I thought I knew what I was doing when I set the sat nav for Oestra Aemtevik. Three hours from Gothenburg, straight up the E45, then a left somewhere near Karlstad. Easy, I told myself. Famous last words, that.

The trouble began when I decided I knew better than the GPS. There was a road on my paper map, you see, a thin grey line cutting through a patchwork of lakes and forest. Looked like a shortcut. It was not a shortcut. Within twenty minutes I was crawling along a gravel track barely wider than the hire car, branches scraping the windows like something out of a low-budget horror film. The sat nav had given up entirely, displaying only the little arrow of shame, spinning in circles.

Then the fuel light came on.

I will admit to a small moment of panic. Perhaps more than small. I may have uttered words my grandmother would not have approved of. But here is the thing about Varmland, and I say this with the benefit of hindsight and a full tank: getting lost is not the disaster you imagine. It is, in fact, rather the point.

I rounded a bend and found a lake I cannot name, because it had no name on my map. The water was the colour of weak tea, stained by the pine forests that pressed against its edges. An old wooden jetty sagged into the shallows. I stopped the car, more from necessity than choice, and sat there listening to nothing but the wind moving through the spruce trees. No traffic, no planes overhead, no signal on my phone. Just that extraordinary, slightly unnerving Scandinavian silence.

I walked down to the jetty, half-expecting someone to shout at me for trespassing. No one did. There was a tin bath rusting in the reeds, and a rope swing hanging from a birch tree, the seat worn smooth by decades of children's bottoms. I sat on it, very carefully, expecting it to snap. It held. I swung out over the water, feet dangling, feeling like a trespasser in my own childhood.

The fuel situation eventually resolved itself in the way these things do when you stop trying so hard. A red Volvo appeared from nowhere, driven by a man in a cap who looked at my predicament with the weary patience of someone who has rescued many idiots before me. He spoke no English, I speak no Swedish, but through elaborate pointing and the international language of embarrassed smiling, he led me to a petrol pump outside what I can only describe as a shed with aspirations. It took cards. Of course it did. This is Sweden, after all.

I arrived at Oestra Aemtevik two hours later than planned, just as the light was turning that particular gold you get at northern latitudes, everything edged with softness. The house sat above its own little bay, red paint fading to pink in places, a proper wood-fired sauna stacked with birch logs. I should have been frustrated, should have been calculating lost time, missed activities.

Instead I stood on the deck with a cup of tea that tasted of smoke from the kettle, and watched a heron work its way along the shoreline. The lake I had found by accident, the man in the Volvo, the rope swing, the silence - they felt more genuinely Varmland than anything I had planned. The guidebooks do not mention nameless lakes and rusting tin baths. They do not tell you that the best thing you can do is take a wrong turn and let the forest teach you its own geography.

I have been here four days now. Yesterday I deliberately got lost again, following a forest track until it petered out into marshland, then turning around and finding another. I discovered a clearing where someone had built a tiny shelter from branches, just big enough to lie down in. A child's project, perhaps, or a hunter's. I lay inside it for ten minutes, looking up at the canopy, feeling slightly ridiculous and completely content.

The sauna is excellent, by the way. The proper sort, where you throw water on the stones and it hits you like a wall of heat, then stumble outside to cool off in the lake, yelping like a dog. I have done this every evening. I have stopped checking my phone for signal. I have learned that the map is not the territory, as someone clever once said, and that the territory is considerably better than I expected.

Tomorrow I might try to find that nameless lake again. Or I might get lost somewhere entirely new. The sat nav stays in the glove compartment. Some things are better approached without assistance.