I should have known the Harz would have the last laugh when I smugly told my mate Dave I'd "mastered German navigation." Three hours out of Hanover, my phone died precisely as I turned onto what I swore was the B6. It wasn't. It was someone's driveway. A very long someone's driveway, ending at a farmhouse where an enormous dog regarded me with the weary disappointment of someone who'd seen this exact scene play out a dozen times before.

The farmer, bless him, didn't even ask questions. Just pointed back the way I'd come, made a circular gesture that I think meant "roundabout," and handed me a cold bottle of Apfelschorle through the window. I sat there drinking it like a chastened child, watching his chickens peck about, wondering how I'd managed to turn a straightforward drive into an impromptu rural cultural exchange.

Properly humbled, I found Thale eventually. The town sits where the Bode River cuts through a proper dramatic gorge, and my holiday home perched on a hillside looking down at the whole business. I'd booked a traditional Harz place through Novasol, half-timbered and sensible, the sort of building that has witnessed three centuries of slightly lost English visitors. The key was in a lockbox with a code I'd written on my actual palm, smartphone having surrendered to my incompetence.

That first evening, I abandoned any plan whatsoever. Wandered downhill with no destination, which is how I found the old narrow-gauge railway line. Not the tourist steam railway everyone knows about - this was a disused spur, overgrown with elderflower and rust, running parallel to someone's vegetable allotment. An elderly woman was cutting lettuce by her fence. We discussed the weather in my atrocious German, her patient corrections, the way she pronounced "Gewitter" with a particular rolling emphasis that made thunderstorms sound almost friendly. She'd lived there sixty years, she said, and still found new paths through the woods each spring.

I followed her pointing finger up a track I'd have missed entirely - unmarked, beginning between two garden sheds. Twenty minutes of uncertain scrambling later, I emerged onto a limestone outcrop I'd find on no map I later consulted. The Bode Gorge opened below, the river catching late light, Thale's rooftops clustered like they'd been shaken from a bag. A kestrel hung motionless above the opposite cliff. I sat on that rock until the light failed, feeling the particular foolishness of someone who nearly missed something extraordinary by being too efficient about arrival.

The mishap with navigation, the getting lost, the accidental discovery - this became the pattern of those first days. The Harz doesn't reward the organised, I decided. It rewards the wandering, the slightly confused, the ones who turn down lanes because a cat looked interesting or a barn door stood open. My holiday home became base camp for deliberate disorientation. Each morning I'd set out with a packed lunch and the explicit intention of losing my way.

Found a chapel that way, crumbling and candle-lit, where someone still leaves wildflowers weekly though the parish closed decades past. Found a pond where newts made lazy circles and an old man fished with equipment from another era, speaking of trout he'd caught in the fifties as if time barely moved in certain Harz hollows. Found myself, occasionally, which sounds sentimental until you've scrambled up a forest slope convinced you're ascending a hill fort only to discover it's a particularly ambitious compost heap.

The self-reflection came gradually. I'd arrived so certain about efficiency, about maximising, about experiencing the "right" things in the "right" order. The Harz gently dismantled this. The farmer's dog, the railway lady, the limestone outcrop - none featured in any itinerary I'd constructed. My first impressions weren't of Thale's famous gorge or its witch-themed tourism or any advertised attraction. They were of small generosities, unexpected vistas, the particular quality of light through beech trees when you've no idea where you are.

I still can't reliably navigate that area. Dave asks how the holiday was, and I describe compost heaps and newts and a dog's disappointed expression. He looks puzzled. I don't mind. Some places teach you that getting lost isn't failure - it's the entire point of having come.