We made a bit of a fool of ourselves on our first full day in Fiji, wanting to actually save some money by cooking for ourselves and not frittering what little we had left away at the restaurant. Having bought some cans of food while shopping in Sigatoka earlier in the day, we were slightly annoyed upon returning to the room to find that neither of us had thought to buy any matches with which to light the gas hob. While Eloise pottered around preparing everything else, I rushed off to find some matches and pretty much ended up making a complete circuit of the resort. They didn't have any at reception, but suggested that I should try the restaurant, and the restaurant sent me to the bar telling me that they thought I might be able to buy a packet there - which, of course, I couldn't. In the end, I gave up all hope of having anything hot to eat for lunch and arrived back at the room just as the porter was walking past on his way back to reception. Casually, I asked him if he happened to have a box of matches we could borrow so that we could light the hob, at which he simply walked into our room, sauntered over to the oven, lifted a small flap to one side of the hob and pressed a button. Immediately there was a hiss of gas, a small spark and the hob burst into life - our hob had had an electric gas lighter built into it all along.

Our experience with the restaurant at the resort wasn't much better. Deciding that we couldn't leave the Crow's Nest without trying the on-site cuisine at least once, we wandered over to the pool on our second night and had a couple of drinks at the bar before sitting ourselves down inside and looking the menu over carefully as though we expected to find "sautéed tourist" on there somewhere. Instead, everything looked reassuringly delicious, so we placed our order and set about chatting and reading the ridiculous amounts of maritime material that was plastered all over the walls. Unfortunately, Eloise had made the mistake of ordering the vegetarian Hawaiian Pizza, on the not unreasonable grounds that we were getting fairly close to Hawaii now and they would probably know how to make one. This turned out to not be such a good assumption. When the pizza turned up, it didn't have any pineapple on it - instead, it was basically just a pizza base with not very much else on top, especially as the vegetarian option had even stripped it of the only other main ingredient, ham. The obvious question of "where's my pineapple?" was answered apologetically by our waitress in that laid back way that only Fijians can pull off - she smiled politely, gave a "what can you do?" shrug and informed us that the kitchen was out of pineapple. But we were British, so we didn't argue. When the main course was over and it was time for desert, Eloise ordered a banana split - something which looked particularly mouth-watering on the menu. What actually turned up was a banana in a dish, cut in half, with a dollop of vanilla ice cream in the middle and strawberry sauce drizzled across it. Where, we enquired, pointing quite excitedly at the picture in front of us, was the chocolate ice cream? Or the strawberry ice cream? Or the chocolate sauce? Where, in fact, was our bloody banana split? Our waitress took a step back, in case we should spontaneously combust, and explained as patiently as possible that the kitchen was all out of any type of ice cream other than vanilla. Oh, and they didn't have any chocolate sauce either. Then she asked us if we wanted the bill, at which point we politely paid for all of our half-made meals and went back to the room wondering what had just happened.

I mentioned earlier that we took a trip into the local town of Sigatoka on our first morning to stock up on canned food and some other essentials for a couple of days. This, in itself, turned out to be something of an experience and showed us that, sometimes, things can be so fundamentally different overseas that even doing the smallest things which we take for granted back home can end up causing major confusion. We arrived in Sigatoka by taxi at around mid-morning and spent some time looking around the local market, soaking up the atmosphere and culture of the lively town square.

All of this was all very familiar to me as Sigatoka had also been the local town when I had stayed in Fiji back in '99, and I had wandered around the market on that occasion with some new friends who I had met at the hotel. Back then, I had simply taken in some of the local handicraft shops, being pursued around by salesmen who clearly thought I had more money than sense - food shopping had been the last thing on my mind, as everything was being laid on for me back at the resort. This time, however, Eloise and I were doing the Fijian equivalent of the supermarket shopping run. We spent some time pottering around the open air market looking at the colourful collections of fruits and vegetables - these were laid out on blankets around the street and attended by vendors who sat cross-legged in the gutter and were clearly hoping that their goods would get sold before the local insect population finished devouring them. It was a sight which would almost certainly have caused people from health and safety to explode had it happened back home, but this was clearly part of the way of life in Fiji and locals were bustling around with baskets, loading up with fruit and veg and then bargaining with the vendor as though everything wasn't cheap enough already. We were slightly less willing to take our lives into our hands for the sake of an orange, so we headed for the large modern looking supermarket which dominated the entire back wall of the square - this, surely, would be where we would find everything we needed to survive for the next couple of days. Inside, the supermarket didn't feel much different from the ones back home. There were certainly no shortage of tinned goods lining the shelves, some of which didn't even have labels - I remember thinking that it must be fun to sit down with the family at a Fijian meal and be served up a steaming hot plate of peas, vegetable soup and peaches because mum decided to take a gamble on some unmarked tins at the supermarket that morning. We had a ridiculously hard time finding bread, a product which usually has it's own aisle in shops back home. We walked up and down the supermarket for twenty minutes, looking on every shelf of every aisle. We looked in the darkest corners, we lifted up dusty trays and looked underneath them, we scratched our heads and stood around for a while as though expecting a loaf to suddenly fall out of the sky and hit us on the head. In the end, I half-heartedly suggested to Eloise that Fijians might not get their bread from supermarkets like the rest of the world, and that we might be expected to go looking for some sort of bread shop. This resulted in Eloise looking at me as though I was ever so slightly mad, so I didn't mention it again and we carried on searching high and low. Eventually, having decided that we were fighting a lost cause, we arrived at the checkout with our basket of tins and casually asked the nice woman with the microphone on her head where we could find bread. Without looking up from the till, she gestured over her shoulder at a small side street across the square, saying "you want the bread shop!"

The bread shop was different, to say the least. Having accepted that bread was not sold in supermarkets and that we had to go somewhere special to get it, we had been expecting to find something along the lines of a small bakery which would be selling home made bread as well as a selection of cakes. You would have thought, by now, that we would've realised that things overseas are rarely anything like they are back home. After walking up and down the street for a while looking in every shop window, we eventually located the bread shop. It wasn't so much a shop as one of those kiosks you find set into the walls of railway stations in the UK which sell over-priced confectionary and have just enough room behind the counter for one man to stand if he doesn't try to do anything radical like turn around. There was a queue of people waiting along the wall next to the kiosk, and when we got to the front we found that the interior consisted of one woman standing in front of a row of bread trays who was handing loaves out on a one loaf-one person basis as though they were a precious commodity. We supposed that we were lucky to have not taken any longer finding the place, as she seemed to be down to her last couple of trays.

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.