The thing about driving on the right-hand side of the road is that you think you've got it sorted after about twenty minutes, and then you try to change gear with the door handle and nearly take out a goat. That was my official welcome to Crete, somewhere between Heraklion airport and the village of Agia Galini, where I'd booked a stone cottage through Novasol that looked charmingly rustic online and, I secretly hoped, had functioning air conditioning.

I'd decided to be clever and take the scenic route. This was mistake number one. Mistake number two was trusting my hire car's sat nav, which appeared to be using a map drawn by someone who had visited Crete in a previous life, possibly as a Byzantine merchant. The tarmac gave way to gravel, which gave way to something that can only be described as "aggressive dust with ambitions," and suddenly I was climbing through olive groves with branches scraping both sides of the car like nature's very own car wash.

That's when I found the chapel. It wasn't on any map I had. A tiny whitewashed building with a rusted blue dome, perched on a ridge overlooking a valley I hadn't known existed. No sign, no car park, just a path worn smooth by decades of local feet. I stopped because I needed to turn around anyway, and because the goat I'd nearly collected was now giving me what I can only describe as a deeply judgmental stare from a nearby wall.

The chapel door was unlocked. Inside, it smelled of beeswax and time. Someone had left fresh flowers in a jar, and the walls were covered in faded icons with faces that seemed mildly surprised to see me. I sat on the single wooden bench and listened to absolutely nothing except cicadas and my own breathing, which was still slightly elevated from the door-handle gear incident. I'd planned to be unpacking by now, checking Wi-Fi speeds, finding the nearest supermarket. Instead I was accidentally contemplative in a building probably older than my entire family tree.

Back in the car, now thoroughly lost, I abandoned the sat nav entirely and followed a donkey. This is not advice you'll find in guidebooks, but the donkey clearly knew where it was going, and it led me down through terraces of lemon trees to a stream where an elderly man was washing vegetables in a stone basin. He looked up, unsurprised by my appearance, and pointed wordlessly up the hill where I could finally see terracotta roofs and the glint of the Libyan Sea beyond.

The cottage, when I eventually found it, was everything the photos promised and nothing like them. The stone was warmer in person, the courtyard smaller and more intimate, with a jasmine plant that had clearly been engaged in a long-term territorial dispute with the front door. I never did find the "proper" road in. For three days I kept discovering alternate routes back from the village, each more improbable than the last, each revealing some minor wonder: a collapsed stone windmill full of swallows, a spring where locals filled plastic bottles, a terrace where someone had abandoned an armchair beneath an ancient carob tree, positioned perfectly for watching the sunset.

On my final evening, determined to leave by the main road like a normal person, I got lost one last time and found myself on a headland above a cove no one seemed to use. The water was that impossible Mediterranean blue that makes you slightly angry at your own eyes for not being adequate recording equipment. I swam until my shoulders ached, then lay on rocks warm as a radiator and thought about how thoroughly my plans had been dismantled by this island, and how grateful I was for it.

I still don't know the name of that chapel. The donkey, I suspect, has forgotten me entirely. But I have a photograph of an armchair in a carob tree, and the certain knowledge that sometimes the sat nav knows nothing worth knowing.