Is any place a better antidote to the rigors and rush of modern life than spellbinding French Polynesia? Alexandra Marshall slips into the blue, where troubles melt like lemon drops

The mullets are rioting on Tahitian television, but this is no South Pacific rugby match. A baguette crust is at the center of this scrum, and the rioters in question are in fact foot-long tropical fish of incandescent gray, their tails delicate yellow. My idiot box, too, is not your typical TV set but rather a rattan coffee table with a removable glass top through which I've been chucking yesterday's breakfast, gasping in delight for the better part of an hour and a half. This is how time passes on Rangiroa, the world's second-largest coral atoll and the largest in French Polynesia. After ten days in these islands, this is the quietest I've felt. The crumbs sift through my fingers like sand.

I have come to French Polynesia to learn how to relax. Despite the lure that downshifting into tropical bliss holds for so many, to me vacation usually means long nights in transatlantic bistros and overspending on luxury leather goods. But after a year of accelerated work and family drama, I decided that the time had come to allow the life of the mind to give way to the pleasures of the flesh: sleeping, sunning, focusing on nothing more than the feel of warm salt water tickling my skin. What, I wondered, would it feel like to find myself completely alone? But I was learning that one such as myself—a New Yorker, someone never farther than five feet from a high-speed Internet connection—does not just slip into tranquillity naturally. Experiencing anything novel, even relaxation, causes anxiety. Idleness, as I was discovering, is not to be taken lightly.

No place better suits the idle (novice or not) than French Polynesia, a group of 118 tiny volcanic islands scattered like pebbles over a stretch of the South Pacific Ocean the size of Western Europe. Although the entire country is familiarly called Tahiti, French Polynesia actually encompasses five far-flung archipelagos: the Tuamotus, the Marquesas, the Austral Islands, the Gambier Islands, and the thirteen Society Islands, so named by Captain James Cook during his 1769 visit. (This was ten years before he met his ignominious end in Hawaii, 2,400 miles to the northeast.) Today, Tahiti and Bora Bora are the best-known of the Society Islands, though Moorea, Raiatea, and Huahine are also members of the chain. Ever since Cook's visit, French Polynesia has attracted pleasure seekers and runaways, people hoping to escape the grayness, the routine, of their lives. "I am entering into the truth, into nature," said Paul Gauguin, one of the most famous runaways, and looking at these islands, it is easy to believe him.

But the region's history belies a bit the image of otherworldly calm that it sells so well. While Europeans first made contact in the sixteenth century, the French Catholic missionaries didn't establish their hold until the nineteenth, a struggle that sparked bloody wars of independence. In 1847, the islands' queen, Pomare Vahine FV, finally ceded control to the French, who established first a protectorate and then, in 1880, a proper colony. After World War II, under pressure from the locals, France extended citizenship to the Polynesians, of whom there are now about 275,000. (A little over two-thirds of them are full-blooded indigenous people, while the rest are European, Chinese, or some mixture thereof.) Americans' interest was piqued soon after, thanks in no small part to the runaway success of James A. Michener's 1947 book, Tales of the South Pacific (later adapted into the musical and movie South Pacific), but the islands retained their reputation for tantalizing inaccessibility until 1963, when Tahiti's first international airport opened.