The drive from Patras to Skaloma Nafpaktos had been going suspiciously well, which in my experience always means disaster is lurking round the next bend. Sure enough, I missed the turning for the property by a good three miles, distracted by a roadside stall selling what I convinced myself were "artisanal" oranges. They were not artisanal. They were just oranges, and I had paid roughly triple the going rate for the privilege of carrying them in my lap for the remainder of the journey.

By the time I found the correct lane, a narrow strip of tarmac curling down toward the Gulf of Corinth, the light had begun to soften into that particular Greek golden hour that makes everything look slightly magical and forgiving. The property sat nestled among olive groves, a modest stone building with terracotta roof tiles and shutters painted that particular blue that seems to exist only in Greece. I parked badly, as is my custom, and wrestled my case out while clutching my overpriced citrus.

The key was where promised, in a rusted metal box that required the sort of delicate negotiation I do not possess. After several minutes of muttering and jiggling, the thing surrendered with a squeak that probably woke every gecko in the postcode. I pushed open the door and was immediately struck by the smell of pine and distant sea, that combination I had forgotten I loved until it hit me.

I dumped my belongings with the enthusiasm of someone who has been in a hire car for too long and made straight for the terrace. The view stopped me properly in my tracks. The gulf stretched out below, hazy and blue, with the mountains of the Peloponnese sitting on the horizon like a painted backdrop. A fishing boat puttered across the middle distance, leaving a white comma on the water. I stood there with my ridiculous oranges and felt, for the first time in months, genuinely still.

The mishap of my wrong turn had cost me perhaps forty minutes, yet it had landed me here at precisely this light, this temperature, this particular moment of quiet. I found myself wondering how many other wrong turns had delivered me exactly where I needed to be, and how rarely I noticed.

The next morning I set out with no particular plan beyond finding coffee, which is how the best discoveries happen. I took a left where the map suggested right, following a dirt track that wound between ancient olive trees, their trunks gnarled into impossible shapes. The track petered out at a small chapel, whitewashed and locked, with a stone bench beneath a carob tree. I sat with my inadequate thermos and watched a falcon trace circles in the sky above the gulf. No one came. No one passed. The silence had texture to it, warm and slightly resinous.

Later, wandering back by a different route, I stumbled upon a cove I cannot name because it had no name, at least none that was signposted. A sliver of shingle beach, a few abandoned fishing nets, water so clear I could count the stones on the bottom. I swam clumsily, self-consciously, then floated on my back and listened to nothing but my own breathing and the occasional clink of a goat bell from somewhere higher up the slope.

That evening I cooked badly with local ingredients I barely recognised, drank wine that cost less than my oranges, and watched the lights of Rio across the water begin to prick the darkness. I thought about my talent for getting lost, for missing turnings, for following tracks that lead to locked chapels and nameless coves. It is not a talent I have ever valued particularly, yet here it had delivered something the guidebooks could not have prepared me for: the particular, unrepeatable quality of a place discovered by accident, at the wrong moment, with the wrong fruit in my lap.

I would miss the turning again, given the choice.