Best "beach stop by" between Thailand and California

Hi all,
thanks in advance for your attention and your help, the forum is really useful and I'm glad I've found it.

I'm gonna spend my honey-moon traveling from Rome (Italy) to San Francisco (CA), where I'm gonna work for six months. We have around five weeks available (from 21 July yo 27 August) and our idea is to go straight to Beijing, spend a few days there, go south overland (or with a local flight) visiting (quickly) Cambodia, VietNam and Thailand and finally spend a week of real relax in a beautyful small island on the way to California.

From the forum I got the idea that Hawaii is not the best stop for us, since we are looking for something romantic without masses nor big cities and possibly white sand beaches with ease of travel (we can spend only a week there!) and good snorkelling. We have a reasonably flexible budget, but Tahiti seems to be too expensive: we'd like to skip traveling through the Australia and NZ route. Many on the forum suggest Fiji, but they seem to present the same problem: NZ route = an expensive flight.

Do you know if there is any good solution for us in Indonesia/Philippines/Malaysia?

thanks!

Paolo

The SE Asian countries are all much cheaper than the South Pacific.

My favourite is Indonesia, which also has the most islands to choose from.

Is this one beautiful enough for you?

It's fairly remote though, with two flights required to get there from say, Bali or Jakarta.

Of course there are many more accessible ones, but not quite as beautiful.