I have never been so grateful for a dodgy sat nav in all my life. There we were, my partner and I, crawling along a gravel track somewhere west of Suldal, convinced we were following the route to our holiday let near Jelsa. The voice on the phone kept insisting we turn left into what looked suspiciously like a sheep field, and after twenty minutes of increasingly tense silence, I finally admitted defeat and pulled over beside a weather-beaten red barn that definitely was not on any map I had studied.

That is how we found the first hidden gem, entirely by accident and slightly cross with each other.

The barn turned out to be part of a smallholding where an elderly chap called Arne was mending a fishing net in his doorway. He did not speak much English, and my Norwegian extends to "takk" and "ol" with questionable pronunciation, but through a mixture of pointing and enthusiastic nodding, he directed us down a path I would have walked straight past. Ten minutes later we emerged onto a shingle beach so perfect it looked staged. The water in that little cove was the colour of weak gin, utterly transparent, and not another soul in sight. We sat on a driftwood log and ate the emergency packet of digestive biscuits from my glove compartment, and somehow the sat nav disaster felt like the best thing that had happened to us all day.

Our actual cottage, when we finally reached it, turned out to be one of those traditional wooden places with grass on the roof that always makes British visitors want to photograph it from seventeen angles. It sat tucked between birch trees and a proper working fjord, the kind where small boats putter past at dawn and you feel obliged to wave like you belong there. But by then I had already caught the bug for wandering without purpose, and the next morning I suggested we simply walk in the direction that looked least promising.

We got magnificently lost within the hour, following a stream uphill through terrain that grew increasingly boggy and dramatic. My partner, who had sensibly worn wellies unlike my regrettable choice of canvas trainers, found the whole thing deeply amusing until the path simply vanished into bracken and we had to choose between retracing our steps or pushing through. We pushed through, naturally, because turning back would have involved admitting something. What we found was a small lake, barely a puddle on most maps, fed by a waterfall thin as a ribbon but loud as a motorway. Someone had built a rough wooden bench there years ago, now silver with age, positioned perfectly for doing absolutely nothing. We did absolutely nothing for two hours, and I cannot remember the last time I felt so smug about my own poor navigation.

The pattern continued. A wrong turning on a borrowed bicycle led us to a tiny chapel near Jelsa village, locked but surrounded by graves so old the names had worn to whispers, with views across the fjord that made me understand why people bother with all that fjord business in the first place. Another afternoon, following what I thought was a shortcut back from the local shop, I stumbled into a clearing where someone had arranged dozens of painted stones into a spiral pattern, completely unexplained, completely wonderful. I took a photograph and immediately felt like a tourist, then took another because some things deserve to be photographed even if you feel silly.

There is something particular about getting lost in a place like Rogaland. The landscape is generous with its secrets but does not broadcast them. You have to earn the good spots through mild suffering, wet feet, and the occasional moment of genuine worry that you might need to be rescued by a very patient local. Each time we found somewhere unexpected, I felt slightly less like someone on holiday and slightly more like someone discovering something personal, which is a pretentious way of saying it felt like ours even though obviously it was not.

By our final day I had stopped checking maps altogether, which my partner found either endearing or irresponsible depending on whether we had a dinner reservation. We spent that last morning following a track that started promisingly beside a field of sheep and gradually deteriorated into something a goat would hesitate to attempt. At the end, predictably, was another cove, smaller than the first, with a single wooden rowing boat pulled up on stones and no indication of who owned it or whether they minded our intrusion. We sat there until the light started to fade, not talking much, watching the water change colour through shades I do not have names for.

I have been on holidays where every hour was planned and every attraction ticked off, and I suppose there is satisfaction in that efficiency. But I will take the wrong turns, the soggy trainers, the emergency biscuits on unexpected beaches. The sat nav still lives in my glove compartment, slightly unreliable, and I have not updated it. Some things you do not want to improve.