The holiday season is here again, and yet again, the papers and the internet are full of travel articles (as all year there have been hundreds of holiday brochures) referring to holiday destinations as being “paradise” or “heaven”. In the autumn, when everyone is safely back home again, there will be many more hundreds of articles about holiday “hells”. Try googling it: “holiday heaven” evokes around 2,100,000 results; “holiday hell” gets around 11,000,000.
Especially on your honeymoon apparently, you want a spot of extra paradise not supplied by your new spouse: what about the Cook Islands where, according to the Telegraph, “couples can live the romantic fantasy of a torchlit dinner on a finger of sand stretching into the turquoise lagoon…. Forget Dancing with the Stars, dancing under them to the hypnotic drumming of Aitutaki's princes of percussion sets up a marriage made in honeymoon heaven”. Not my idea of heaven, but then I’m just an old grouch, whose idea of heaven is the Cipriani in Venice.
