I'd been warned about the Ibiza airport taxi queue, but nobody mentioned the car hire desk. There I stood, clutching a booking confirmation for a Fiat 500, watching a man in a polo shirt explain that they'd "upgraded" me to a van. A van. For one person, one wheelie case, and the winding lanes of northern Ibiza. I took it anyway, because holiday optimism is a powerful drug, and promptly scraped the side mirror against a parking barrier before leaving the terminal. The gentle crunch echoed through the multi-storey. I didn't look back. Some things are better left unacknowledged.

The drive to San Miquel de Balansat took longer than planned, mostly because I refused to use the sat-nav out of stubbornness and immediately got lost near Santa Gertrudis. This turned out to be the best decision of the entire trip. I found myself on a dirt track between almond groves, the van bouncing like a dodgem, until I emerged at a tiny farmhouse selling homemade hierbas from a kitchen table. An old woman poured me a thimbleful from a plastic bottle. It tasted of aniseed and licorice and something medicinal that made my eyes water. She laughed at my expression, which I choose to believe was affectionate rather than mocking.

By the time I reached Villa Palazzo, the sun was dropping behind the hills and I'd developed a genuine fondness for my ridiculous van. The villa sits up a steep drive, all white walls and terracotta, with a view that stops you mid-step. I didn't stop mid-step, though. I tripped on a loose paving stone and nearly launched my phone into the infinity pool. There's a metaphor in there somewhere about technology and tranquility, but at the time I was mainly concerned with not looking like a complete prat in front of the keyholder, who had appeared silently on the terrace.

He showed me round with the patience of someone who has seen many variations of the overwhelmed British tourist. The kitchen was vast and slightly intimidating, the kind that makes you feel you should be preparing paella for twelve rather than opening a bag of crisps. The bedrooms had wooden beams and heavy doors that shut with satisfying clunks. But it was the outside that got me. That pool, catching the last light. The covered terrace with its long wooden table. The absolute, thick silence of the countryside, broken only by a distant goat bell and what I later learned was a peacock from a neighbouring finca, though at the time I genuinely thought Ibiza had developed a siren problem.

I unpacked badly, as is my habit, leaving a trail of belongings from bedroom to bathroom to terrace. Found a bottle of local wine in a welcome pack and drank it too quickly on an empty stomach, watching the sky turn from apricot to violet to deep, star-pricked blue. There's no light pollution up here. None. I saw the Milky Way properly for the first time in years, and felt simultaneously tiny and wonderfully insignificant, which I suppose is the same thing but felt different somehow.

The next morning I woke early, confused by the silence, and made coffee in that enormous kitchen. Sat on the terrace watching mist rise from the valley below, the hills emerging like slow breaths. I'd planned to drive to San Miguel village for breakfast supplies, but instead I walked. Badly, in sandals, with no water. Followed a path that seemed to lead somewhere and absolutely didn't, ending at a collapsed stone wall where wild rosemary grew in profusion. I sat there for an hour, scratched my legs on thorns, and felt genuinely happy in a way that surprised me.

That's the thing about getting lost. You find things you weren't looking for. A collapsed wall. A woman with her hierbas. The particular quality of silence that makes you hear your own thoughts properly, perhaps for the first time in months. I came to Ibiza expecting clubs and crowds, found the north instead, and discovered I'm the sort of person who gets emotional about goat bells and starlight. Who knew? Not me, certainly. The van with its scraped mirror stayed parked outside Villa Palazzo for three days. I walked everywhere after that, deliberately wrong, deliberately wandering, deliberately found.