I'd driven down from Rijeka with the windows open and a playlist that should've stayed in 2008, convinced I was about to pull off the smoothest arrival in Croatian holiday history. The ferry from Misnjak to Rab Town had been a breeze, all sparkling water and me pretending I knew which direction west actually was. Then came the satnav betrayal. I followed its cheerful instructions down what turned out to be someone's private olive grove, reversed into a stone wall with a crunch that still makes me wince, and finally limped into Banjol with a dented bumper and severely dented pride.

The Rab Banjol property sat there like it knew all along I'd make a hash of finding it. Terracotta roof, wooden shutters, that particular creamy stone that glows pinkish at sunset. I stumbled out of the car and immediately met Marija from next door, who was watering her geraniums with the focused intensity of someone conducting surgery. She didn't look up, just said, "You took the olive road," in English far better than my Croatian, which currently extends to "beer" and "help." I started to explain about the satnav. She cut me off with a wave. "Everyone takes the olive road once. The Germans twice."

The key was in a lockbox that defeated me for a solid ten minutes. Another neighbour, an elderly man in a vest and trousers despite the heat, watched from his doorway without comment. Eventually he shuffled over, produced reading glasses from his pocket, and simply turned the box upside down. It opened. "You were pressing the wrong button," he said, not unkindly, then introduced himself as Branko and asked if I understood football. I said I understood it existed. This seemed to satisfy him.

Inside, the place smelled of lavender and old wood, that particular holiday-rental scent of other people's summers. I opened the terrace doors and there it was, the Kvarner Bay doing its shimmering blue thing, the mainland hazy in the distance. I stood there feeling properly smug for perhaps thirty seconds before Marija appeared at the fence with a bowl of figs. "From my tree," she said. "Don't eat the ones on the ground. Wasps."

That evening I walked down to Banjol's small harbour, still slightly dazed from the journey and the olive road incident. A fisherman called Toni was mending nets with fingers that moved faster than I could follow. He told me, unprompted, that he'd been catching the same fish for forty years and they were definitely getting cleverer. "They know my boat now," he said, completely serious. "They see the red paint, they scatter." I asked why he didn't repaint it. He looked at me like I'd suggested he change his name. "It's my boat."

I ate at a konoba where the owner, Darko, refused to tell me what was in the brodetto. "Fish," he said. "From Toni. Good fish. You want ingredients, go to pharmacy." The wine was local, harsh and excellent, and he sat with me between courses to complain about his daughter's new boyfriend from Zagreb, who apparently didn't understand why you couldn't get decent prsut in the capital. "He thinks it's all Croatia," Darko said, pouring more wine with the resigned air of a man discussing a natural disaster. "Zagreb is not Croatia. Zagreb is Zagreb."

Walking back up the hill in darkness, Branko was still outside his house, now listening to football on a crackling radio. He raised his hand without turning. Marija's geraniums had been joined by a cat that watched me with the same judgmental expression she wore. I sat on the terrace with Toni's figs and Darko's wine, the bay invisible now but still present in the sound of water and the smell of pine.

I'd arrived convinced I was organising a holiday. What I'd actually found was something more complicated and far better, a little world already in motion that might, if I was lucky and didn't take the olive road again, let me briefly join.