The man is waiting in the shade of the coconut trees as our boat runs up on the sandy beach, sending tiny fish skittering away across the shallows. We shake hands and I give him the gift we have brought. Immediately he sets off, leading the way across a broad swathe of tropical grass dotted with brightly painted wooden cabins and flowering trees. A woman walks past carrying a silvery fish as big as a small child. The breadfruit trees are laden with glossy green fruit. Two women wave from under a sunshade where they are chopping an enormous pile of green vegetables. Everywhere there is abundance and vitality. Everywhere there is food.
As instructed, we are wearing sarongs but no shoes, hats or sunglasses. Near the centre of the small settlement we arrive at a blue cabin, a building no grander than any other – only a large boulder outside suggesting this might be the dwelling of an important person. Inside we find two old men sitting cross-legged on the floor under a garish poster of fluffy kittens. One of them, wearing a floral scarlet sarong, smiles broadly and indicates that we are to sit opposite. Our intermediary, Sam, talks to him – the chief I assume – introducing us. Then he throws our present across the floor.
There is a silence. Neither man shows any interest. Is the gift inadequate? In the markets of Suva, the Fijian capital 200 miles west across the sea, I had bought what I had been told would be acceptable: a kilo of the roots of a plant, piper mythisticum, commonly known as kava. Without it, protocol would not be observed and permission to enter the territory possibly refused. Kava is a drug, the South Pacific equivalent, you might say, of alcohol. We have brought, symbolically at least, a bottle of wine to the party.
The man in the scarlet sarong claps twice, very loudly, and leans forward to touch the bag gently, pushing it towards the other man, who remains silent. Still smiling broadly, scarlet sarong launches into a welcome speech that Sam translates. When he has finished, both men clap several times.
I then give a long-winded reply – it seems like the right thing to do – thanking them for the welcome. Through the open door I can see the ocean and that incredible blue, like no other blue I've seen before, but it is their village, Daliconi, that I praise: its clean simplicity, its jungle-backed location, its abundant fruit trees. When I finish, I clap my hands twice. They nod, satisfied, then clap too. We can enter.
It is perhaps the most unusual entry to a national park that I have ever made, but then we are among the first visitors to what must be one of the most remote protected areas on earth: the Qilaqila Marine Reserve on the island of Vanua Balavu. As we stroll back to the boat, I realise that the smiling man in the scarlet sarong whom I had addressed myself to was not the chief at all. The chief was the other man. Everything had been done through intermediaries. My partner, Sophie, has worked that out too and whispers, "This feels like something from Captain Cook."
Actually Cook only ever made it to Vatoa, one of the other Lau Islands, further south. This necklace of volcanic islands and atolls belongs to Fiji, but is flung in casual profusion between the main archipelago of Fiji and its neighbour Tonga. Captain Bligh was more familiar with these waters, having sailed through them on his epic 3,600-mile voyage in an open boat after being cast adrift by the dastardly Bounty mutineers in April 1789. Not that Bligh went ashore: fear of cannibals deterred him, and with good reason. In the Fijian National Museum in Suva, alongside the only remaining piece of HMS Bounty, there is one of the most memorable artefacts on public display anywhere in the world: the sole of the Rev Thomas Baker's left boot, all that was found of the poor man after the Fijians ate him – a case of braise the Lord, you might say.
By 1867 when Baker was meeting his doom, the South Pacific was already seriously damaged by a century of contact with Europeans, but things had started out very promisingly. When French navigator Louis de Bougainville arrived in Tahiti in 1767, his crew were greeted by a dazzlingly beautiful topless maiden who climbed on deck and innocently let her loin cloth drop. From this thrilling landfall, sadly, it was a vertiginous descent. First the sexual innocence was destroyed by venereal disease and missionaries. Then the racial balance was upset by forced migrations, while imported plants and animals sent the ecosystems into a tail spin. Finally, Britain, the US and France set about tenderising various islands with nuclear bombs, ready for the arrival of the Armageddon meltwaters of our consumerist lifestyle – including, of course, our aeroplane emissions as we flew east from Fiji's main island. At that point, almost a week before we made it to Daliconi, I had no idea that we were about to get a taste of the old South Pacific, the one that every expert will tell you no longer exists.
Don't bother trying to find Vanua Balavu in your atlas, at least not without a magnifying glass. Suffice to say that this 20km-long mountainous strip of emerald green is about as far as it is possible to get from Britain. Part of a group called the Northern Lau Islands, it lies 200 miles east of Fiji's mainland and close to the international date line. Getting there has never been easy and the necessity of obtaining permission from a chief for each island something of a deterrent. Now, however, the people are starting to encourage visitors, if in a charmingly idiosyncratic manner. The advice of my contact at Fiji Tourism certainly promised a different experience. "Take a kilo of kava with you," she suggested. "And your Sunday best."
At the airstrip we had been met by Tevita "David" Fotofili, owner of one of only a dozen vehicles on the island and its sole accommodation, Moana's Guest House – a single thatched hut in his garden next to the ruins of another hut that was flattened in a 2010 cyclone. Such a draconian reduction in hotel rooms scarcely troubled the island's hospitality industry, however; they only get around 20 tourists a year.
"The plane is the problem," explained David. "It's only weekly and doesn't always come. People get stranded. The boat is no better: we've been waiting three weeks this time and the island has almost run out of flour."
We were not complaining, soon tucking into vast meals cooked by David's partner, Mita: roasted cassava, yams, octopus, reef fish, pineapples, tiny sweet bananas, and spectacularly huge local coconut crabs. These monsters feed on coconuts, which they crack open with their massive pincers. "Don't get too close," advised David. "They'll break your arm."
For breakfast, instead of toast we had to eat chocolate cake. "The flour goes further," explained Mita with a grin. My daughter Maddy (eight) was grasping what we meant by "island paradise".
Food has long been a central issue when it comes to European attitudes to the South Pacific, particularly one item: human flesh. In an environment where there was little or no access to red meat, cannibalism was a key ingredient of survival. At least that is the theory. The truth is that Europeans found such a thrill in the threat of cannibals that it is difficult to untangle how widespread it really was. In the 16th century, the French philosopher Montaigne pointed out that we were often far more barbarous than those we called cannibals, but his lone voice was drowned out in the 19th century stampede of millenarian preachers determined to write memoirs with titles like My Life Among Cannibals.
And the flesh-eating reputation is a difficult stain to lose. Paul Theroux, in The Happy Isles of Oceania, claims, with impish glee, that the Pacific islander love of corned beef is because of its similarity in taste to human flesh.
Our own objective, not talked about much, was to avoid becoming corned beef for the sharks. David was adamant that no shark attack had ever been recorded inside the lagoon that surrounds the island. There are plenty of reefs within the lagoon so we did not expect our first snorkelling expedition to be quite as dramatic as it was. Sophie, Maddy and I leaped off the boat to find ourselves in another cosmos: complex societies of coral standing alone in vast dark blue spaces and around them satellites of multicoloured fish. This was different to other reef experiences I'd had: the sense of space and dimension, the sheer variety of fish, and most of all the size of the fish. With so few human residents and visitors, the reefs of Vanua Balavu are relatively untouched. I dived down and picked up a triton shell as big as a rugby ball. A tuna the size of a small car swept past. It was too overpowering for Maddy and Sophie who decided to get out after 10 minutes. As they did, I spotted a two-metre white-tip reef shark drifting past, checking us out. A healthy reef, of course, should have its top predators. When I resumed swimming along the reef edge, it reappeared and kept position with me, cruising gently in parallel for a minute before powering away into the darkness.
Three days later Maddy's confidence had grown so much she was complaining that I hadn't told her there was a shark – she'd have stayed in the water. I was encountering the relatively harmless white-tips almost every time I got in, but I still got an adrenaline rush each time one cruised up out of the gloom. Some might say it's foolhardy to take your child into sharky waters, but I calculate that it's OK if you take local advice, treat the animals with respect, and stay cool and calm in the water. Besides, all the locals reckoned there was only one big old Tiger shark – a real danger – in a lagoon that is 20km across. On the fourth afternoon Maddy got what she wanted: a large white-tip that smoothed past us watching attentively.
The next day was Sunday and David warned us it would be special: "Don't eat much breakfast. You'll need room for the feast after the service."
Wearing sarongs, we walked down to the Methodist church in the nearby village of Sawana. Most people wore the same with the addition of a woven grass skirt and some flowers in the hair. The church windows were open on to the beach and coconut palms. It was all conducted in Tongan and Fijian, and we didn't follow much of what was said, but the singing was powerful and uplifting.
Afterwards everyone shook hands with the preacher and strolled up to a local house where a feast was laid on: low tables laden with huge fish, piles of crabs, octopus and boiled roots and fruit. The men prepared the kava by soaking the root in a large bowl, then sieving it and serving it in coconut shells. The liquid has the look of the Humber estuary at low tide, but doesn't taste as good. After a couple of shells I got a brief tingling in my lips – just like Humber water – but nothing more. Curiously the locals call it grog and it certainly excited as much desire as wine and whisky do elsewhere. In the local school a couple of days earlier, I peeped inside the students' English books and found mentions of it in their essays, along with some pretty candid assessments of life in a tropical paradise where the only income is from coconuts, fishing and selling sea slugs, bêche-de-mer, to a Chinese agent.
"Sometimes," wrote one girl, "Mother gets angry with Father and Brother and does not give them money for grog and cigarettes."
Our own feast and introduction to grog over, we did what everyone else did on a Sunday afternoon: wandered slowly home and spent the day relaxing in hammocks.
The big day trip of our stay was to be to the new marine park of Qilaqila, or Bay of Islands, but getting to this place had given us our first intimation of the potential complexities in travelling through a culture unused to visitors. "I'll ring the community up there," said David when we arrived, "and see if they will accept your visit."
Two days later we were told that they might. Next day they would not. That Sunday evening David received a call to inform us that we would be allowed to pay our respects to the chief at Daliconi. Finally on Monday David settled us into a boat of a friend, handing us our bundle of kava and sarongs. "Wear these and give the kava to the village headman or chief. If they accept you, they will provide a guide to Qilaqila. It should be OK."
And so, at last, with the blessings of the chief, the Bay of Islands proved to be an exquisite gem: 160 mushroom-shaped coral outcrops topped with virgin jungle. Between them is a milky blue lagoon filled with fish, clams and caves – some accessible only by diving. Overhead, bats as big as buzzards filled the air with screeches. It was impossible to land on most of these strange islands, and quite likely no one ever has.
That evening back in David and Mita's kitchen cabin, while dinner was prepared I was reading Theroux again. Maddy was playing with the couple's son, Daniel. Sophie was studying A Guide to the Birds of Fiji – a short but informative volume (there are only 149 species as when people arrived 3,500 years ago they promptly ate quite a few, including a giant pigeon). "What's for dinner?" asked Maddy. Mita cast a mischievous look. "It's the last bit of flour. I made pizza."
We all cheered. "What flavour?"
If Mita had heard us chuckling over Theroux and his cannibal diet theories, I don't know, but she was grinning broadly as she opened the oven door and pulled out a delicious-looking round of dough and topping. "It's corned beef," she laughed.
