a London bus fare, watching the light change over the olive groves, I found myself thinking about what draws us to places like this. It is not the traffic lights of Labin, charming though its old town apparently is. It is the certainty that somewhere nearby, a woman in a blue apron is still shooing goats and rescuing the lost, that Goran is still mourning the cement age, that a washing machine somewhere demands basic courtesy.

We came for Istria's reputation, its truffles and its coastline and its pretty hill towns. We stayed because a handful of strangers decided we were worth the trouble. I still do not know what face I have, exactly. But I suspect I will be making it again, hopefully with better directions next time.