Tahiti

Ever since Samuel Wallis landed off Tahiti on HMS Dolphin in 1767, and his men discovered they could swap a single nail here for a night of love with a local, voyaging westerners have found it impossible to avoid paradisiacal comparisons in these parts. Get the South Seas right, and you are in Eden. And just as all Muslims save up to visit Mecca once in their lifetimes, so I recommend that all Christians, practising or lapsed, saintly or sinful, gay or straight, undertake a pilgrimage to Tahiti and her islands at some point in their allotted time in order to glimpse this gorgeous approximation of what it was we were thrown out of.

My own second arrival had been deliberately timed for Christmas. Gauguin died here just over 100 years ago, and as a wacky Christmas present to myself and my family, I decided that all of us would visit his faraway grave on Christmas Day. I know, I know. These are signs of insania. But making a film about him had affected me much more deeply than I could have imagined, and some of the things I had seen during the shoot were so damned moving and interesting that, as an act of sharing, I needed the rest of my family to view them too. Were we being morbid? Nah. We were being faithful.

Although Gauguin lived on Tahiti itself for much of the 1890s, in the house with the sunset, he had actually died in 1903 on Hiva Oa, one of the Marquesas Islands, the northernmost islands of French Polynesia. The Marquesas are officially the most remote spot on earth. Set off from here in any direction and before you reach a continent you must complete the longest such journey available on this planet. You want to get away? You come here.

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