I have never been very good at reading maps, which is a generous way of saying that my sense of direction is roughly on par with a confused pigeon. This became embarrassingly clear somewhere between Nafplio and our supposed destination of Xiropigado, when I confidently directed my partner down a road that grew progressively narrower, stonier, and more inhabited by goats who seemed personally offended by our presence.

The sat nav had given up on us around the third wrong turn, emitting what I can only describe as a digital sigh before falling silent entirely. We were somewhere in the eastern Peloponnese, that rugged stretch of coastline where the mountains tumble down to meet the Argolic Gulf, and I had managed to transform a forty-minute drive into something approaching two hours of agricultural tourism. We passed olive groves that looked older than democracy itself, a tiny church with a blue dome that did not appear on any map I had studied, and one very patient donkey who watched us pass three separate times from slightly different angles.

The funny thing about getting properly lost, though, is that you start noticing things you would otherwise barrel straight past. We found a beach cove, if you could call it that, more a slip of shingle where a freshwater stream cut through to the sea. No umbrellas, no taverna, just a fisherman mending nets in the shade of a tamarisk tree who waved us down with what I suspect was amusement at our clearly lost expressions. My Greek extends to approximately eleven words, eight of which are food-related, but he understood enough to point us back toward the main road with the patient air of someone who had performed this service many times before.

When we finally reached the property, rattled and slightly sun-drunk from the journey, I understood why people bother with the effort. The villa sat perched above Xiropigado village with that particular Peloponnesian magic of feeling completely secluded while actually being quite close to civilisation. The terrace looked out over the gulf toward distant islands, and somewhere below us, invisible from our vantage, lay that shingle cove where I had briefly considered simply abandoning the car and living among the fishing nets.

What struck me most in those first hours was how the getting lost had somehow become part of the place itself. I could not separate the villa from the accidental discoveries that preceded it. That evening, rather than immediately seeking out the nearest restaurant recommendation, we simply walked down through the village without purpose, following the smell of wood smoke and the sound of a radio playing bouzouki music from an open window. We found a tiny ouzeri where an elderly woman was frying small fish she had caught herself that morning, served with rough wine and no menu whatsoever. We would never have found it deliberately. It existed in that particular space of being neither hidden nor advertised, simply present for whoever happened to wander past.

I have thought since about how much of travel we pre-plan into uselessness, downloading apps and bookmarking reviews until the actual place becomes merely a backdrop for our expectations. My spectacular failure at navigation forced a different rhythm, one of wrong turns and unexpected conversations and the particular quality of evening light on a road that definitely went nowhere useful. The Peloponnese, I discovered, rewards this approach more than most places. It is not a region that reveals itself easily to the efficient traveller. The good stuff requires a certain willingness to look foolish, to circle back past the same patient donkey, to accept that you have no idea where you are going and that this might be precisely the point.

By the third day, I had stopped checking my phone entirely for anything beyond the time. We found other accidental places: a path through ancient terraced hillsides that led to a ruined tower with views across the gulf, a spring where villagers still filled plastic containers with water they insisted was better than anything from a tap, a beach where the swimming was mediocre but the shade of the carob trees was perfect for afternoon reading. None of these would have satisfied a review site. None were destinations in themselves. They were simply what happened when you allowed yourself to be genuinely, thoroughly lost in a place that had no particular interest in being found.

I am still bad with maps, as it happens. On our final morning I managed to take a wrong turn even on the familiar road to the village, discovering yet another small chapel I had somehow missed before. My partner just laughed and kept driving, having accepted by then that my navigational incompetence had become, against all probability, the organising principle of a genuinely lovely holiday. Some people find hidden gems through research and careful planning. I find them through stubborn inability to follow simple directions, and I am no longer sure this is entirely a failing.