I have never been so grateful for a sat-nav giving up on me as I was on the way to Roccelletta di Borgia. There I was, cruising down the A2 from Lamezia Terme airport, feeling terribly smug about my left-hand driving skills, when my phone decided the Calabrian countryside was a complete mystery it wanted no part of. One moment I was following polite instructions, the next I was staring at a goat who seemed deeply unimpressed by my Fiat Panda. I had taken a wrong turn somewhere near the railway line and ended up on a track that grew narrower with every metre, olive branches scraping both sides of the car like nature's very own car wash.

The goat and I held eye contact for what felt like a solid minute before I swallowed my pride and asked directions from an elderly chap tending a vegetable patch. He spoke no English, my Italian stretches to ordering coffee and apologising, and yet through magnificent hand gestures and some enthusiastic pointing, he set me right. I reversed back up the track, the goat watching my retreat with obvious satisfaction, and eventually found the proper road to the property.

What struck me first about arriving at the holiday home was the silence. Proper, thick, wrap-around-your-ears silence, broken only by cicadas and the distant clank of someone doing something agricultural. The house sat among low hills with views I had not earned through my navigation skills, white walls and terracotta tiles glowing in that particular late-afternoon Calabrian light that makes everything look slightly golden and improbable.

I dumped my bags with the enthusiasm of a woman who had been lost for the better part of an hour and immediately set out to explore on foot, partly to stretch my legs and partly because I had spotted what looked like a path heading down towards some trees. This was where the accidental discoveries began. The path was not on any map I later found, just a worn track between dry stone walls where lizards darted away from my footsteps. It led me down to a small stream, barely more than a trickle in late summer, where someone had placed flat stones to cross. On the other side, tucked against a hillside, I found the remains of what must have been an old farmhouse, roof gone, fig tree growing straight through what had been a kitchen.

I sat on the wall there for ages, eating the bread and cheese I had wisely packed, feeling like the most intrepid explorer despite being perhaps two kilometres from where I was staying. The figs were ripe and warm, which I took as nature's apology for the goat incident.

The next morning, determined to get properly lost this time, I headed in the opposite direction with no destination in mind. The lanes around Roccelletta di Borgia crisscross in ways that seem designed to confuse, branching off to nowhere and doubling back on themselves. I walked past abandoned terraces where vines still produced grapes with no human to harvest them, past a shrine to the Madonna that someone still kept fresh with plastic flowers, past a dog who decided to accompany me for half a kilometre before losing interest in my company.

I found my way to a tiny settlement, barely a hamlet, where an old woman was hanging washing and regarded me with the same suspicion as the goat. She softened when I attempted my terrible Italian, and directed me to what she called "il posto bello" with gestures towards the coast. This turned out to be a cove I never would have found deliberately, a scoop of shingle and clear water between low cliffs, completely empty on a Tuesday in September. I swam there alone, floating on my back watching swallows dart above the rocks, and thought about how much of travel is planned and photographed and ticked off lists, and how the best bits happen when your technology fails and your ego takes a bruising and you end up somewhere you never meant to be.

That evening, back at the house with a bottle of local Ciro and some pasta I had managed to acquire, I watched the sun go down over those same hills I had wandered through. The sat-nav sat on the table, silent and unrepentant. I raised my glass to it, to the goat, to the old man in his vegetable patch, to fig trees growing through kitchens and empty coves and laundry-watching grandmothers. I had come to Calabria with plans and ended up with stories, which seems about the best trade anyone can make on holiday.