The first time you ring your boss and say you cannot come to work because you are trapped on a (sub)tropical island, it is amusing.

The second time, it is kind of OK, ha ha, the jokes about Gilligan are a little less exuberant.

The third time it feels like a career death by weather.

Arriving on Lord Howe Island, a 10km-long volcanic remnant about 600km off the coast of New South Wales, my mission was to write about spending 48 hours there. Instead I spent 168.

It’s a stunning place, like something from a picture book, with waters actually the colour of turquoise – not the clear blue some writers lazily refer to as turquoise – and rolling green hills.

Other than its beauty, there are two things that strike you about the island when you arrive – there is nil phone reception and only patchy Wi-Fi. I was not mentally prepared for how cut off the island is communications-wise, but for my gen X travelling companion, MQ as I shall call him, this was an integral part of the paradise. I found myself occasionally flipping desperately through Kim Kardashian’s book, Selfish, as if it was an analogue Instagram.

The second thing you notice is the friendliness of the locals. The island has a population of about 350 and, though I assume it would have the normal small town feuds and petty grievances, everyone seems genuinely happy, cheerfully saying hello to every person that passes.

It is like some sort of Guardian utopia: there are a limited number of cars and the speed limit is 25kmh so pedestrians and cyclists – the primary road users(!) – are safe.

“I like your hair,” a woman yells out on the makeshift main street on my first afternoon on the island.

“I like your pants,” another woman says the next day.

“Nice jumper!” I hear several times on the third day.

I pay $4 for the local paper, the Lord Howe Island Signal – 38 pages of printed A4 paper bound together, with the front page pointing to the eulogy of a 90-year-old man written by a man with the same name.

Originally from a country town myself, this small community is the Shane Warne on Tinder of friendliness.

Day one

We check into our bungalow at Earl’s Anchorage, near the main street, Anderson Road. There you’ll find the Anchorage restaurant, a post office, a general store and a food co-op looking out across the lagoon to the two biggest mountains on Lord Howe – Gowing and Lidgbird.

Our bungalow ($430 a night in the low season, $950 in high) is roomy with a self-catering kitchen, separate bedroom, shower and living/dining area with plenty of windows to enjoy your subtropical surroundings – mainly palm trees.

We dine at Arajilla Retreat, driven there by Anchorage staff. Staff at various restaurants and resorts will ferry you to your destinations at night and, if you get stuck, you can always hitchhike (official island advice).

At Arajilla I have, no word of a lie, the best kingfish I have eaten in my life. We find out it was caught that morning. Entrees are sweet potato and coconut soup and for dessert there’s a triple chocolate torte with salted caramel burnt fig, vincotto spheres and espresso creamacotta. The creamacotta comes in a hollowed-out eggshell!

Day two

We ride our bikes to Old Settlement beach, which we are told in summer is full of turtles. We are not here in summer though, we are here in the first days of winter, so the beach is empty but still hypnotisingly blue.

We trek to Ned’s beach where fish swim so close to the shore to be fed you wonder how they do not beach themselves. There is an honesty system for snorkels, wetsuits and paddleboards, meaning you put $10 in a box and help yourself. There are about 50 fish close to shore. I’m surprised to discover that I’m scared of big groups of medium-sized fish. I squeal my way through the throng, scared that they, I don’t know, are going to nibble me? Or I will squash and kill them?

I manage to paddle out a few metres, myself and the fish unharmed. The waters are calm and if you make it past the rocks – which are not dangerous – you will find yourself hovering over red and green coral with fish to match.

Before the hike we picked up ham and salad rolls from the Anchorage restaurant. We sit on the beach taking in the views, thinking how nice life is. It is the point of the long weekend where empty promises to yourself start being made; I’ll stop eating dessert and drinking red wine when I get back to the mainland; I’ll exercise five times a week; I’ll write 1,000 words a week that are not work-related.

Dinner that night is at Capella Lodge, the island’s luxury resort. Its swankiest room has a plunge pool, an outdoor bath, views across the lagoon and to the mountains from the bed and the option for on-deck dining and costs $1,300 a night for each person.

The costs of all the rooms at Capella include breakfast, lunch, dinner and drinks and the menu changes daily according to the ingredients the chef has at hand.

Before dinner we sit in on a presentation by the naturalist Ian Hutton, which leads to MQ and I rechristening Lord Howe as Wuss Island. We learn that there are no natural predators here. This means many birds do not fly as they can get all their food from the ground. Even some plants on the island that have thorns on the mainland do not have thorns on Wuss Island because there is nothing here to attack them.

The island is home to providence petrels, which will come straight to your feet and basically pose for a selfie because they have no cause to be afraid. This also explains the many fish at Ned’s accustomed to humans. There are no snakes on the island and, while there are more than 100 spiders, none are lethal. From this moment on MQ and I point to the walking birds and the impotent spiders we spot on our hikes and yell “WUSS ISLAND!” as we pass.

It’s not a proper paradise, though. The island does have one blight, in the form of 70,000 rats. On a 10km-long island. There could be as many as 120,0000. The island has rid itself of goats and cats and other introduced species to watch plants flower and native animals thrive but the proposal to exterminate rats has been contentious. I am baffled that people could be opposed to getting rid of SEVENTY THOUSAND RATS.

Hutton shakes his head warily. “It’s a social argument, not a scientific one,” he says. The locals opposed have a distrust of authority, especially when it is people (ie government officials) coming from the mainland to tell them what should be done.

After the Wuss Island revelations we dine on medium rare steak (perfect) and kingfish with pigfish as the entree. It is raw and the best entree I eat on the island.

Day three

There are dark clouds on the horizon, both in reality and metaphorically – but mostly in reality. We ride our bikes down to Environmental Tours, where a glass-bottomed boat cruises out on the lagoon to tour different reefs.

I drift over coral in electric blue, green, pink and red. Two Galápagos sharks cruise beneath me and fish of every colour and size come within swiping distance. One has what looks like horns on its head which make its expression seem a bit sad.

The winds are rising and the dark clouds are nearing but we’re told the boat will make it out and back before it gets too bad. This should have been the first clue to my extended stay but I am blissfully oblivious.

Day four

It’s been a lovely long weekend, MQ and I agree. But we are ready to go home. Our own bed, and work, and phone reception awaits.

I spend the morning at the museum, which is only about three rooms but, as it was built off the back of donations and the passion of the Clean Up Australia founder, Ian Kiernan, it is worth spending at least an hour there.

Now it is definitely time to go home. Except it isn’t. We receive a phone call telling us our plane, the one flight out a day, has been cancelled because of the wind. It happens occasionally on the island, which is why visitors are advised to buy travel insurance – despite it being a domestic trip from Australia. I cannot emphasise enough that you should get travel insurance.

MQ and I shrug it off. It’s windy but the rain has stopped so we decide to brave Intermediate Hill, where a new lookout has been built with 360-degree views of the island. We walk the few kilometres to the hill and begin our ascent. The start of the track forks into two paths but I do not notice and steam ahead. We walk along some fairly steep tracks, looking down over cliffs to the clear ocean below. We were told it would take about an hour to get to the lookout and back and, after 45 minutes of trekking I begin to get slightly concerned. Then I hear the squarking. It’s like a magpie, but slightly more hysterical. Or angrier. MQ and I laugh it off and continue on.

The squarking becomes louder, almost as though it is coming straight for us. We turn around and see a brown long-beaked squarking bird coming straight for us. I scream and hit the ground while MQ searches for something to ward it off. The bird turns around and comes straight for us again. “WE’RE MEANT TO BE ON WUSS ISLAND,” I yell, stumbling and covering my head and waving my arms at the same time to ward it off. The damn thing turns on us again. “PROTECT ME!!!,” I scream, diving to the ground and pulling MQ over me for cover, in what is surely in the top three of my most dignified moments. By this time I am off the track and perilously close to slipping over a cliff, which sounds dramatic but there is lots of scrub below to break my fall and bones before I would end up in the water. MQ gallantly pushes me ahead on the track while I keep screaming and we escape from the violent brown bird.

At the end of the walk I see a sign I missed. The track is closed because of “danger”.

Once we’re off the mountain we’re both too exhausted to walk back and for the first, and perhaps last, time in my life I hitchhike. A man picks us up in his ute. He’s on his way to milk the cows and tells us he is sixth generation on the island.

I ask him about the rats. “It’s a load of bull,” he says. “They say they’re killing the wildlife but there is more birds and wildlife on this island than there ever was when I was a kid. They want to poison them but what else is the poison going to do?”

Day five

This day is notable for being the first time I connect to internet properly on my phone and am able to receive iMessages. It’s been 96 hours! I brace myself for the flood, estimating 56 will come through. Seven arrive. Four are from my father.

I ring my editor again to tell her I am still stranded. I am missing the internet and conversations with people who aren’t MQ so much that I keep her on the phone as long as possible. Like most people, she shows little sympathy for my plight, laughing about how horrible it must be for me to be trapped on the island. Despite her understanding and extremely reasonable nature I still have low-level anxiety about the whole thing. I hate not having control over where and when I’m going.

Day six

Another day, another 9.20am phone call to say we will not be flying today. MQ and I ride our bikes furiously to Old Settlement beach to trek to Mount Eliza. Along the way we invent creative ways to kill each other while trapped and make a pact that if one of us gets a flight out they are allowed to go without the other with no reproach and the other one will make friends with a volleyball.

The path up the mountain gets steep, and narrow, with fewer steps and sharp ascents up gravel. I scramble through a bush and reach to a rock then turn around. I am awed. We look out over another mountain, we look out over ocean, we look down to what I would like to say is a secret beach but I’m sure all the locals know about it – reachable only by climbing up and down a mountain then bush bashing for a bit.

The summit is only a few metres ahead but this view is so good I sit down and appreciate it. MQ sits with me and I think about asking for my sandwich. Then I scream and almost fall off the mountain. A rat! A rat has come sniffing to check me out. It scurries away as quickly as I scream and descend.

It’s after that notice something missing in the rainforest-like landscape: undergrowth. In a rainforest the seeds fall off the trees and new plants grow and, as long as humans aren’t trampling all over it, there is a green, leafy undergrowth around the taller trees. Here the rats are eating all the seeds, which means the forest is a series of tall ferns on barren ground. It’s a sad sight once you realise what you’re looking at.

Dinner that night is at Pandanus, the best value for money I find on the island. I have also heard good things about the bowls club but it was booked out by the time we called at 6pm to inquire about dinner.

At Pandanus, beer is $6 and that night the kitchen is serving up Asian fusion cuisine. King prawns, grilled yakitori chicken and more kingfish, with chocolate mudcake for dessert. The servings are generous and everything is loaded with flavour without seeming as though the chef is trying to show off.

The island’s restaurants all serve fish that is caught off the island, mostly on that day. My advice: order the kingfish wherever you go, wherever you are. It is so good it will be ruined for you once back on the mainland (which dear reader, I did eventually get back to).

Day seven

The skies have cleared, the wind is gone, and it’s actually a gorgeous day to spend on the island. But we have a flight back to Sydney, maybe partly due to the once-every-four-years prayer I said out loud the night before.

And now my hard-won tips for holidaying on Lord Howe:

I feel practically a local, and thus able to pass along what I learned:

• Breakfast at the Anchorage restaurant is delicious but alternatively you can buy bread made fresh on the premises and eat each morning in your room. The co-op just across the road sells homemade peanut butter in small portions so you don’t have to buy an entire jar for three days of toast. The co-op also sells small cups of oil for 85 cents if you choose to cook at your accommodation.
  
  
• The general store in the “main” street has most of the things you need but be careful not to spend $70 on two cheeses, a bottle of red and a six-pack of beer as I did on a particularly taxing day when I didn’t take note of the prices. Expect to pay a little more for a few things; you are on an island, after all. Joy’s Shop a couple of streets over has more variety than the general store and will have almost anything you need. The pricing isn’t oppressive, we paid $14 for enough steak for the both of us for one night when we cooked at the bungalow.
  
  
• I didn’t go to the bottle shop, but there is one.
  
  
• You can withdraw money on the island at various places and most places take cards, but I still advise taking some cash – at least $120.

• Make sure you give your mum and dad (or other loved ones) the address of where you are staying and phone number because, while you will get Wi-Fi at different spots on the island, you will get zero phone reception.

• The island is child-friendly, with everything from bikes to hikes catering for the kids. The beaches are hemmed in by lagoons so you don’t have to worry about rips, or sharks – unless you are like me and think it is wise to always be a bit worried about sharks. The island is actually all-ages friendly, I was one of the youngest visitors to the island (at 27 and one week old) and saw people of decades on the hikes and dining out.
  
  
• Getting trapped on the island is not an everyday event and if, unlike me, you check the general weather patterns around the time of your planned visit you should be able to avoid it. It is a pretty stellar reason not to be able to show at work though.