Beaches

Cancun doesn’t have an identity crisis. It is what it says it is: a place to go and party and hang out on a beautiful beach, a place to go on vacation at the second longest coral reef in the world. Punto. There is nothing to mislead you here, no tempting photographs that speak more [...]

PALOMINO, Colombia- After a day on the beach of Palomino I was not plotting an escape but a way to stay there forever. I looked over at the hippie colony that formed in the bushes which sit on the cusp of the surf as I floated by in the gentle waves. They were living in [...]

TAGANGA, Colombia- I tried to walk down to the beach in Taganga but could only find the boats of tour companies and fishermen, restaurants and beer houses, comatose rasta men and clans of binder wielding touts blocking my path. I walked all the way down to the western edge of what would otherwise have been [...]

LANGAHOLT, Iceland- Iceland is not widely referred to as an optimal beach destination, but as I walked over the wide, free flowing sandy beach near Langaholt, watching the sea sparkle yellow, red, blue in the perpetual daylight with the Snaefellsnes glacier rising over all I could have been fooled into believe that it was so. Subtract [...]

VENTANILLA, Mexico- Ventanilla is called as such because there is a little opening that looks like a window within a rock outcrop that stretches out to sea from its beach. But this little window is not why people come here: they come here for the crocodiles, they come here because it is a truly undeveloped [...]

ZIPOLITE, Mexico- “I’ve heard that around 50 people a year drown in these waves, that is like a person a week,” a young tourist informed me on Zipolite beach one sunny day. We both looked off into the waves — they were rising around four feet up from the ocean surface before quickly crashing into [...]

Plane Crash in Ventanilla Mexico VENTANILLA, Mexico- The wing of a plane rose as an ominous monument in the distance down Ventanilla beach on the Oaxaca coast of Mexico. Plane crashes often leave more behind than parts and rubbish: they leave stories. This is perhaps for no other reason than plane wrecks often happen in [...]

ZIPOLITE, Mexico- I found a place of refuge from the storm of drunken Mexicans on Christmas holiday at the Posada Carrizo Hostel in Zipolite. The place is owned and ran by a sociable French woman who bought the land twenty years ago and built up a hostel and a restaurant. “I saw a good opportunity [...]

ZIPOLITE, Mexico- Business as usual was the carol that was sung on Christmas 2010 in Zipolite — a beach town on the coast of Oaxaca. All the shops were open, people went to work, and tourists walked through the street as if this holiday was just another day at the beach. It was. I could [...]