The ferry from Rijeka was meant to be the easy bit. I had spent the previous evening smugly packing what I considered a very organised little rucksack, colour-coordinated and everything. What I had not packed, as I discovered while rummaging through said rucksack at the ferry terminal, was my phone charger. Or, more critically, my phone itself, which was currently sitting on the bedside table in my Zagreb hotel, probably enjoying a lovely rest without me.

So there I was, charger in hand, phone in absentia, boarding a ferry to an island I had only ever seen on a booking confirmation email. The lady at the ticket office took pity on my panic and scribbled the name "Kornic" on a scrap of paper with a tiny map that looked like it had been drawn by someone who had only heard about Krk secondhand. Still, I had the address, and how hard could it be to find one holiday home on an island?

Famous last words, those.

The drive from the ferry port at Valbiska should have taken twenty minutes. Without GPS, without my phone, and with only my questionable sense of direction and that increasingly damp scrap of paper, it took me the better part of an hour and a half. I took a wrong turn somewhere near Vrbnik, which is rather embarrassing given that Vrbnik is essentially one long road clinging to a cliff. I found myself on a track that grew narrower and more committed to its olive groves until it simply stopped being a road altogether and became a suggestion between two stone walls.

I got out of the car. A very old man was watching me from a doorway. He did not look surprised to see me, which suggested this happened regularly. I waved my scrap of paper at him. He squinted, then pointed back the way I had come, then made a gesture that I eventually understood meant "left at the church that looks like a barn, then keep going until you smell the sea properly, not just the bay."

I followed his directions. I missed the church twice because it genuinely does look like a barn. But on the third pass, I noticed the tiny bell, and then the left turn, and then the smell changed from harbour mud to open salt water, and suddenly I was descending a lane I would never have found on purpose.

Kornic village, when I finally tumbled into it, revealed itself in pieces. A glimpse of red roof between cypress trees. A cat on a wall who looked like it had been waiting specifically for me. The lane opened into a small square with a fountain that was not working but was being used as a planter by someone with excellent taste in geraniums. I stopped the car and simply sat there, slightly shaking, wondering if I had accidentally arrived somewhere I was not supposed to know about.

The holiday home itself was down another even narrower passage, the kind that makes you fold in your wing mirrors and hold your breath. A stone house with green shutters and a terrace that hung over a drop I initially found alarming and later found addictive. I never did manage to back the car out of that passage without a three-point turn that became a twelve-point turn. The neighbour, a woman called Marija who introduced herself by bringing me tomatoes still warm from her greenhouse, watched this performance without comment, then offered me a glass of something rakija-adjacent that made my eyes water pleasantly.

That first evening, still phoneless and therefore gloriously uncontactable, I walked without purpose through Kornic's unmarked lanes. I found a chapel with a door that opened when I pushed it, the interior smelling of cold stone and old beeswax. I found a bench positioned perfectly for watching a fishing boat that seemed to belong to no one, tied to a rusted ring in a concrete jetty too small for anything official. I found a fig tree growing from a wall, heavy with fruit that was technically not mine but which I ate anyway, standing there in the half-dark like a slightly guilty thief.

The mishap of my lost phone, which I had spent the ferry crossing catastrophising about, turned out to be the mechanism that delivered me to these places. With no maps, I followed lanes that petered out into goat tracks. With no reviews to consult, I ate at a konoba where the menu was verbal and the fish had been swimming that morning, brought in by a man who ate his own dinner at the table next to mine and occasionally commented on my progress through his wife's cooking. With no photographs to take for later, I simply sat on rocks and watched the light change over the Kvarner islands, trying to commit the particular blue of that water to actual memory rather than digital storage.

I found a swimming spot on my third day by following a path that started between two houses and looked like it led to someone's bins. It led, after a scramble down rough steps, to a concrete platform where locals had clearly been swimming for generations, the surface worn smooth by decades of bare feet. The water there was different from the main beaches, deeper and somehow more serious, and I swam out far enough to feel genuinely small, treading water among fish I could not name.

On my fifth morning, I woke before dawn without alarm, without notification, without any reason except that the light was changing and my body noticed. I made coffee in the small kitchen and took it to that hanging terrace, and I watched the sun come up over the mainland mountains with a clarity I cannot remember having experienced before. The mist lay in the bay like something spilled. A heron worked the shoreline below me, patient and prehistoric.

I have been on holidays where I ticked boxes, where I saw the recommended sights and ate at the starred establishments and came home with a camera full of proof that I had been present in those places. This was not that kind of holiday. This was a holiday of wrong turns that became right turns, of missing technology that became found time, of a village that revealed itself only because I had no choice but to move through it slowly, attentively, lost in the best possible way.

My phone, when I finally retrieved it from the Zagreb hotel on my return journey, contained nothing from that week except the automated emails I had missed. I did not feel deprived. I felt, instead, like I had accidentally discovered the proper speed at which to experience a place, and I was not entirely sure I wanted to speed up again.