Rarotonga by Martin O'Brien

The man in the Foodland supermarket is dressed for the office. He wears a light cotton jacket and freshly pressed slacks, an open-necked white shirt and a pair of well-shined shoes. In one hand he carries a briefcase and in the other a wire basket for his purchases. An unremarkable sight, you might think. Except for the gorgeous crown of flowers that he wears on his head, an extravagantly woven headband of red tipani and snow-white tiare maori that fill the aisle with the rich and heady scent of frangipani and gardenia.

In a Paris supermarket the same man would be rudely stared at; in London he would probably be politely ignored; while in New York he would almost certainly be taken into care. But this particular supermarket is in Avarua, on the Pacific island of Rarotonga, where the locals continue to do what their ancestors have done for centuries with little concern for what Papa'as, or outsiders, might think. On other Pacific islands, like Tahiti and Hawaii, the floral lei may be little more than a tourist gimmick, but on Rarotonga the wearing of this traditional native headdress, or ei katu as it is known, is as natural to an islander as a bowler hat or a well-knotted silk tie to a westerner. And much more striking.

Rarotonga is the largest and capital island of the Cook Islands, an isolated archipelago in the South Pacific named after the British explorer Captain James Cook who claimed them for the British Crown on his voyages of discovery in the 1770s. So isolated, in fact, that the good captain recorded in his log that they were "the most detached parts of the earth". Given the statistics it's a fairly accurate description. Scattered over a million square miles of ocean, with a total land area less than a tenth the size of Hong Kong, there are only 15 islands in the group with resident populations; these range from a respectable 9,000 on Rarotonga to a lonely six on Suwarrow.

Not that Captain Cook ever set eyes on Rarotonga himself. The first Europeans to spy its jagged, jungle-clad peaks and encircling reef were the mutineers of HMS Bounty. In 1789, after casting their dreaded Captain Bligh adrift in an open boat, it is said they sailed past this island in search of a suitable refuge where a vengeful British Navy would never find them. Eventually they settled on an island called Pitcairn nearly 2,000 miles to the east, but had they decided to drop anchor at Rarotonga and pay a visit, it is unlikely they would ever have left.

Rarotonga makes a fitting capital island. Though smaller than Tahiti in neighbouring French Polynesia, it is, in Cook Island terms, never less than grand, imposing, and unremittingly beautiful. Its beaches are as white as washing powder and softer than caster sugar, its mountainous interior as dramatic and primeval as any Conan Doyle Lost World, and its people as warm and friendly and attractive as any on earth. With their vibrantly coloured pareus clasped with mother-of-pearl shells, their long black hair - sleek, shiny and scented with coconut oil - the women simply take your breath away. They are as coolly unaware of their beauty as their menfolk, tall and proud, arms and thighs tattooed with intricate bracelets of native design, seem unaware of their good fortune.

Thanks to its volcanic origins, Rarotonga is a sumptuously fertile island with a broad band of coastal land that supports a dizzying variety of fruit and vegetables - plantations of umbrella-like papaya, tidily-banked paddies of taro, groves of coconut, forests of mango, avocado and breadfruit and plump squares of dark green arrowroot. And, where the land isn't cultivated or controlled, it is rapidly overcome by flowers of every conceivable shape and colour - hibiscus, frangipani, the softly mauve and aptly-named Angels' Trumpets, gardenia, lily and great waxy concoctions of red and gold-tipped spikes that look for all the world like extravagant coathangers or TV aerials. Push a matchstick into Rarotonga's rich volcanic soil, they say, and a day later you'll have a tree. Some people will even tell you not to bother with a matchstick. Stand still long enough and you'll likely become part of the landscape yourself, quickly covered with the rampant ivy creeper that drapes itself like an emerald dustsheet over every untended acre.

With their abiding sense of separation from the rest of the Pacific, the Cook Islands have never been, and likely never will be, a mainstream Pacific destination. While tourists may descend in their leisure-wear millions onto Fiji and neighbouring Tahiti, Moorea and Bora-Bora, few go that extra mile and make it to the Cooks. There may now be an airstrip on Rarotonga long enough to accommodate lumbering jumbos en route for New Zealand, but the island's twin harbours of Avarua and Avatiu will always be too small and reefbound to make it a viable port of call for cruise lines.

Certainly, all the accessories of tourism are in place - a staggered ring of beach-front hotels, car rental agencies, T-shirt emporia, scuba and sky-diving operations, and extravagant Island Nights when bank tellers and local businessmen dress up in grass skirts, beat drums and husk coconuts with their teeth to entertain the Papa'as. But there is never any real sense that any of this is provided for strictly commercial gain. It's as if the islanders feel obliged to lay it on in an attempt to make their visitors feel welcome, at home: a natural hospitality rather than adopted avarice. In theatrical terms, Rarotonga remains the willing and enthusiastic amateur in a line-up of hard-bitten, high-kicking professionals.

There are those on Rarotonga who doubtless bemoan this undeserved backwater status, but if stiff competition for the tourist dollar from other better-established Pacific destinations has kept Rarotonga out of the mainstream, it has also helped preserve this remarkable island's intoxicating charm and character. And on "Raro", as it is more commonly called, intoxication is a state of mind you quickly become familiar with.

Take Rarotonga's coast road, for example. At a steady thirty miles an hour, it takes approximately forty minutes to circumnavigate the island by car. Following the line of the coast the road is narrow, uniformly fringed with spiky gold crotons, banked with thick hedges of frangipani and hibiscus, and draped with feathery casuarina known to islanders as ironwood or Toa. It is also, to all intents and purposes, straight. Until, that is, you fetch up at the point where you started out forty minutes earlier. Like everything else on this capital island, it's an intoxicating effect.

On Rarotonga intoxication comes in many different forms. At the bar of Trader Jacks' on the waterfront of Avarua it comes, as you might suspect, in chilled glasses of locally-brewed Cooks Lager served by an ever-vigilant Ngatere who manages this immensely popular bar and restaurant with a quite remarkable friendliness and efficiency. Or if "Honest" Jack, the owner, is about and in carefree mood, the same effect is induced by ice-filled rounds of "rum and juice" that taste of the tropics and steam in the island heat.

It is an intoxication also brought on by the distant, drowsy constant of waves crashing against the reef, by the intemperate, irresistible beating of island drums and by the impossibly pungent scents of lily, sweet jasmine and gardenia that explode after the slightest shower of rain, or creep up on you as the sun sets and shadows lengthen.

On the slopes of Mount Maungatea, Ikurangi and Te Manga, highest of the island's extravagantly formed volcanic peaks, a similar sense of intoxication is set off by views that reach down over lushly green slopes to semicircles of white coral sand and aquamarine shallows, banded by impossible indigo blues that conceal some of the Pacific's greatest depths. And on the deck of the Moana Maria, trolling those same depths for marlin or following the frigate birds for tuna, you'll feel something closely akin to intoxication when your lure is snatched, the reel sings and the rod bows to breaking point. Even the missionaries who converted the Cooks to Christianity in the early nineteenth century must have found Rarotonga's insinuating spell hard to resist.

More than the first European explorers who preceded them, and the original Polynesian settlers who arrived here in their war canoes a thousand years earlier, the missionaries, more particularly the London Mission Society, were a major influence on Rarotonga and its far-flung satellite islands.

After their first success on Aitutaki, another Cook Island widely regarded as one of the most beautiful atolls in the whole Pacific, the missionaries came ashore on Rarotonga in 1823. In short order they outlawed cannibalism, replaced the islanders' ancient traditions and religious practices with a strict Christianity, and inadvertently introduced such a rich mix of disease and infection, against which the islanders had no natural immunity, that the locals promptly assumed it was a message from their gods to embrace the new philosophy on pain of death. And embrace it they did. No missionary force anywhere in the world could have had an easier time of it, or found a more congenial bunch of willing converts.

The legacy of that influence is still plain to see. Churches abound on Rarotonga, both missionary churches like Matavera and Titikaveka - built in the nineteenth century with glaringly white coral stone walls - and the more modern bungalow-style venues of the Seventh Day Adventists. Every Sunday, stately matrons with fans, fancy hats and ancient umbrellas make their way to church, accompanied by squads of Sunday-best children, proudly uniformed troops of Brownies and Girl Guides and various Boys Brigade brass bands. As intoxicating as a drink or two at Trader Jacks is the sound of their lilting and hearty hymn-singing drifting through open church windows, and the deeply sonorous, admonishing tones of their often hour-long sermons.

But the missionaries' influence went much further than simply imposing a strict observance of the Sabbath. That early Christian discipline has created a people who are intensely proud of their island and at pains to cherish it. You will see not a single hedge in need of a trim, or lawn in need of a mow, or shutter in need of paint. And if anyone does fall behind and let standards slip they are promptly buttonholed by the "garden police", a community service known as Tutaka that ensures every property on the island - house and grounds alike - is properly cared for and maintained.

Like the man in the supermarket, it's a small but telling ingredient in the remarkable Rarotonga experience.