I’m lying on a deckchair, sipping a martini and flirting outrageously with the rather attractive French girl lying beside me. We are both naked, because this is a nudist beach. I am sporting a foot-long penis that arrived only moments before in a cardboard box. Crystal has a naughty tattoo on her bottom and a pair of glittering stilettos. She claims to be a nurse on holiday in the south of France, but it’s raining there, which is why she’s here instead.

Just as I’m complimenting Crystal on her tattoo, a man with an even larger penis offers her a massage. I’m rendered speechless by his impudence, but Crystal coolly declines his offer and explains that she’s with me.

We're alone again. Things move fast. We go for a stroll along the beach, we look at the waves gently lapping the shore, I give her a massage and, inevitably, we kiss. Before I can catch my breath, she suggests going somewhere more private. Which is when my wife steps into my study with a cup of tea and a biscuit. A deft flick of the switch and my virtual French nurse vanishes into the ether.

Five years after Second Life – the 3-D virtual world – opened, it has had more than 6m visitors, 1.6m of whom have logged on in the past six months. That’s 1.6m people opting out of normal earth-based life to manoeuvre their “avatar” around a cyberworld, interacting with other “avatars”. It’s quite a disturbing trend.

In Second Life, you can buy virtual clothes, cars, swords, windsurfing lessons, lap dances, books, martinis, anything. You can dance, undress, giggle, urinate, gamble, stroll through art galleries, smoke fags and spank your loved one. Or a complete stranger. Plus you can fly.

There is only one problem: it’s all virtual. As in not real. As in fantasy. Apart from the money: buying a virtual motorbike only costs a few real dollars, but Second Life’s currency, the Linden dollar, has already made several real people into real US-dollar millionaires. Currently, about US$1.6m is spent in Second Life every 24 hours.

Even stranger, you can now go on holiday in it. There are Second Life tour operators, Second Life tourist information services, a Second Life Swedish Institute, where you can ask lots of questions about Sweden . There’s an SL Louvre, an SL Piazza Navona, an island modelled on Manhattan. You can even stay at a new type of hotel that won’t open in RL (that’s real life, stoopid) until 2008.

If holidays are about escapism, then is it possible you could escape through your computer screen? Just think of it: no packing, no jet lag, no lost luggage or queuing or serious cost. And no carbon footprint at all (assuming, of course, you source your electricity from renewable sources – you do, don’t you?). Well, I’ve just been on my first virtual vacation in Second Life, and I wouldn’t start not packing your suitcase just yet. My souvenirs consist of a headache, some dark memories and a (nonvirtual) wife who is upset, because I came clean about the (virtual, but she’s still a person and you still kissed her, you bastard) French nurse.

When you first log on to Second Life, you have to agree to all sorts of things under threat of expulsion. Intolerance, harassment and assault are out and indecency is a nono unless you’re in a Mature area. This should all serve as an ominous indication of what seem to be the most popular pastimes in Second Life: virtual shagging and virtual gambling.

Having passed the immigration test, you design your avatar (I select a default Nightclub Male, then expand my six-pack, because in RL I don’t have one), choose a name and practise moving around. Then, you are free to set off on your virtual holiday.

I click Search, then Popular Places. Almost all the top 20 places in SL are either orgy rooms or gambling rooms. I teleport to Hedonistic Isle (no Ryanair flight required). The sunset is deep red, the waves look inviting, and my avatar hasn’t loaded properly, so I have breasts and a Hey-hey-we’re-the-Monkees haircut. Someone near me says, “Nice sunset.” Someone else says, “Yup”; and about two minutes later, someone else says, “Everybody is dead here.”

I teleport to a gallery at Westpoint Hotel, which is boring, so I go to a shop to get some tattoos. As I browse the options, a girl dressed in white walks past. I say hi. (When I say “say”, I mean “type”. You type something, press return and it then appears on a scrolling message board for people to respond to.) Overcome with excitement when she responds (my first interaction in Second Life), I ask if she’d show me around. She says I’ll have to ask her slave master, who is suddenly standing behind her in a full-body leather suit, clutching a whip. They both say they’re from Planet Gore, which is some sort of Dungeons-and-Dragons-style fantasy zone running in another part of Second Life. I leave.

At the Caribbean Breezes Jazz Club, the jazz is good, and I’m dancing nicely (right click to groove), until someone karate kicks me through the piano, unprovoked, then sniggers with his mates. Second Life is an intimidating place if you’re new. A bit like Paris.

Life is better at Phat Cat’s Jazzy Blue Lounge, one of the few popular but sex-free venues in Second Life. Charity Colville and Dilbert Digweed (not their real names) set up the black-tie dance club after they met and fell in love in SL, then met and got married in RL. As such, they’re SL celebrities: people flock to their lounge in the hope of falling in love too.

Charity was on her rather glamorous terrace when I teleported in, but just as I was about to ask her whether she was a virtual weirdo for marrying a virtual person, my system crashed. When I returned, she was gone, so I ended up dancing with a 32-year-old Italian mother-of-three, who said she was doing the tango with me in Second Life because her husband had two left feet. That we weren’t actually tangoing didn’t seem to matter to her or, until I thought of it, me – which is an indication of how strange this world really is.

DAY FOUR of my virtual vacation and I was getting used to it. I did all the things people do or wish they could do on holiday: I bought a large motorbike and rode around beach resorts showing off. I went to a strip club – purely out of curiosity. I went clubbing on Festival Island and got into an argument with an American about the French election. I bought a Soviet military uniform, an AK47 and a Marxist treatise. I urinated on a wall in a Pittsburgh ghetto, rode a waterslide and fired myself from a cannon.

Then, I stopped messing about and went to some serious places: the Second Life Louvre displays digital artwork. How very 21st-century high brow. It didn’t have the crowds, but it didn’t have the Mona Lisa either, so I left.

I went to Starwood’s Aloft hotel – the first hotel to be trialled virtually before being opened for real (in 2008). I had to content myself with looking through the fence, because it was being renovated following feedback from Second Lifers. I called a real person at Starwood to ask what that meant. They said they’d had loads of useful feedback. I asked if that meant the real hotel would open with an orgy room, a tattoo parlour and a teleporter. Apparently not: they’re just changing the colour scheme and moving around the furniture in the lobby.

On German Island, I was awarded one Linden dollar just for being there, but a group of strange German break dancers scared me off. Which is when, thoroughly bored with my virtual holiday, I went to the nudist beach, right-clicked on an advert for large penises, strapped the resulting appendage on and joined Crystal. On the grounds that casual sex is a part of a lot of people’s holiday experiences. And that you can’t get into trouble for kissing an avatar.

How wrong I was. I’m still sleeping in the spare room. And that’s for real. Take my advice: don’t give up real holidays just yet – you need them to escape the very strange world we live in.

Travel brief: it costs nothing to open a basic account in Second Life. Just follow instructions at secondlife.com. If you want to buy virtual land (upon which to build a virtual holiday home?), you need to upgrade to a premium account that costs US$9.95 a month. One US dollar buys 186 Linden dollars. My tattoo cost 100 Linden dollars.

If you want someone, sorry, someone’s avatar to show you around, cyberguides and package tours can be arranged at synthravels.com.

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