I should have known the Sat Nav was plotting against me the moment it insisted Secovlje was "just past that salt flat, probably." Three hours after landing at Ljubljana, I found myself beetling down a road that grew progressively narrower and progressively more convinced it was a cycle path. My hire car, a Fiat 500 that handled like a shopping trolley with ambition, finally surrendered to a tractor the width of a small bungalow. The farmer, a chap called Stanko with eyebrows you could lose a pencil in, leaned out and said something in Slovenian that I choose to believe was sympathetic rather than anatomically impossible.

Twenty minutes of elaborate pointing later, I arrived at the Portoroz Secovlje property with what remained of my dignity and a front bumper decorated with thistle. The key safe code worked first time, which felt almost suspicious after my navigational ordeal. I pushed open the door and was immediately greeted by the smell of lavender and the realisation that I had absolutely no idea how the induction hob functioned.

The neighbour appeared within four minutes. I know this because I was still standing in the kitchen, jabbing at buttons like a confused pigeon, when a weathered face materialised at the window. This was Branko, who introduced himself by tapping the glass and shouting "Ne! Ne!" until I opened the patio door. He wore a vest that had last seen service during the Tito era and carried a bottle of something clear and presumably flammable. Through a magnificent combination of mime, broken German, and pointing at his own elbows, he conveyed that I had attempted to boil water on the warming plate. He then demonstrated the proper technique, accepted no thanks whatsoever, and vanished into his own garden where I later observed him conducting what appeared to be a very serious conversation with a fig tree.

By evening I had met three more characters of note. The woman in the adjacent property, Maja, arrived with a bowl of something she called "salt worker's stew" and a warning that her rooster, Tito, had "opinions about British people." I never established whether this was political commentary or simply observed behaviour, but Tito did spend the following morning following me around the terrace with what I can only describe as prosecutorial intensity.

The property itself sat in that curious zone between Portoroz's faded Habsburg glamour and the working salt pans of Secovlje. My balcony overlooked a landscape that shifted between industrial heritage and genuine beauty depending on the angle and the time of day. At dawn, the salt flats turned pink and the whole place looked like someone had applied an Instagram filter to reality. At noon, it simply looked like hard work, which I gathered from Branko was precisely the point.

The most significant conversation came on my third evening, at the tiny konoba five minutes walk toward the pans. The proprietor, a woman called Dragica who moved with the economical grace of someone who had been serving strangers since before I was born, took one look at my attempt to order wine and brought something entirely different. "You have the face of a man who chooses badly," she said, with what I eventually recognised as fondness rather than insult. She was not wrong. The local Refosk was magnificent. The face, I suppose, remains a work in progress.

I spent the remainder of that evening in conversation with a salt pan worker called Edvard, who had retired three years previously but still cycled down each morning to "supervise" his successors. His English was better than my Slovenian by several orders of magnitude, which meant we achieved something approaching genuine communication. He spoke about the rhythm of the harvest, the way the weather had changed in his lifetime, the particular quality of light in September when the brine crystallised just so. He also spoke about Branko, his cousin, and the fig tree, which apparently had a history of poor decision-making stretching back decades.

What struck me, and what I keep returning to now that I am home, was the particular quality of attention these people offered. Not the performative friendliness of tourist destinations, but something more specific and more conditional. You had to demonstrate some willingness to be ridiculous, to be corrected, to accept stew from strangers and wine from women who insulted you. The place demanded a certain surrender of competence.

I surrendered mine almost immediately, of course. The induction hob remained a mystery until my final morning, when Branko reappeared unbidden and performed what I can only describe as an exorcism upon it. He accepted a coffee, rejected my biscuits as "English sadness," and departed with a handful of my lavender, which he claimed his wife needed for "nerves."

I left with salt on my shoes, Tito's opinion still unresolved, and the distinct sense that I had been lightly but thoroughly assessed by several people whose names I would probably misspell forever. The Sat Nav, naturally, tried to send me through the salt pans on departure. I ignored it, found the proper road within ten minutes, and felt an unexpected pang of something like loss when the Fiat finally reached proper tarmac and sensible signage.

Some places teach you their geography. This one taught me, however briefly, its particular humour. I was a very willing student, even if the coursework involved regular public incompetence and the occasional rooster confrontation.