My room at the Naviti is amazing. The glass doors open around two entire sides, and I have a view out onto the mountains across the hotel gardens. I can sit out on my own patio and chat to the neighbours, or I can hand feed the strange little birds that come hopping across the lawn from every direction at the slightest smell of food. They stand at my feet, look up at me and make the feathers on their neck stand up like a mane. Then they warble until I feed them. It's really cool - except that if they were several feet taller I'd run like crap because they'd look almost entirely like the raptors from Jurassic Park.

On the other side of the corridor, the rooms look out onto a long white sandy beach lined with palm trees and lines of vines laid down to the sea. There is even a little grounded boat to one end of the beach, to give the resort that "deserted island" look. The hotel has a big pool in the gardens, although the closeness of the sea makes it a bit redundant. For youngsters, there is a huge adventure playground out in the grounds, and the bars have family entertainment every night which ensures that there is never any chance of getting bored here. In fact, there is very little reason to leave the resort except to go to the shops - and there are shops on site so you could probably get away with not even doing that.

The people here are incredibly friendly, too, almost to the point of overkill. Every single member of staff - Receptionists, Barmen, Clerks and Gardeners, Guards and Cleaners - constantly stop whatever they are doing and greet me with a friendly "Bula" and an extended hand wherever I go. The barman, who sees himself as a self elected tour guide for the resort, explained all the facilities to me, told me when happy hour is in the bar, and when the nightly show starts. He even gave me a big dopey looking yellow flower to stick behind my left ear. Apparently, this is a local custom - a flower behind your left ear means "I'm single - come and get me", and a flower behind the right ear means "I'm married. Hands off." Presumably, a flower in both ears indicates somebody who is either seriously confused or looking for a bit on the side! I like this tradition - I can imagine it going down well in Nightclubs back home!

Another thing I appreciate about the Naviti is the fact that everything I do gets charged back to my room - even at the bar. In fact, it is impossible to buy anything with cash in the resort except in the shop, so there's no need to carry any. The Naviti is part of the Warwick Hotel chain and also has a sister hotel called The Warwick, and I can even go there on the free shuttle bus and use the facilities and charge it all back to my room here. Life should always be this easy!

The Naviti Resort has its own tour office, and I booked a trip today to the capital city of Suva on the other side of the island, leaving at 10 this morning. I figured that I may as well see the big city early in my stay, and then I can do what I came here to do - relax. They serve breakfast here until 11.00 and I can't tell you how good it is not to have to get up at the crack of dawn to eat or get on a tour bus. In Australia, they tend to finish serving breakfast at all the hotels about 8.30 to 9.00, and who the hell is up at that time on holiday?

Suva was not at all what I had expected. It was a large concrete jungle of small shops, although everything was crowded together and organised around large market squares on which crowds of salesmen were sitting cross-legged with their goods arranged hap-hazardly around them in the road. Suva is a bit of a dichotomy - on the one hand there is clearly a flourishing trade in souvenirs and tourism, and yet the buildings all look as though they haven't been repaired for a hundred years and are in danger of falling down. Local trading seems to take place mainly from market stalls in the centre of town under a large tent structure, where you can buy anything from fruit and veg to cheap watches. Stray and hungry looking dogs were everywhere, even in the markets sniffing at the food, but nobody seemed to be bothered by this. Everywhere you look people are sitting around on the streets, and it's never quite obvious whether they are beggars or if that's just what you do here. Clearly, the traders will do anything to part you from your money - the wages are so low that they all depend on tourists for their money and this makes it virtually impossible to walk any distance without somebody stopping you and giving you a hard luck story. Taxi drivers will happily take you wherever you want to go, and spend the entire journey trying to convince you that you should call them for all of your travel arrangements during your stay so that they can give you a much better deal than the tour offices. In the streets, every shop has a pack of workers outside to drag tourists inside. They'll follow you around the shop telling you why you should buy everything, and then attempt to sweet-talk you into giving them a tip which is normally more than you paid for whatever you bought. In one shop, I bought a beautiful wooden carving to take home as a souvenir and the shopkeeper followed me out of the shop and all the way down the road trying to talk me into going back for more.

I joined up with a bunch of other guys from the bus - Vivienne and Nora from Australia, John and Dave from New Zealand, and an older couple from Canada - and we went exploring in Suva. Nora and Vivienne went shopping for clothes in the flea market and the rest of us did a bit of browsing, bought a few things and ended up running for the nearest café with shop owners in pursuit touting for more business. The average weekly wage in Fiji is the equivalent of about £25, so it's hardly surprising that there seems to be a really startling level of confidence trickery and overcharging going on in the shops and at the street stalls. It was even an exercise in advanced negotiation to get hold of a film for my camera - the whole group chipped in and bargained for some time to try to get a fair price, and we came away thinking we'd done a pretty good job between us. Five minutes later, we found the same film in the Kodak shop down the road for about a third of the price we'd paid.

The specialist handicraft shops, licensed by the government, are another matter entirely. It's like I mentioned back in Thailand, you can find things in handicraft shops that are being sold in the markets at hugely inflated prices - you just have to look for places that look as though they're run by a big company rather than a local merchant.

We managed to use up our 3 hours in the city easily enough - mainly searching for souvenir shops that looked slightly respectable. In one, I was busy looking through the displays of reproduction cannibal equipment and reading the little plaques explaining how they had been used in earlier times to cut peoples heads off and scoop out their brains, when Vivienne came running down the stairs and summoned us all up to the second floor. Upstairs the walls were lined with elaborate wooden carvings, and display cases were filled with charms and pendants and shell necklaces - but Vivienne was pointing open mouthed at the centrepiece of the room, which was a life-size wooden fertility statue of a man, complete with thirty inch erect phallus. This, as you can imagine, was something of a talking point over dinner tonight for the girls. The rest of us just sat there and felt inadequate.

For lunch, the tour bus dropped us at McDonalds - there really weren't many other choices - and they were filming an advertisement for Fijian Television. The restaurant was full of equipment, and one half of the ordering area was literally covered in cables, Teleprompters and an army of producers and directors. We ordered our food and sat around watching what was going on. After an eternity of checking and rechecking equipment, reading over scripts and having women dart back and forth with buckets of makeup, the director finally shouted "Action." Behind the counter, a pretty Fijian girl took one step towards the camera and smiled. "Right, Cut" shouted the director, "That's a wrap. Print it." And thus another commercial for burgers was in the can.

There were plenty of chances to take photographs on the way to and from Suva, and the journey passed quickly enough. The scenery outside the cities is fantastic, and the old Polynesian style of living obviously still persists here as we passed many small villages consisting of nothing but a few small huts near a river with the village elder's hut dominating the view. The couple from Canada were less interested in looking at the scenery but full of suggestions for my fast approaching journey through North America, while Nora had travelled a lot and was happy to impart some knowledge of Hawaii for next week. On the way back to the Naviti we stopped off to collect a young couple, Nathalie and Chris, who had been on a rafting trip along the river while the rest of us went into Suva - for a moment I found myself feeling quite envious of the exciting day they were keen to relate to us, but then I remembered all the aches and pains I had after white-water rafting in Cairns.

Tonight, I had a dinner of roast beef and sweetcorn in the hotel restaurant and sat out on the balcony where I could watch the sunset. This is such a popular activity here that the daily sunrise and sunset times are routinely posted on the events board at reception. It was, unsurprisingly, a spectacular sight. Down on the beach, children were playing in the water. A dog was splashing about in the surf and the sunset cruise was just heading out into the Pacific waters. It was like being in a postcard.

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.