Joali Maldives is the best place to do nothing at all

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, swooping roof fashioned after a manta ray. Here you are offered the customary – should these be the circles in which you move – cocktail, and are paired with your personal jadugar, a golf buggy-driving butler who is at your beck and call, 24 hours a day, throughout your stay.

Thus begins a holiday during which decision-making is taboo, where the only choices you’re required to make are what flavour of cocktail you would prefer and which book you want to read on the beach. Fancy a snorkel: the jadugar will scoot around with the equipment and drop you at your desired spot. Want to eat in your room? Call the jadugar. Play tennis with a former pro (there’s one on site)? Jadugar.

As the jadugar drove me along the criss-crossing network of piers that house the resort’s stilted water villas (there are also larger residences on the island itself), he pointed out the feature that most sets Joali apart from other resorts: a long, finger-shaped strip of coral sand that snakes from the shore around 50 metres into the ocean, the glistening waves – damnit! – lapping upon either side of it, the coral reefs mere metres beyond. It really is astonishing, a beach so incredible it doesn’t look real, like someone used CGI to generate the Platonic ideal of a beach. It’s almost too perfect, like it’s showing off. Towards the shore are hammocks and loungers, and it was upon these I spent much of my time, gazing at the absurd beauty of it all like an urban hermit who had never seen the ocean before, or even knew it existed, dumbfounded any of this could be real.

Should you want to swap one body of water for another, the obligatory infinity pool lifes just behind, and beyond that the main restaurant and bar area, where an army of waiters and mixologists will ensure your blood alcohol level never drops below acceptable parameters. 

While you could simply order your jadugar to drive you everywhere, the best way of traversing this relatively slight island is by bicycle; you’re issued with one each, bearing a wooden plaque in the shape of a dolphin or a seashell with your name burnt into it. 

It took me around three minutes to cycle from beach to water villa. And the water villas are ludicrously luxurious, laughably lavish, outrageously opulent. Far bigger than my London flat, they come with all the touches you would expect, some you did not, and a few you would never have come up with in your most fevered dreams. Outside, each villa has a decent-sized private pool, more showers, and a hammock dangling over those turquoise waters – I can’t help it! – under which, within two minutes of me collapsing into it, a manta ray glided past, followed by two nurse sharks. There’s a staircase down to the ocean itself, should you wish to pursue the wildlife (this is frowned upon) but I was mostly content to lie and watch the dreamscape unfold beneath me.

Joali positions itself as an arty destination and artists from around the world have been commissioned to create everything from benches to giant sculptures. One morning I had breakfast inside a vast, hollowed out wicker manta ray raised five metres in the air, with a view over the ocean. In the afternoon I joined two of the resident artists to paint ceramics, which were then fired overnight and delivered to my room (and are now displayed in my flat).

There is a choice of restaurants, each predictably good: Vandhoo, offering South East Asian, Chinese and Indian cuisines; Tuh’U serving Levant food; and Mura with a more relaxed bar menu. But make time to visit Saoke, the Japanese-Peruvian – what else? – restaurant on stilts over the water located on the far side of the island. The food is excellent and you can peer over the edge to watch hundreds of nurse sharks, coiled into disconcerting balls, writhing below. Feeding them is verboten but you can ask for ice cubes to chuck into the water to watch them spring to life.

There was more: I got a padel lesson from a former pro player; I snorkelled with the on-site marine biologists attempting to hold back the tide of coral bleaching; I attended one of the beach parties organised over the weekends. But this is all just filler around the main event: sitting in a hammock, gazing out to sea, wondering how any of this can possibly exist.

• JOALI Maldives has villas from $3,300 (approx. £2,780) per night based on two sharing a Beach Villa with Pool on a B&B basis  – visit the website here