The Maldives is the kind of place that inspires bad prose. These impossibly manicured resort islands in the Indian Ocean fill you with an urge to write things like “turquoise seas” and “burnt orange sunsets” and “glistening waves” and “pristine white sand beaches”. When left to nature these islands are craggy, tangled, antediluvian places populated only by seabirds, lizards and insects.
But those islands owned by the world’s most exclusive resorts defy this state of nature, transforming them into a landscape architect’s utopian vision of what a tropical island could be , a dream of paradise filtered through pure imagination, precision engineered to meet the every whim of the honeymooning couples and C-suite executives who flock to them. Islands like Joali Maldives are ‘perfect’ not because they showcase the best of the natural world but because they have tamed it, ordered it, conquered it. It takes a small army of workers to keep nature at bay.
Wake at dawn and those pristine white beaches – sorry – will be peopled by a team of workers raking the sand into some ideal configuration, ensuring the illusion is preserved, the dream kept alive, order maintained. This was not my first trip to the Maldives but even against the backdrop of other versions of perfection, Joali is breathtaking. After arriving on Muravandhoo Island , some 170km north of the capital Malé via sea-plane, you’re ushered into a welcome building on a pier that features a dramatic.
