I have never been so grateful for a sat-nav with a sense of humour, or perhaps it was just broken, because it led us down a track so narrow that our hire car developed a sudden and intimate relationship with an olive tree. The scratch is still there, a little souvenir of our arrival in Valtura, a tiny settlement just outside Pula where the roads seem to have been designed by someone who really wanted you to slow down and smell the lavender.

We were looking for our holiday house, one of those charming Istrian stone numbers with a pool and a terrace and probably a view of something picturesque. What we found first was a farmyard full of chickens who looked deeply unimpressed by our reversing skills. A farmer emerged from a shed, wiping his hands on his overalls, and pointed us back the way we had come with the resigned air of someone who had done this many times before. "Tourists," his expression said, though he was far too polite to voice it.

The actual house, when we finally located it, was worth every wrong turn. Perched on a slight rise, it looked out across rolling countryside towards the distant glimmer of the Adriatic. The pool was one of those infinity affairs that makes you feel slightly smug just looking at it. But here is the thing about arriving somewhere new, particularly somewhere rural in Istria: the real discoveries do not happen where you intend them to.

We had planned a straightforward first evening. Unpack, swim, perhaps a trip to the supermarket in Pula for supplies. Instead, having got ourselves turned around again on what I am calling the Olive Tree Incident Road, we stumbled upon a konoba that did not appear on any map I could find. It looked like someone's front room with a few extra tables, which is more or less what it was. An elderly woman was rolling pasta by hand while her husband tended a grill outside. They did not speak English. Our Croatian extended to "hvala" and "pivo." Somehow, between gestures and hopeful pointing, we ended up with the best meal of our entire trip. Istrian fuži with truffles, because of course this random roadside spot happened to sit in one of the world's great truffle regions. We would never have found it deliberately.

That set the pattern for the week. Each morning we would set off with some destination in mind, a beach, a ruin, a recommended restaurant. Each morning we would get lost. Istria's interior is a maze of unmarked lanes, sudden forks, roads that simply become dirt without warning. The sat-nav, clearly traumatised by our first day, began suggesting routes that involved what I can only describe as optimistic thinking.

One afternoon, attempting to reach what a guidebook called a "hidden cove" near Premantura, we took a wrong turn that deposited us in a village apparently consisting of three houses and a cat. The cat led us, I am not making this up, down a path between two stone walls to a clearing where an elderly man was selling honey from his garden. He insisted we try his malvazija wine, produced from vines we could see tangling up the wall behind him. We sat on plastic chairs and watched swallows darting overhead and felt, for a moment, as though we had accidentally stepped through some portal into a slower, kinder version of time.

The beaches we never reached, the restaurants we missed, the Roman ruins we circled without finding: they do not matter now. What remains is the memory of getting properly lost in a landscape of red earth and green forest, of surprising ourselves with what turns up when you stop trying so hard to find things.

Our last evening, we drove out deliberately without the sat-nav, taking random turns until we found ourselves at a viewpoint we had never seen before, watching the sun settle into the sea beyond Pula's amphitheatre. The scratch on the car caught the light. I did not mind it at all.