Unearthly Delights

Discover why a trip to The Maldives is a must for any stressed-out man in search of sun and salvation.

- David Ashford

I ’m balanced precariously on one leg, my hands linked above my head in a hydrotherapy pool at COMO Cocoa Island resort in The Maldives. I’ve been told that yoga, when done correctly, can be a transcendent, borderline divine experience. But as a bloke who’s more comfortable bending it like a particular high-pitched style icon on the football pitch than contorting my limbs in a yoga studio, I had dismissed this as the new-age posturing of hemp-garbed hippies.

Until today when I jumped into a pool of warm water in a class led by Dr Aashly Jayan, the resident yoga instructor who carries a touch of the mystical about him. Aashly, who wears yellow flowers behind his ears, is doing his best to make me a yoga convert – of the water-based variety anyway – propping me up when I teeter and moving me gently through the pool’s hydro stations. Finally, he cradles my head as a heavy cascade of water pounds my scalp. As baptisms go this is hard to beat. I’m a bornagain yoga disciple.

Hydro-yoga is just one of many experiences that invite divine comparison in The Maldives, perhaps the closest approximation of heaven on earth. On long grey days in the office under deadline pressure, I’ve longed to dive into the default desktop wallpaper of my Mac and inhabit a calmer, more exotic world - I just didn’t picture Dr Aashly here with me.