I have a friend called Harry who once asked me where and how I wanted to die. "Easy," I said. "I would spend a week wandering around Upolu Island, Samoa: see the house RLS lived in, climb Mount Vaea to his tomb, read the epitaph, enjoy the view for an hour, then lie back and await the painless heart attack."

It was mainly as a result of this conversation that I seized the first opportunity to visit Samoa that presented itself; not because I felt close to death, well, no closer than usual, but because, for one thing, the Grim Reaper is notoriously unreliable when it comes to timing. And, perhaps even more importantly, I needed to undertake such an expedition while my knees were still working.

I took a fancy to Apia, the capital, immediately. It wanders carelessly along its bay, with a handful of streets running straight inland towards soft, wooded mountains. The traffic is light and the buildings are low, not many of them over two storeys, with the old ones made of timber, and sporting porches and verandas like battered old godowns.

Nearly every passer-by makes eye contact and smiles, pleased to see you, happy to chat. Samoa is the southern hemisphere's best-kept secret. It's the country where you don't have to lock the car, where there are no parking meters, men wear lava-lavas (aka sarongs) and there is nobody on the beaches.

At the top end of town I found the fish market, a huge open-sided shed with concrete slabs to display the merchandise: fish exotic, fish elegant, fish frightening - their scales striped in brilliant hues - turquoise and crimson, yellow and blue; their dead faces mournful with pouting lips and frozen grins; and eels with sharp teeth; and leviathans lurking deep within enormous shells, ready to eat every bit of me, given the chance.

A salt-laden breeze came in off the Pacific; the ambience was lazy, cool in every sense of the word. The fishwives sat behind their wares, waving away squadrons of kamikaze flies with bits of beleaved branches: and in dark corners lay tired fishermen, stranded, marooned high and dry, their night's work over, surveying a half-speed universe out of half an eye.

Beyond the market, in the full blaze of the sun, was the bus station, where travellers waited for transport. Babies slept on generous laps, schoolchildren fluttered and chattered like sparrows and the buses came and went, their bonnets and superstructures painted in gaudy fairground colours. And their rear axles were a foot or two higher than the front ones, giving them a provocative high-arsed look, as if suffering from steatopygia, as were a good percentage of their passengers. Destinations were written on squares of cardboard and propped in the windscreens; names that brought to mind the titles in Stevenson's collection of island stories: Falelatai, Satapuala, Solosolo, Tafitoal and Vaivase-uta.

I hired a car the next day from two jolly girls in a ramshackle office. "My brother-in-law plays rugby for Bedford," said one of them. At the police station, I gave 10 tala to a sergeant in a blue lava-lava and he signed a paper that validated my licence. He was a five-storied apartment block of a man, and he moved with the certain but gentle grace of a steamroller. "Take care," he said.

I drove past the port of Apia where a couple of coasters lay at anchor, their hulls streaked with rust. Out of town there was an exuberant vegetation on either side of the road, leaves shining under the delicate touch of a sweaty rain. Here and there were square clapboard houses with porches but no windows; who needs windows? And there were traditional dwellings, too - the " fale " - oval constructions on short stilts, their floors some 3ft off the ground, with thatched roofs of palm leaves raised up on posts - no walls. Who needs walls?

I followed the coast eastward, not another vehicle to be seen, the white waves breaking on the reef to my left, the sound floating in through the open window of the car. There were black volcanic rocks along the shore and black pigs rooting in the sand. Chickens strutted archly where they would.

At the village of Solosolo there was a lean-to emporium and post office. The boy in charge had his elbows on the counter and his chin in his hands. His eyes barely flickered as I came into the frame of his vision. I bought a pot of noodles for lunch and the owner of the shop invited me to sit with him in his house, and I did, and he slumped back in his chair and stroked an acre or two of warm stomach with his cold can of beer.

"How far is Saleapaga?" I asked him. Notions of distance are not strong in Samoa. He considered the problem for a short lifetime, then pronounced his verdict. "It'll take some while," he said. He continued stroking his stomach and I stroked mine.