I had convinced myself that driving from Krakow to Zakopane would be a doddle. Four hours, scenic views, perhaps a cheeky stop for pierogi. What I had not accounted for was my spectacular inability to operate a Polish toll machine at 7am, which resulted in a queue of increasingly unimpressed lorry drivers watching me flap about with a twenty-zloty note like a man trying to bribe a robot. By the time I arrived at the Zakopane Koscielisko, my hands were still slightly trembling and I had developed an irrational fear of automated barriers.

The property sits in Koscielisko, a village that clings to the edge of the Tatra Mountains with the sort of dramatic scenery that makes you want to immediately abandon your urban life and become a person who owns walking poles. I had booked it chiefly for the balcony views, which the website promised would be "breathtaking." This turned out to be technically accurate, though my first breath was largely taken up by the realisation that I had packed three jumpers and no suncream for what was shaping up to be the warmest May week in a decade.

The owner, a chap named Tadeusz who communicated in a magnificent mixture of broken English and emphatic gestures, handed me the keys with the solemnity of a man passing down a family heirloom. He then pointed vigorously at the sky, made a walking motion with his fingers, and gave me a thumbs up. I interpreted this as meteorological approval for hiking and chose to ignore the slight worry that he might have been warning me about something entirely different.

My first morning began with the sort of optimism that only a person who has never attempted a mountain walk in improper footwear can muster. I had planned a gentle amble along the Dolina Koscieliska, a valley trail that Tadeusz had circled on my map with what I now recognise was probably excessive generosity. The path follows a stream through limestone cliffs, and within twenty minutes I had already stopped four times to photograph the same view from marginally different angles, convinced each time that this particular composition captured something profound about the human condition. It did not. It was a rock.

The warmth was the thing that undid me. I had prepared for the Tatras of my imagination, all misty peaks and biting winds, not this sun-drenched amphitheatre where butterflies performed drunken aerial displays and elderly Polish couples power-walked past me in sandals. By midday I had shed both jumpers, tied one around my waist in a manner I hoped looked intentional, and was seriously considering using the other as an improvised sunhat. A group of teenagers passed me eating ice creams with the relaxed confidence of people who had not just spent twenty minutes arguing with a toll machine.

I reached a clearing where the path forked and made what I can only describe as a characteristically optimistic decision. The left route looked steeper but shorter on my crumpled map. The right looked gentle but meandering. I chose left, because I am the sort of person who consistently confuses efficiency with wisdom. Twenty minutes later, sweating in a way I did not know was physiologically possible, I encountered a family descending with the easy rhythm of mountain goats. The father took one look at my damp, desperate face and said, in perfect English, "Ah, you took the hard way. Very Polish of you." I could not tell if this was a compliment.

By the time I retreated to the valley floor, the afternoon light had shifted to that particular honeyed quality that makes everything look slightly unreal. I found a wooden bench beside the stream, removed my boots with the relief of a prisoner unshackled, and watched a dipper bird perform its peculiar bobbing dance on a submerged rock. My phone declared it twenty-six degrees, which felt like either a triumph or a betrayal depending on which jumper I thought about.

That evening I sat on the balcony with a beer purchased from the village shop, where the woman had patiently counted out my change as if teaching a particularly slow child. The mountains had turned purple in the declining light, and somewhere a dog barked with the lazy persistence of an animal with nowhere particular to be. I thought about my wardrobe failures, my map misreading, my brief but meaningful relationship with that toll machine. The warmth had forced an improvisation that felt, in retrospect, like the actual point of arriving somewhere unfamiliar. I had come for the dramatic peaks and the brisk mountain air, and instead found myself slowly roasting in a valley, happier than my planning would have allowed.

Tadeusz appeared briefly in the garden below, spotted me on the balcony, and performed his walking-finger gesture again followed by a new movement I interpreted as "drink your beer slowly." I raised my bottle in what I hoped was universal acknowledgment. Tomorrow I would attempt the gentler path, perhaps with proper suncream, perhaps with fewer jumpers, certainly with the same unearned optimism that had brought me here. The mountains would still be warm, and I would still be slightly unprepared, and somehow this seemed exactly as it should be.