I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I confidently turned left at Porto-Vecchio instead of right, following a road that grew narrower and more convinced of itself with every kilometre. My hire car, a Fiat 500 that had all the power of a hairdryer, whined in protest as the tarmac gave way to something that could only generously be called a track. Somewhere behind me, my carefully printed directions sat in the footwell, entirely useless, while my phone declared "searching for signal" with the optimism of a lottery ticket buyer.

The mishap, though, turned out to be the making of the whole trip. I'd been aiming for Sainte-Lucie-de-Porto-Vecchio, a village I'd booked almost on impulse, drawn by photographs of a stone cottage with a terrace that promised proper evening aperitifs. What I found instead, twenty minutes after admitting defeat to my own navigation, was a tiny cove I'd never seen mentioned anywhere. No beach bar, no parking, just a handful of local lads fishing from the rocks and water so clear I could see my own embarrassed expression staring back from the surface. I sat on a boulder for half an hour, sharing a packet of fig biscuits I'd bought at a petrol station, and felt that particular lightness that only comes from being completely lost and not particularly minding.

When I finally found the cottage, rattling down the proper lane with my tail between my legs, the key was exactly where the owner said it would be, under a terracotta pot that had seen better decades. The place smelled of lavender and old wood, and the terrace, I'm relieved to report, absolutely delivered on its promise. I unpacked with the enthusiasm of someone who'd survived a minor expedition, then walked to the village proper to find bread and an apology coffee.

Sainte-Lucie itself is the sort of place that doesn't announce itself. There's a modest church, a bar-tabac where the same three men seem permanently installed, and roads that wander off into the maquis without much explanation. I wandered with them. The following morning, still jet-lagged and waking at an ungodly hour, I took a path behind the cottage that looked like it might lead somewhere interesting. It led, after twenty minutes of scratching through low scrub and convincing myself I wasn't about to encounter a wild boar, to an abandoned olive press. Stone walls, rusted machinery, silence except for the cicadas. I sat on a broken wall and drank warm water from my bottle, feeling like the first person to discover something that hundreds of locals obviously already knew about but kindly never mentioned to tourists.

The pattern established itself quickly. Each day I'd set out with vague intentions and return with discoveries that felt stolen. A bakery in a hamlet that doesn't appear on my map, where an ancient woman sold me fougasse still warm from the oven and communicated entirely through gestures and raised eyebrows. A swimming spot where the rocks formed natural shelves, perfect for leaving a book and a pair of sandals while you float in water that makes you understand why the French call it la Grande Bleue. I found it by following a woman carrying a beach bag and looking purposeful, then pretending I hadn't been following her when we both arrived.

There's something about the maquis, that dense, aromatic scrub that covers so much of Corsica, that encourages losing yourself. The smells are intoxicating, wild thyme and rosemary and something else I could never identify, and the light filters through in a way that makes every path look inviting and slightly mysterious. I took wrong turns deliberately after a while, abandoning the few walks I'd found online in favour of tracks that petered out or doubled back on themselves unexpectedly.

One afternoon, hot and thirsty and genuinely uncertain where I'd ended up, I stumbled onto a small vineyard with a handwritten sign offering degustation. The owner, a man whose French was as heavily accented as my own attempts deserved, poured me a glass of something local and red while his dog slept on my feet. We managed a conversation of sorts, mostly about the heat and the difficulty of keeping wild pigs from the grapes. I bought two bottles I couldn't really afford and carried them back through the scrub like precious cargo, feeling absurdly pleased with myself.

The cottage became my base for these expeditions, a reliable constant to return to. I'd make simple dinners from the market in Porto-Vecchio, fresh fish and tomatoes that actually tasted of something, then sit on that terrace with my stolen wine and watch the light change over the hills. The mishap of my arrival, that wrong turn, had set the tone entirely. I'd come expecting a holiday and found something more like an adventure, though an exceedingly gentle one, conducted at the pace of a Fiat 500 with a grudge.

On my final morning, I tried to find that first cove again, the one where I'd sat with my fig biscuits and my humiliation. I took what I thought was the same wrong turn, but the track ended at a farmhouse with an aggressive dog and no sea in sight. I never did find it. I'm not entirely convinced it wasn't a figment of my own lostness, a cove that only exists for people who have given up on arriving anywhere in particular. I like to think it is still there, waiting for the next person who turns left instead of right and has the good sense to see what happens.