I have never been particularly good with directions, which is how I found myself reversing down a one-track lane in a hire car the size of a small boat, convinced I was about to become a local legend for all the wrong reasons. The sat-nav had given up somewhere near Campos, leaving me with nothing but optimism and a crumpled map from Palma airport. I was trying to find Jara in Ses Covetes, a finca I had booked in a rush of enthusiasm for "authentic Majorca." Authentic, it turns out, includes agricultural roads and the occasional goat.

The mishap came when I mistook a farm gate for the property entrance and nearly introduced the bumper to a lemon tree. A farmer appeared from nowhere, looking less surprised than I would have liked, and directed me back the way I had come with a gesture that suggested this happened weekly. I reversed with the dignity of a man who has accepted his fate.

When I finally found the right turning, the finca revealed itself slowly, hidden behind dry stone walls and bougainvillea that looked like it had been plotting its takeover for decades. The house sat low and honey-coloured against the fields, nothing like the glossy complexes I had driven past near the coast. My first thought was that I had accidentally arrived at someone's private home and would shortly be arrested. My second was that I did not particularly mind.

I dumped my bags with the relief of a traveller who has survived his own incompetence and went wandering before I could unpack. This proved to be the best decision of the trip. Ses Covetes is not a place that announces itself. The village, if you can call it that, is a scattering of houses and a beach that appears at the end of a sandy track like an afterthought. I took a path that looked unofficial, which is my preferred category of path, and found myself in a landscape of salt flats and low scrub that smelled of rosemary and dried earth.

The getting lost began in earnest when I followed what I believed was a coastal trail and ended up in a grove of ancient olive trees, their trunks twisted into shapes that suggested centuries of stubborn survival. I had no signal, no water, and absolutely no idea which direction the sea lay. A woman walking three dogs appeared from between the trees and pointed me toward a track I would never have found intentionally. It led to a cove so small it did not appear to have a name, just a few fishing boats pulled up on shingle and an old man mending nets who nodded as if I belonged there.

That evening I cooked with oil from a bottle left in the finca kitchen, tomatoes from a village shop I had passed three times before noticing it, and bread that was still warm. I ate outside watching the light change over the fields, still slightly disoriented from my wanderings. There is something particular about the quality of evening light in that part of Majorca, thick and golden, as if the day is reluctant to finish.

I realised over that meal that my wrong turns had not been mistakes at all but the point of the whole exercise. The lane with the lemon tree, the unnamed cove, the olive grove that felt like a secret, all of it came from not knowing where I was going. I am not about to claim some profound transformation, I am still the man who cannot read a map. But I am perhaps more willing now to follow a path that looks unpromising, to trust that getting lost in Ses Covetes is not a problem to solve but the main attraction.

The finca itself helped with this philosophy. It did not offer entertainment or instruction, just space and quiet and the occasional gecko on the ceiling. I spent mornings drinking coffee slowly, afternoons walking with deliberate aimlessness, evenings discovering that the nearby beach had different moods depending on the tide and the time. Sometimes I found myself alone there at sunset, which felt like an accidental privilege.

On my last day I tried to find the cove again and failed, ending up instead at a freshwater spring I had not seen before, surrounded by reeds and the sound of frogs. I sat there for an hour, slightly sunburned, thoroughly content, with no photograph to prove any of it happened. This seems to me now the proper way to remember a place like that, not through precision but through the haze of happy disorientation.

I left Jara with sand still in the car and a renewed conviction that my worst navigational instincts are secretly my best ones, at least when I am far enough from home for it not to matter.