Arriving in Fiji with Eloise in 2002, I was really hoping that nothing would have changed since my last visit. My main memory of getting off the plane at Nadi International Airport had been of stepping out the other side of the customs hall and immediately thinking that I had somehow gone back in time to the seventies - wherever I had looked, I had seen women sporting the most ridiculous, perfectly spherical microphone haircuts. Obviously, this had been something which I had felt the need to tell Eloise as soon as I'd known we were going to be visiting Fiji, and I wasn't totally convinced that she had believed me - after all, if I had told me that there was an island in the South Pacific where everybody walked around with huge seventies hairstyles looking like they were all members of some sort of Jackson Five tribute band, I'm not altogether sure I would have believed me either. So it was with a huge sigh of relief that I disembarked from the plane to be greeted by a customs officer who was sporting a haircut which I felt sure would have prevented her from going through doorways without bending down. Eloise did a really good job of not saying a single word all the way through passport control, throughout the agonising wait for our bags to come through those flippy-floppy leather straps at the end of the conveyor belt which nobody understands the purpose of, and past the nothing to declare counter (where the person on duty was just barely awake). Instead, she just allowed the corners of her mouth to quiver in a way which told me that she really wanted to say something but didn't want to run the risk of suddenly bursting into uncontrollable laughter, pointing at the nearest customs officer's head and shrieking "What the hell is that?" at them in a wholly unacceptable manner . Then, when we were alone, she turned to me with a huge smile splitting her face ear to ear, and said simply: "Um, yeah. I see what you mean."

The office of Rosie Tours was just where I had left it on my last visit, and still seemed to be the number one destination for anyone arriving in the country and looking for somewhere to stay. A woman was standing outside, smiling broadly at everyone coming off the plane and asking if they needed any help, and we allowed ourselves to be bundled into the same cramped room in which I had waited for the bus to the Naviti back in '99. This time, though, we didn't have the faintest idea where we were going to stay, so we were handed a heap of brochures and invited to pick something which fitted our budget. Our budget by this time, of course, was just about enough to get us a small cardboard box to sleep in, so we turned immediately to the pages of hostel accommodation towards the back of the last brochure on the pile and watched the smile falter as it dawned on our host that she might not be about to make quite as much commission as she had hoped. After a fairly long session of phoning around various places in the brochure, however, it started to become obvious that turning up in Fiji without somewhere to stay hadn't been such a good idea - the cheapest places were booked solid, and in the end we had to settle for something slightly more expensive than we would have liked. But at least The Crow's Nest, as our hotel was called, was on Fiji's coral coast and right next to the beach, which is something we certainly wouldn't have got if we had paid bottom dollar for a dorm room in a hostel in Suva.

Our first impressions of the Crow's Nest, when we pulled up outside late at night, were misleading to say the least. Getting out of the taxi which Rosie Tours had kindly laid on for us, we briefly had one of those moments where we mentally looked back over some of the other places we'd stayed and just let out a little sigh of resignation that this was all we could afford. From the front, and bearing in mind that it was very dark when we arrived, the place didn't exactly look like much to write home about. The reception was a square functional building with a single desk and a couple of chairs, standing away from anything else on site as though it was a guardroom. At night, it had a single spotlight which illuminated a small area around it - including the frog which always seemed to be sitting in the same place on the porch - and this made the place look even more like something out of a war film, especially as the light was just strong enough to pick out the vague shapes of what seemed like square tin huts beyond. Across the road was a ragged collection of hedges, and beyond these was a line of jagged rocks no more than a metre wide which appeared to function as a beach. The sea began just past the rocks and stretched on to the horizon - so at least, I told myself, we had a sea view. The road itself narrowed right down to a single lane track as it reached the front of the reception building, quickly vanishing through a lop-sided gate on which a notice in broken English told anyone thinking of opening it to go away. On the whole, it didn't look good. But, as I should have known well by now, you should never judge anything on first impressions alone.

Things started to look up almost straight away as the guy at reception, who was probably the night porter, showed us around the facilities. Upon closer inspection, and with the aid of a torch, the strip of grass beside the road which had previously looked dull and lifeless turned out to be the edge of a large well mown garden which was bordered by an attractive row of elevated bungalows with tin roofs, their balconies raised on stilts and jutting out over the lawn. Behind reception, a flight of stone steps led up to a two level recreational area, the upper part of which contained a large swimming pool bordered by round seating areas with thatched roofs in the style of traditional Fijian Burres. Soft lights reflected in the water as we strolled past, and the stern looking tin huts which I had noticed earlier turned out to be a row of tin-roofed bungalows with neat little picket fences. At the back of the pool, there was an outside bar, also with a thatched roof, and behind this was what looked like a cosy restaurant full of nooks and crannies and little booths that might allow Eloise and I to hold a conversation over dinner without feeling as though we were part of a large group. As it turned out, we were about the only people in the resort at the time and so we pretty much had the place to ourselves for a few days anyway, but we didn't know that at the time. As we came to the end of our brief tour and were shown to our room, our overall impression of the Crow's Nest was that things were kept simple and relaxing - this was somewhere you came to get away from it all rather than to party all night long. That's just how we wanted it. At dawn the next day, our picture of paradise in Fiji was completed when we opened the balcony doors and noticed that the strip of rocky beach which I had complained about the previous night was now some way in the distance. The tide, naturally, had now gone out and given us the beach we had been hoping for.

Our room, quite unexpectedly, was one of the nicest and most strikingly different we'd stayed in throughout the trip. From the moment we walked through the door, it was suddenly obvious why the resort was called the Crow's Nest - the whole place had a boating theme, and the rooms were actually decorated in tribute to ships which have played a part in shaping Fiji's history. Even though it was technically a bungalow, the interior of our room had been divided into two levels and made to feel like the cabin of an old sailing ship - the bedroom and en-suite bathroom were raised up from the living area and kitchen below, and a ladder on the wall allowed us to climb from one to the other. The feeling of being inside a cabin was reinforced by the fact that the walls and floor were all made out of planks of wood held together with beams and painted yellow in the style of a nineteenth century ship, and behind the bed there was a ship's steering wheel mounted on the wall below an authentic looking nameplate from the HMS Conway. The whole thing was quite surreal, actually, and it was quite odd to lay in bed at night in the cabin of a ship without actually being at sea. It occurred to me after a while that our balcony was probably supposed to represent the bridge - if you opened the doors from the living room and stepped outside, you could hold onto the railings and look straight out to sea. I have no idea who is behind the design of the rooms at the Crow's Nest - but whoever they are, I really have to salute their ingenuity. This place was quite unlike anywhere I've ever been and, I think I can safely say, anywhere I'm likely to go again.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.