TRAVELING IN STYLE : BAREFOOT DAYS IN FIJI : The splendid isolation of Matagi Island is reason enough for a visit. Another is its size: 240 acres. There is nothing on Matagi except a single resort

We are sitting cross-legged on mats spread over the floor of the bure , the bamboo and grass-mat cottage of the village chief. The headman and his family have gathered, along with a few neighbors and myself, an American visitor to Fiji. After some talking and some drinking, the chief’s wife, who until now has been quiet, turns toward me.

“Are you married?” she inquires. When I tell her I’m divorced, she asks in the blink of an eye: “Do you want to marry a nice Fijian girl?”

I’ve come to this village of Vatusogosogo on a small skiff from nearby Matagi Island. Michael, a friend from London who’s come to Fiji with me, is skipping this outing. He flees his dank and gray hometown whenever he can for the chance to slather himself in baby oil, slip an opera tape into his Sony Walkman and bake himself bronze. For him, Fiji means sun.

For me, the lure is more than getting a tan. I’m after the mythic, unspoiled escape, the tranquil refuge, and Matagi Island Resort promises all of that. But while I was seeking an escape, what I found turned out to be much more intriguing.

That Matagi (pronounced Ma-TANG-ghi) is situated in splendid isolation is reason enough to come. Another reason is its size. A horseshoe-shaped, botanist’s dream of an island rising dramatically from the sea, Matagi consists of only 240 acres. And there’s nothing on it except a single resort, a dozen bures accommodating at most 30 guests, set among gardens of frangipani and bougainvillea and poinsettia.

Tranquillity found. Here I spend mornings lying under tall coconut palms, reading the novels and histories I’ve brought from another place. I collect shells on unsullied beaches and swim alongside dolphins. I suck in air through a snorkel while drifting for hours above fish that Picasso might have painted, above majestic gorgonian fans and fields of soft coral that wave like a woman’s auburn hair.

I set my watch aside as soon as I arrive, since meals are announced with the thumping of a drum, and otherwise time means only sunshine and shadows. A day later I discard even my Topsiders. They just get wet in the sea.

One day I go picnicking with Michael--lamb sandwiches and succulent papaya and shortbread--on a long and deserted arc of white-sand beach. If this were Waikiki, I think, the beach would be lined with big hotels and swarms of reddened tourists. But we have the place to ourselves. At night, the sky is so dark and clear that I imagine I can see the outermost edges of the galaxy.

On my boat trips out to the best snorkeling reef, I get to talking with a 20-year-old Fijian named Richard Valentine Jr., who works at the resort. He’s fascinated by anything American. He’s taught himself fluent English by chatting up the guests; he has initiated a correspondence with an anthropologist from Berkeley who spent some time at Matagi; he asks if I’d send him some T-shirts from the States. A few days into my stay, when Richard invites me to go with him to the village of Vatusogosogo, where his grandfather is the chief, I jump at the chance.

Learning how others live, I’ve found, is the most rewarding part of traveling. I struck stately homes from my itineraries several trips ago, and these days churches have to be truly special (preferably tiny and Romanesque) to rate a visit. More worthwhile is a chance encounter with local color and culture. Once, for example, on a Sunday morning in a Balinese village, I came upon a wedding and, next door, a fascinating coming-of-age ceremony in which the incisor teeth of adolescents were filed down in order to keep away the “devil spirit.”

Make no mistake, I like lazing around a balmy beach. But there is much more to a remote corner of the Pacific 5,000 miles from California than sunsets, rum punch and a deep tan.

In Vatusogosogo, on the island of Qamea, I find an extended network of neighbors and kin that has let in something from the outside while maintaining many of the old ways. That tradition includes the Fijian commitment to family and friends, including newly made friends from America. The time I spend on Qamea gives me new insight into this peaceful dream.

On our way to Vatusogosogo, Valentine maneuvers the skiff through a canal cut out from the mangrove swamps to his sister’s home, a few miles up the Qamea coast. Here I buy the customary gift, a kilo of yagona , better known as kava, the dried root of the pepper tree, Piper Methysticum .

Kava is the usual tourist’s present to the villagers, but it’s also part of the ordinary way of life. On a quiet day in any rural Fijian household, families are likely to sit on the floor around a large wooden bowl drinking the liquid that is made from this root. It is celebrated in a Fijian ballad:

Go uproot the yagona and bring it,

Prepare the root and proclaim it!

The acclamation rose skywards,

Reaching distant lands!

Might I take a photo?” I ask, after making my purchase from Valentine’s sister. Three generations have gathered for the occasion, and on half a dozen faces the answer is told in smiles, along with a request that I send back a print. With that, the family’s pride, a red floral-print armchair is carted into the sunlight and a 2-month-old infant in a Diet Pepsi T-shirt is posed by his mother for his first portrait.

When the photo session is over, we head for Vatusogosogo. Approached from the sea, this village of about 30 bures , rising up a gentle grassy hill, looks almost like a hamlet in the Cotswolds. But instead of English cottages and trimmed hedges, it is festooned with banana trees and nodding palms.

The unfolding scene is pure South Pacific, something that might have inspired Gaughin. Children run to the boat with ear-to-ear smiles and a chorus of “bula” (hello). They wrap their small hands around my fingers and we walk together to greet the chief. Old men gather at the crest of the hill to gossip. Women do the wash and tend to the pepper trees; many are wearing loose floral-print cotton dresses, and there are orange-red hibiscuses in their thick, black hair.

The older children are off at primary school in the larger Qamea village of Naiviivi. Most of the men are fishing or working at a cocoa and ginger plantation or tending to guests at the Qamea Beach Club Resort, tucked away on another corner of the island.

The chief thanks me for the kava, then sends one of his daughters off to pound the root into powder with a large, wooden mortar and pestle. She dissolves the powder in water, which turns the color of murky dishwater. Then, with formal grace, she offers me a half-coconut shell filled with the liquid.

I have no idea what to expect, and only later do I learn that kava has a mildly hallucinogenic (but nonalcoholic) kick whose chemical causes remain mysterious to pharmacology. The kava from Qamea and the neighboring islands is generally regarded as the most potent in Fiji.

Nevertheless, I pick up the drinking ritual from the chief’s example: say bula , clap your hands once, gulp down the drink and clap three times more. In this setting the drink, which tastes like lukewarm tea, gently loosens the tongue and emboldens matriarchs to ask about the marital prospects of visitors.

You can only reach the village by boat at high tide, and that makes it seem far away, even for Fiji. As compared to the rest of the country, these outlying islands have been least corroded by mass tourism, and the web of communal obligations has been least disturbed. A few years back, as new job opportunities began taking villagers elsewhere, there was some chafing at the burdens of kinship, but the elders have been able to maintain the core traditions.

Sitting around the family circle, sharing the kava, talking about the news of the islands and faraway worlds, the extended family exhibits relaxed deference to the chief. The most visible influence of the West is the technology of motorboats and generators, as well as in the widespread use of English, legacy of a century of generally peaceful British rule.

On another day, Valentine takes me to services in a tin-roofed, two-room schoolhouse in Naiviivi, which becomes a Methodist Church on Sundays. (The Catholic church is a nearby bure .) Perfectly pitched Fijian voices turn the tunes of the Methodist hymnal into complex harmonies. The minister wears a sulu , the familiar Fijian skirt, and a flowered tie.

I join in the hymn-singing and, caught up in the moment, I daydream about what I might learn from a life without gurus or FAXes.

Most tourists who come to Fiji see nothing of this everyday life. Typically, they stay in handsome and smartly run hotels such as the Fijian or the Regency--with their hundreds of rooms and fine restaurants and movie nights, their free-form swimming pools and golf courses--situated along the Queen’s Road on what’s called the Coral Coast. Or they head out to the dry, western Mamanucas, Malolo Lailai and Mana and Qalito, a string of tiny island resorts--with their unfailing sun and endless beaches--that pitch their appeal variously to honeymooners, families and swinging Aussie singles.

Before we landed on Matagi, Michael and I tried out this life, spending three days being pampered at the deluxe Fijian, two more days at the mass-market Plantation Island Resort, 90 bures and hotel-style rooms on Malolo Lailai. The Fijian is all flowers and buckets of tropical fruit, tiny tucked-away beaches and fine wines. The sweetness of the constantly heard greeting, bula, as well as the Fijian dance-theatre, meke, are special, even if inevitably contrived. But at Plantation Island, amid the boozing bands of fun seekers, the flash of the video-game rooms, the lines of visitors snaking towards a vaguely Polynesian buffet, it’s all too easy to forget that we’re in far-off Fiji.

This packaged paradise is what lures most visitors, mainly from Australia, New Zealand, the United States and, increasingly, Japan. They get no closer to the real Fiji than Orchid Island, a nicely done mock-up of a traditional island village, a Disney-like touch. Not so long ago, tourists were avoiding Fiji, fearing trouble. Twice in 1987, a Fijian colonel named Sitiveni Rabuka staged nasty, if bloodless, coups. The effect was to keep government out of the democratically elected party dominated by Fijian-Indians, who number nearly half the country’s population. (The British shipped Indians over a century earlier as indentured servants to work the cane fields). The colonel’s power plays put thousands in jail, prompted a mass exodus of Fijian-Indians and drew international slaps on the wrist, including expulsion from the British Common- wealth.

The colonel still controls the government, and elections are promised only for the indefinite future. But with peace restored, for the past two years tourists have been jetting back in growing numbers. They swim, scuba, play golf and buy carved wooden bowls (replicas of those once used by Fijian cannibals) that are actually made in the Philippines.

The more venturesome head for Suva, the steamy capital and biggest town in the South Pacific, to have a drink in one of the dark and boisterous establishments such as Lucky Eddie’s or the Golden Dragon. Sometimes tourists are suckered by local touts who learn their names and then present them with a customized wooden sword, insisting on payment. (So notorious is this practice that the Travelodge, Suva’s leading hotel, lists “sword-sellers” in its directory of services, with a note urging guests to just say no.) Nevertheless, visitors seem to feel as though they’ve wandered into paradise.

Life is very different on Matagi Island, the greenest and, from December through March, wettest of the 322 Fiji islands. The journey there is a passage through time as well as distance. First there is the jumbo jet to Nadi International. Next comes a bumpy, hour-long flight in a plane so small that passengers as well as bags are weighed beforehand. Then a Jeep ride from the grassy landing strip to the barest hint of a pier. And finally a half-hour trip in an 18-foot boat across sometimes-choppy seas.

Staying at Matagi is hardly going native, not with the mini-bar and the king-size bed in one’s bure and a tab that can top $400 a day. It’s as if some well-to-do uncle who happened to own a plantation invited you to have the run of his place.

During the day, guests head off for dives in gin-clear water; some will spend several days living on a hotel-operated boat that ties up at the best reefs. Or else they go cave-exploring, take bush walks or go sport fishing for marlin, sailfish and jackfish.

At night, we all sit around in a semi-circle of chairs on a lantern-lit terrace, drinking tall drinks and swapping tall tales with Noel and Flora Douglas, Britons by ancestry, whose family has owned this island for five generations. Visitors drop by from Laucula, the late Malcolm Forbes’ hyper-luxe island resort. Or they come over from the equally appealing Qamea Beach Club, 14 bures with a fine reef at water’s edge, where a shell pool has been set like a jewel in a tropical rain forest barely 100 yards from the beach.

A Greek-Australian family came to Matagi last year for a vacation and decided on an impulse to build themselves a place on the nearby Qamea hillside. The Acropolis, they’re calling it, a jokey reference to all the carved poles of their megalith bure rising into the air, and they can’t wait to settle in. While one home goes mostly unnoticed amid the palms, I wonder whether this Acropolis could mean the beginning of the Waikiki-ization of a place whose visitors, describing their stays in the guest book, invariably describe as paradise.

It’s a drizzly morning on Matagi, the first rain we’ve seen, when Michael and I clamber aboard the skiff to begin the long journey home. All the Fijians on the island, the cooks and maids and boatmen and gardeners, gather on the shore. One of the women is playing a guitar, all of them are singing. Moce, the voices blend in fine harmony: goodby. I’ve witnessed this same performance on other mornings, when other guests have left. This isn’t the long goodby of those villagers in Vatusogosogo, yet Matagi is so bewitching that I feel as if I’m being serenaded with the songs of the Sirens. I won’t take up the offer of the chief’s wife and marry a nice Fijian girl, but on another visit there will surely be more kava, more singing and more tranquil barefoot days.

DETAILS

Getting there: From LAX, Air New Zealand flies direct via Honolulu four days a week; Qantas flies direct via Honolulu three days a week. (No visa is necessary, but a valid passport is required.)

Where to stay: Matagi Island (10 rooms), P.O. Box 83, Waiyevo, Taveuni, Fiji. Telephone 011-679-880-260. $95 to $110 double. Qamea Island Beach Club (11 rooms), c/o P.O. Matei, Taveuni, Fiji. Tel. 011-679-880-220. $197 double. Plantation Island Resort (110 rooms), P.O. Box 9176 Nadi, Fiji. Tel. 011-679-72333. $106 to $123 double. The Fijian, on Yanuca Island, just off Fiji’s Coral Coast (364 rooms). Tel. (800) 359-5050. $150 to $186 double. Regent of Fiji, on Denarau Island (290 rooms). Tel. (800) 545-4000. $146 to $173 double; $365 suites. Sheraton Fiji, 9761 Nadi Airport. Tel. 011-679-777. $216 to $329. Reservations (800) 325-3535. Laucala Fiji Forbes Resort (island accommodates maximum of 10 adults). Tel. (719) 379-3263. All-inclusive rate (including round-trip air transportation from Nadi on private aircraft) is $2,400 per person for 7-night stay.

Package plans in connection with some hotels are available: Ted Cook’s Island in the Sun, (800) 854-3413; Tropical Adventures, (800) 247-3483.

When to go: The official dry season, June to October, is the best time to visit, although most travel agents recommend any time between May and November.

For more information: Fiji Visitors Bureau, 5777 W. Century Blvd., Suite 220, Los Angeles 90045, (213) 568-1616.