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“My cousins gave me this garland when I left LA,” said the large Polynesian man squeezed next to me on the flight to Samoa. It wasn’t a ‘lei’ of fragrant flowers, but a cling-film necklace of chewing gum and chocolates. Eleven hours later, when the plane landed on the steaming tarmac of Apia's Faleolo airport, he still wore his souvenir from the land of plenty (minus a few chocolates). Departing tourists boarding the onward flight to Auckland, meanwhile, were wearing simple garlands of pink and white frangipani.

Ever since Robert Louis Stevenson settled near Apia, bringing the country to the attention of many in the west, Samoa - and the South Pacific - has been a byword for paradise.

The Scottish author built himself a huge house panelled with imported Californian redwood, atop a rainforested hill above the capital.

It was, as he writes in his short story 'The Bottle Imp', a house "with balconies all about like the King's palace" where he would "live without care and make merry with...friends and relatives" for the last five years of his short life.

The house is now restored and well-maintained. The hot morning I visited, men were busy repairing the wide balconies. One asked me where I was from. When I said England, he queried “is that close to Scotland?”

Inside is full of heavy imported furniture, lion-skin rugs and unnecessary fireplaces. (Intended to dry clothes in the wet season.) “The workmen didn’t know how to build chimneys and the rooms just filled with smoke, so they didn’t use them,” said my guide, Fa’asolo, who confessed to only having read Stevenson’s book of prayers.

“He had to varnish his books to protect them from the climate and insects,” he said, showing me the library which now contains all the titles Stevenson wrote. Perhaps he should have varnished his Australian maid, who left two weeks after arriving because, she didn’t like the weather.

Next to the library is an exhibition of colonial photographs of Samoa: all bare-breasted village virgins and tattooed warrior-like men. Handsome natives in a garden of Eden with kindly Victorian missionaries and traders.

In reality, most South sea islands aren’t the perfect paradises we desperately want them to be. Indeed, they never were. Even Stevenson in the 1890s, was already looking elsewhere to live – to Nassau in the Bahamas - because Samoa was becoming too 'civilised' and spoiled.

Now there is a drive-thru McDonalds in Apia, the dishevelled little capital with its ancient wooden clapboard bars on the seafront, where Stevenson - who was named Tusitala, meaning 'teller of tales' by Samoans - would listen to drunken sailors playing accordions.

But despite Apia’s night-clubs, supermarkets and, bizarrely, a Chinese-owned cashmere factory where local workers are paid a pittance to make jumpers for export; Samoa today is possibly more like the innocent Eden idolised by Europe than it was in the 1890s.

For then, just as Stevenson had decided to settle there, the country went to war over which chief should be king. Interested colonial powers - Germans and British - sent out gun boats and Chief Mataafa, whom Stevenson famously supported, championing his cause in the letters pages of The Times, was captured from a small island called Manono, and taken off into exile on a German ship.

Manono sounded fascinating. My guide book (wrongly) said nearly all the houses (or fales, pronounced ‘fah-lays’) had traditional thatched roofs. A small tourism venture – beach-side thatched fales - run by a local couple, sounded charming.

I took a local bus – a wooden carriage on a Toyota truck chassis - from Apia market, and, after several false starts during which we simply circled around town and went back to the market to pick up more customers, we set off on our way to the wharf.

A bus ride is a lesson in Samoan manners. As the bus fills - which it always does - children and men keep moving to the back to free-up space at the front. Before long people are sitting three-high as well as crowded in the aisle. Having two rugby-player-sized lads sitting on you may sound like fun, but I can assure you, it’s not.

An hour or so, a rain-storm, and several villages later, the bus arrived at the wharf where boats go across the short distance to Manono. There is a sheltered waiting area with a small store. Boats go 'whenever' - there are no timetables. Not many people wear watches anyway. Luckily a small boat, decorated with flowers, was about to leave on its maiden voyage. The owner welcomed passengers aboard and we set off for the thirty minute, 40p –crossing, accompanied by big men in sarongs and women, carrying plates of food covered in tin foil.

There are no cars on the island, just a footpath encircling the rocky shore from village to village. With three churches, two primary schools and three village stores, the island is a microcosm of simple Samoan life, so different to the extravagant European lifestyle which Tusitala lived .

The next day, as I wandered along avenues of banana plants in the early morning sun, a family invited me into their open-sided house. Like most others, it was a cement foundation with a low surrounding wall and wooden posts supporting a corrugated tin roof. We sat on pandanus mats on the lino floor and talked about Britain and Samoa. “Are the trees green where you come from?” asked the father, a pot-bellied man tattooed from midriff to knees. “I’ve seen a picture, and the leaves are all red.”

Breakfast was prepared: milk heated in a kettle over an open fire and sweetened with lots of sugar, fried dough balls and hard plain biscuits sandwiching tinned spaghetti. Seeing a mewing kitten wander over the plates, didn’t whet my appetite.

Like leaves on trees, ‘tropical breakfasts’ come in all guises.

But the family were kind and generous. The father, Lafaele, was a tattooist – one of only a handful of tattoo artists in the country and a respected position in society. Our word tattoo comes from Polynesian, and it is the traditional ‘tatau’ from midrif to knees which Lafaele etches into men’s bodies; a rite of passage for many young Samoans. As Stevenson wrote in 'The Beach of Falesa', "a young man scarce reckoned himself grown till he had got his breech tattooed."

He showed me the tools of his craft. Combs of carved pigs tusks with incredibly sharp teeth; some fine, some broad, which tap the ink into the skin. “It’s the most painful thing a man will ever have to have done,” said Pita, a 23 year old who, having already endured the pain of his tatau, was visiting Lafaele to get a small tattoo.

I watched for two hours as Pita lay on a mat having a band tattooed around his upper arm. Lafaele’s two sons assisted, often to raps over the knuckles from their expert father. “Solo” (wipe) he would shout impatiently when one boy was not fast enough in cleaning the blood oozing from the wounds. The other son stretched the skin and Lafaele tapped away at the combs, forcing the soot and water mixture into Pita’s pinky flesh. “It feels like a hot sharp knife” grimaced Pita.

In the background a crackly radio played a kind of Pacific reggae, interspersed with what sounded like an American preacher. All I could make out, exaggerated at every utterance, was “sin….sin…sin…sins…sinner…corrupt nature…sin.”

The people may still look like handsome tattooed warriors, but Samoa, even Manono, obviously isn’t a garden of Eden, despite the idyllic appearance.

Men venture off into the milky blue sea to spear fish from outrigger canoes, a coconut leaf basket ready for the catch. Women weave mats from sun-dried pandanus leaves or hack at coconuts to extract the meat for copra. The evening sun burnishes the huge leaves of the breadfruit trees.

For many, life is still very much subsistence-based, with a few Vailima beers, imported soap, tinned food, sugar and clothes to be bought whenever necessary. Tusitala's kingly household expenses of £10 a day (equivalent to £540 now) were part of the reason he was so much admired and honoured by Samoans.

These days, in post-Eden Samoa, one way in which people earn money is through very basic, small-scale tourism.

Nearly all villages are on the coast, and many people have a simple thatched fale on the beach across the road from their house, in which to rest and enjoy the breeze. What with customary Samoan hospitality, it hasn't taken much effort to come up with a simple tourism experience. Now for £15 or so, you can spend the night on a mattress on the floor of a little open-sided fale, with a mosquito net and maybe a locker for valuables. Your hosts will cook you dinner and a ‘tropical breakfast’ and can arrange for you to join in with the women as they weave mats or with the men when they go fishing.

In the evening as the sea laps at the stilts of the simple fale, you can sit and think and treasure island life. Under the wide and starry sky.

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