PEOPLE TO WATCH, PLACES TO BE, PRODUCTS TO BUY
Why visit one tropical island paradise when you can take in two?
It has become a commonplace of travel journalism to frame the experience of visiting an extremely beautiful place through the prism of Pixar, the American quality-content supplier that renders every scene in its fabulous movies pixel perfect. Every city is pathologically well-ordered, every landscape is gentle and verdant, every sky is blue, every smile is dazzling. Pixar makes the world anew. It looks a bit like the one we live in, but cleaner, shinier… better.
The Cotswolds, according to this rubric, are the English countryside as if CGId by Pixar. Notting Hill is London with the Pixar filter on. The West Village is New York, Pixar-fied. I have friends, lucky people, who have a splendid house in a tiny village in rural Provence, and every other person who visits them there remarks on the Pixary vibes. It’s the way the light falls softly on the sleepy town square, the way the lavender sways lazily in the gentle summer breeze, the way tanned and toned Lycra-clad cyclists whizz past you like smug bullets on their pell-mell descents from the dinky nearby mini-mountains. It’s the South of France as it only really exists in the movies. (I once went for a frigid February half-term. It wasn’t very Pixary then.)
So the Pixar thing has become a cliché, and lost some of its gloss. If I struggle now, as I struggled when I was there this past spring, to avoid comparing the Maldives to an island paradise as conceived on a computer in the California campus of a certain Disney-owned, blockbustergenerating animation studio, at least I can say, in mitigation, that it’s not as if I wasn’t provoked.
The rinsed-out simile swam in to view as I embarked on the Finding Nemo snorkelling expedition at the Milaidhoo Maldives resort. With masks, snorkels and flippers on, the kids, their mother and I followed a wet-suited marine biologist through the island’s teeming, kaleidoscopic coral reef in search of the stripy little suckers made famous by the film of that name. Taking the Finding Nemo tour at Milaidhoo really is like being in the movie Finding Nemo. If Pixar did beach holidays, they’d look something like this.
There is nothing commonplace, to me, about a Tuesday morning in which I waddle, with penguin-like grace, across my own private beach, and plunge — or perhaps sink, with a gurgle — into the warm, turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean, where I’m immediately surrounded by shoals of dazzling tropical fish. The Maldives is a blissed-out archipelago, southwest of India, a chain of mostly tiny atolls, green palms lolling over white sandy beaches, that has become, not without good reason, shorthand for fantasyholiday-of-a-l
