The ferry from Puerto Juárez takes about 20 minutes across open water that smells of diesel and warm salt. You step off at the main dock on the southern end of Isla Mujeres and walk north through a town of golf carts, painted concrete, and fish taco counters running at full speed by 8am. Three … Lire plus
The road north from Laoag runs straight through flat sugarcane country before it bends toward the coast at Bangui Bay. That’s where you first see them: a row of wind turbines turning hard in the same direction, every one of them, all year long in season. The same wind pressing those blades is the wind … Lire plus
At 7:30am on the beach in El Nido town, four clusters of wooden bangka boats load simultaneously, each tied with a different colored rope. Outboard exhaust mixes with the smell of low tide and salt-wet rope. Every tourist is heading into Bacuit Bay, and almost none of them knows the passengers in the next boat … Lire plus
The boat from Ko Phi Phi Don takes about 20 minutes across water that smells of diesel and salt. Everyone on deck has the same image loaded in their phone: pale sand, vertical limestone, Leonardo DiCaprio. That film is 25 years old. The beach it made famous was closed entirely from 2018 to 2022 because … Lire plus
In 2004, Time magazine named Radhanagar Beach the best beach in Asia. That sentence still appears on nearly every hotel booking page within 12 kilometers of the jetty. What it never mentioned: the beach sits on an island 37 miles northeast of Port Blair, behind a ferry schedule the monsoon occasionally overrules. It never explained … Lire plus
At 6:15am on Lanikai Beach, the sand is still cool enough to feel through your sandals. The two Mokulua Islands sit dark against an orange sky. And nobody is here yet. That’s not luck. Lanikai faces almost due east, and the Koolau Range, rising above 3,000 feet directly behind the neighborhood, blocks the northeast trade … Lire plus
At 7am on Matira Beach, the sand is still cool under your feet. A resort tender motors past maybe 200 yards offshore, six guests in white robes headed toward a snorkel excursion. Those guests paid close to $1,000 a night for that view. The bicycle that got you here cost $10, rented near the Vaitape … Lire plus
The name is on every booking site, every resort billboard, every rum-punch menu from one end of Negril to the other. Seven Mile Beach. It carries the authority of a fixed geographic fact. Walk the sand from Bloody Bay south toward the West End cliffs and you’ll start counting. The usable beach runs closer to … Lire plus
The catamaran from Varadero covers roughly 100 miles southwest and lands on Cayo Largo del Sur somewhere around mid-morning. Four hundred people step onto pale powder sand, photograph water that is genuinely, improbably turquoise, and eat lunch under the palms. By 3pm the boat reverses. By 3:30 the beach is almost empty. The people who … Lire plus
Most visitors arrive at Pink Sands Beach around 11am and wonder if the photos were lying. They weren’t. But the sand is not going to perform on demand. The color comes from a single organism: Homotrema rubrum, a red foraminifera that lives on the undersides of coral and rock in shallow Caribbean water. When it … Lire plus