There’s got to be an “Oh shit” moment. I figured sometime shortly after you get married, maybe that first night, maybe on the honeymoon flight, maybe a few days later -- you turn to your newly betrothed, look into her loving eyes and think, “Oh shit. This is the person I’m going to be with until I die.” The only way to stave off this feeling, I calculated, was to go somewhere dangerous for your honeymoon, say a Muslim country seven months after Sept 11, in the midst of Israel’s invasion of the West Bank. Somewhere that would require lots of transfer flights through Arab countries where I’d have to show my passport with my Jewish last name, perhaps situated between India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Somalia. When you’re spending every honeymoon day wondering if the heat is wafting in from the equator or a subcontinental blast of nuclear radiation, lifelong monogamy doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

 

    That’s how I picked the Maldives, an immense chain of 1,190 miniscule islands south-west of India. Cassandra, my lovely wife, and I left the Sunday night after our wedding, flew to London, then Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, which may actually have the best airport/mall in the world, to Male, the capital of the Maldives, where we landed on Tuesday morning. Then we got on  a half-hour-long seaplane to our hotel, the Soneva Fushi. At that point, you could have put us up in a Hamptons Inn and we would have been pretty pumped.

But Soneva Fushi is a cross between Temptation Island, a Corona commercial, Jurassic Park and Dr. No’s retreat. Maldivian islands are so small, and there are so many uninhabited ones, that each resort takes over a whole island. And tourism started late enough there that all the hotels are super eco-aware, which means they are very expensive, thus preventing a large number of guests which would ruin the place. And it’s far enough away that there are almost no Americans. Basically it’s a the paradise that guy is searching for in The Beach, only he didn’t realize that all he really needed was a whole lot of money.

The water surrounding Soneva Fushi is so see-through that, without even snorkeling or diving, you can see the fish at your feet. In fact, the island is teeming with life: hermit crabs, lizards, roosters, rabbits -- all freakishly tame either from the equatorial weather or, more likely, because they are remote controlled. The animals are constantly crossing in front of your bicycles, which they give to guests so they can cross the sand-paved, palm-lined roads crossing this 1.4 kilometer-long island, which is actually one of the biggest in the Maldives. The only creatures you don’t see are mosquitoes, because the island is sprayed twice a day, though that doesn’t stop them from putting down the very romantic mosquito net around your bed every night. I would tell you just how well this thing worked for me, but sadly there is nothing cool about bragging about having sex with your wife.

 

    Immediately upon getting to the island, you’re given a fresh coconut with a straw in it and a scented cold towel, which the staff gives you anytime you do absolutely anything. There are 240 staff members for the 54 rooms, which means that whatever activity you sign up for, seven Maldivians are escorting you to it. It also means that the second you leave your room, it’s cleaned.  You are not so much waited upon as stalked.  

 

    Before you even get to your room, the staff takes your shoes and put them in a bag marked “No news. No shoes.” This seems to be some sort of Maldivian resort motto. I’m not sure what exactly either shoes or news did to incense the Maldivian people, but they’re pretty serious about it. I think it has something to do with the India-Pakistan thing.

Each room is a thatched-roof, jungle-hidden house, about three times larger than the Manhattan studio I share with my wife. They have a very L.A. decor, with air-conditioning, a huge outdoor bathroom and a TV and stereo for which you can borrow CDs and DVDs. Due to the tiny size of the island, each house has its own private beachfront  (the cheapest rooms share the beach with two other rooms). There are so few people on the island that you spend most of the day not seeing anyone else. I’m guessing its better to attempt this in the first few weeks of your marriage than ten or twenty years down the line.  

 

    You spend all of your time on sand, and nothing you do takes place more than twenty feet from the water. Your spa massages take place in little jungle huts near the water. Meals at either of the two restaurants, are eaten at tables dragged in front of the ocean. And the food is shockingly good. Breakfast, which consists mostly of this giant fresh fruit stand where you pick items to be cut in front of you, is embarrassingly exciting. Because mo matter how uncool bragging about sex with your wife it is even less cool to come back from your honeymoon talking to much about the guy who carved fruit for you. Lunch is a buffet of fresh fish, Indian food and stir fry. Dinner revolves around lobster, fresh caught fish and more than 40 flavors of incredible, soft homemade ice creams, most of which I tried. The first year of a marriage, the way I was looking at it, is a race to see who gets fat and unappealing first.

 

    Considering it’s situated in a country with nothing to do, Soneva Fushi offers a lot of activities. Besides the snorkeling and diving there are trips to the local islands, where you can see firsthand that this is a country where there’s nothing to do. There’s a cooking class in the jungle with the chef, wine tastings, windsurfing, kayaking, fishing, sunset drinks on a sandbar and a spa in the middle of the jungle with masseuses imported from Sweden. Most of these activities involve champagne and some involve both masseuses from Sweeden and champagne.

 

    There are so many uninhabited islands that the hotel takes guests for a picnic lunch at a number of deserted islands for the day, where they leave you with a remote radio to call them when you want to return. Much like at home, I retained control of the remote for about five minutes, with was about one minute after my first “I’ve got the conch” joke. As for the romantic possibilities here, let’s just say that I kind of ruined it when I discovered the existence of palm squirrels by yelling “jungle rat” really loud several times.

After four days, we headed to Soneva’s other hotel in the Maldives, Soneva Gili, which is just a 15 minute boat ride from the Male airport. Both hotels are run by Sonuva, an Indian-Englishman who is the son of a billionaire and is married to a Swedish ex-model named Eva (hence the name Soneva). Normally I would hate a guy like that, but I was on my honeymoon and he seemed sweetly dorky and hard-working enough. Plus he was letting me stay at his hotel for free.  

 

    Soneva Gili, which just opened this year, is an even smaller island than Soneva Fushi, and would be even smaller if Sonuva, who bought a hotel that was falling apart, hadn’t increased the island by a third by filling it with sand, planting 200 palm trees and hiring water gardeners to trim the coral reef. He basically was able to will the island into looking like he wanted it to. He even put a palm tree with a light on it on a tiny speck of an island just off his shore. By next year, he will undoubtedly hire New Yorker cartoonists to put captions under it each week.

 

    The 44 rooms at Soneva Gili are two-storied houses built on stilts directly over the water and are huge, about four or five of studios. The entire room is outside, except for the bedroom. The island sits on a large coral reef, which not only allows for great snorkeling, but means you can walk for a half a mile and still be able to stand in the water, allowing, at low-tide, for lot of fun Jesus pictures. In addition to room service, you can have a chef drive up to your deck, cook dinner on his boat and serve it on either your upstairs or downstairs table. There really is no reason to ever go to the rest of the island, though there is a tennis court, a spa, a garden for afternoon tea, and, for reasons I can’t understand, a salt-water swimming pool next to the ocean. I’m guessing that when your Swedish model wife asks for a swimming pool, you put in a swimming pool.

 

    The crowd at Soneva Gili was a lot younger, hipper and better looking than at Soneva Fushi which greatly improved our Temptation Island game. Cassandra settled on this honeymooning Australian couple she spent a lot of time talking to at the bar at sunset one night, which made me realize that it wasn’t a good sign that she was making wife swapping jokes on our honeymoon. There is internet access, satellite TV and, at the bar,  printouts from news websites. Apparently neither news nor shoes has pissed anyone off at Soneva Gili yet.

 

    After nine days, we figured we’d had enough, not because we didn’t want to stay longer, but because we were becoming intolerable people. Not only were we lazy from the heat, but constantly being pampered to was messing us up. It got to the point where we wanted other people to have sex for us, only we couldn’t figure out which button on our phone to hit to ask for that. By “we” in that last sentence, I mean “Cassandra.” But still, we returned to New York knowing that there is a perfect paradise in the world, and one we will always carry in our hearts for each other. And if we ever want to get it back, we’re going to have to make incredible amounts of money.