Cook Islands: The South Pacific's natural choice

It is day three in the Cook Islands and I have already ticked off most of the anticipated attributes of a tropical island. I have learnt a native greeting: ‘Kia Ora Ana’ (meaning ‘have life, be well/healthy’), walked barefoot on a white-sand beach, drank straight from a coconut and swam in a Byzantine-blue lagoon – but what I was not expecting was to be offered the very elixir of life itself.

But here I am, just off the main road that rings walnut-shaped Rarotonga, the main island in the Cook Islands chain, taking sips of a maroon-coloured juice.

Freshly squeezed from the tropical fruit

which looks like a retarded custard apple, this is a pinched-nose experience. It smells and tastes like rancid strong cheese but any fleeting discomfort will be worth the price if even half the health benefits claimed of noni juice are realised.

Noni has long been used as a natural remedy in the Pacific Islands. It is said to promote overall health and aid the body’s own healing process for a whole range of conditions that include mild depression, high blood pressure, migraines and diabetes. It also lessens your chances of getting cancer and heart disease and boosts one’s sexual performance.

Here, in a factory owned by Australian expat Brad Stafford, who is planting 12,000 trees on the island – that’s 30 tonnes of juice a month – the noni fruit is big business.

With my health hopefully in the early stages of repair, and two large bottles of NZ$15 juice in my rucksack, I am back on my bike, zipping past fields rich with pineapples, trees slumping under the weight of breadfruit and shrubs heaving with bananas.

Avoiding the chickens running freely on the road ahead of me, there is a definite spring in my pedal and my thighs have stopped burning.

Perhaps the noni juice is already working.

Islands in the sun

For those flying directly from the UK, getting to the Cook Islands is undeniably an undertaking.

But the moment you enter the immigration area, to be greeted by the gentle ukulele chords played by islander ‘Papa’ Jake

Numanga, who for the past 30 years has been welcoming every international flight