Islands

There is a specific kind of silence you only meet on a small island: no traffic, no neighbours, just the metronome of surf and the occasional slap of a fish breaking the lagoon. The standalone island holiday sells you that silence wrapped in thread-count and rum. This is a tour of the good ones — the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean — and an honest word about what it takes to get there.

The Maldives, or how to sleep above the sea

The Maldives is barely land at all — twelve hundred coral islands averaging a metre and a half above the water, scattered across atolls like spilled sugar. You fly to Malé, then transfer by seaplane or speedboat to a single resort that occupies its entire island. From your overwater villa a ladder drops straight into bathwater-warm shallows.

The trick the Maldives plays is scale. Each resort is one island, so the horizon belongs only to you and forty other guests you will never quite see. Snorkel off the deck and the house reef begins a fin-kick away: parrotfish chewing coral, reef sharks patrolling the drop-off, the occasional manta wheeling past like a slow black kite.

Reefs, rays and the etiquette of the water

The animals are the whole point, and the rule is restraint. Float, don’t flap; watch, don’t touch. On the right atoll you snorkel with manta rays funnelling plankton, swim beside turtles grazing seagrass, and at dusk see eagle rays stencilled against the sand. Sunscreen goes on under your rash vest, not the reef — the coral is the bank the whole fantasy is borrowed against.

The Seychelles: where the rocks steal the show

If the Maldives is about water, the Seychelles is about stone. These are old granite islands, not coral, and their beaches are guarded by boulders worn into soft, leaning shapes — pink and grey, glowing at low sun. La Digue you cross by bicycle; Praslin hides a valley of giant palms whose seed, the coco de mer, looks frankly indecent. The sea is warm, the snorkelling quieter, the postcard somehow more sculptural.

Mauritius and Zanzibar: islands with a pulse

Some islands give you more than a beach. Mauritius has mountains, sugarcane, Hindu temples and a food culture that fuses India, China, France and Africa on a single plate. Zanzibar, off the Tanzanian coast, trades pure resort fantasy for Stone Town — a labyrinth of carved doors and spice markets — then delivers tide-bleached sandbars and dhows out east. These are places where you can actually leave the lounger and meet a country.

Crossing to the Caribbean

On the other side of the planet the Caribbean offers the same warm shallows with a different soundtrack. Think the cays of the Grenadines, where you anchor off an empty sandbar; St Lucia’s green Pitons plunging into the sea; the long quiet beaches of the smaller Antilles. The food turns Creole here too — jerk and curry, fried plantain, rum that means it — and the reefs, where they survive, still hum with grunts and snappers and the odd nurse shark dozing under a ledge.

When to go — and the honest part about getting there

The Indian Ocean islands are best roughly December to April, when the rains ease and the sea lies flat; the Caribbean’s sweet spot is December to May, safely outside hurricane season. Now the honest part: these are long, expensive journeys. The Maldives is most of a day’s flying from Europe plus a seaplane; remote atolls and the outer Seychelles add another hop. Pack light, accept the carbon cost honestly, and stay longer to make the distance worth it — a week beats two rushed long weekends.

The map above is our pick of places worth the drive. Tap a cell to open details, or hit the list next to the title for every city and sight A–Z, searchable.