Most of us know that the best part of a trip is planning it; that’s when you can indulge all your fantasies of the ideal holiday without being confronted by the deflating realities of bad weather, overcrowding, missing baggage and divey hotels. This is when the slick brochures work their magic; oh the shiny surfaces, the gushing, breathless text, the impossibly vivid colors of the polarized photos – all this melds into the promise of the perfect world, only $1000 away; and although you don’t believe what the brochures promise, the small part of you that mail-ordered sea-monkeys in your youth won’t let you disbelieve it either. And so you find yourself cramped up on a 747 in one of the many economy seats that seem to have shrunk drastically since you last flew, trying to will the airhostess into wheeling the drinks trolley your way. Oblivious to the disappointments that await your strappy sandals and your carefully pre-tanned legs.

This was something like how I came to be in the Krabi province of Thailand, on a picture perfect tropical beach accessible only by boat. It seemed for once like the brochures hadn’t lied; a turquoise, completely transparent sea lapped at a beautifully curved strip of white sand, palms swayed lazily in the breeze, and the only people on the beach were a couple of aesthetically pleasing dreadlocked locals playing Frisbee. It was indeed a tropical paradise, and if I could have frozen that moment of arrival in time and played in it for two weeks it would have been the first completely fulfilling tropical holiday in history.

Alas there is something about the tropics that invites calamity, nothing in that kind of heat stays stable and reliable for very long. You only have to watch Night of the Iguana to know what I mean. But part of the illusion that travel brochures strive so hard to create is that of a site completely drained of any danger, risk or misfortune. Tropical storms and raging seas are quietly smothered beneath copious shots of a pancake-flat aquatic paradise. The very artificiality of the brochure world suggests the impossibility of nature intruding into your holiday in all but the most harmless of forms (e.g. a stunning sunset, a timely full moon, a quaint sea creature), and, intoxicated by this illusion, the possibilities of typhoons, shark attacks and sinking ships never occur to you.

The first flaw in my picture perfect holiday appeared on my second day there, when I ventured into those Bacardi clear waters for a swim. The water was no higher than my knee when I felt a searing pain on my ankle. After much thrashing about I managed to disentangle a jellyfish from my skin and I spent the next few days sulking on the beach in a torment of itchy pain, forbidden from swimming in the now annoyingly crystalline waters. The next misfortune involved a consolation dinner at a beachside restaurant, where I ate the sole bad prawn, and spent an evening of gutwrenching sickness that did however succeed in distracting me from the infuriating itch of my ankle. A third misfortune in the form of fourth degree sunburn completed my downward spiral into self-pity, until the smog from the forest fires in Indonesia blotted out the sun and turned my tropical paradise into post-apocalyptic soup.

I was definitely unlucky. It was surprising however to learn from the locals that jellyfish stings, at least, are not at all uncommon in even the most heavily touristed resort areas. On the day of my close encounter, the sympathetic staff of a nearby restaurant all crowded around to admire my mutating ankle and, in an attempt I assume to comfort me, related stories of tourists dying post-sting from heart-attacks, allergic reactions, or just plain old shock. My travelling companion’s way of sympathizing was to tell me how he was stung by a box jellyfish as an 8 year-old off an island nearby and was tranquilized for a week while he hallucinated wildly and his entire leg became an open, bleeding wound. So why didn’t he tell me about that before I got into the water? I didn’t even have the chance to ask about the frequency of drownings, diving accidents, seafood poisonings, death by sunburn, large-scale environmental disasters and all the other kinds of tropical delights that can spoil your hard-earned holiday. The jellyfish stories filled up a whole evening.

This trashy paperback from 1976, written by a very enthusiastic Thomas Helm, turned out to be a complete gem. It told fabulous true stories of divers eaten by jewfish, of menacing mantarays, of broadshouldered young men being swallowed and then jammed in the jaws of sharks, of tiny octopi killing fully grown men with one small bite, of pufferfish poisonings, of strangulations by giant octopus tentacles, of great packs of mullets throwing themselves aboard fishing boats and sinking them with their weight, and, perhaps most mysterious of all, of the ‘red tide’. According to Helm (who I believe, because he deliberately swims into schools of jellyfish just to see if they really do sting as bad as people say they do – would a man like that lie?) the ‘red tide’ is a mysterious phenomenon that affects parts of the sea the world over at unpredictable times for no apparent reason. It turns the water from its normal consistency into syrup, smells awful, and suffocates all the fish, by causing paralysis of the gills. It can strike at any time, anywhere, with devastating effect for the local ecosystem, not to mention the local tourist trade. And god only knows what the red tide would do to an oblivious swimmer.

Just in case this informative little book wasn’t enough for me, an article in the Bangkok Post soon confirmed my suspicions that the entire world (possibly under the seductive influence of the tourist industry) was participating in a sea-dangers cover up. It described the discovery of a tiny one-celled creature off the East Coast of the US. Pfiesteria Piscicida, as it is affectionately known, excretes a poison that stuns fish and then uses an enzyme to dissolve their flesh. Apparently fishermen also are coming into contact with the creature and suffering from fatigue, headache, diarrhea, weight loss, skin irritation and loss of memory. And that’s just in normal waters. Imagine the tropical version (which is bound to turn up soon); a creature that stuns you mid-tropical frolic and dissolves the flesh from around your string bikini. If these kind of reports have any impact on the shiny world of travel brochures, and manage to avoid the sad fate of courageous Thomas Helm – doomed to beachhouse anonymity – I’ve a feeling tropical holidays will soon be a thing of the past.

Add all these extraordinary risks to the far more mundane ones of horrific pollution in the waters of such tourist hotspots as the Gulf of Thailand, and the proliferation of that hideous invention; the jet-ski, plus the ever more frequent hassles of beach hawkers, harassment, and other tourists, and you cannot help but find yourself wondering why anyone would ever want a tropical holiday.

My next destination? I’ve decided on Nepal, the country that contains the highest point on earth, which is also, incidentally, at least as far as I am concerned, the furthest point from the sea.