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
At 8:30am on a June morning, the south end of Anse Lazio is flat enough to reflect the granite boulders above the waterline. Forty meters north, past the curve where the beach bends toward the headland, the surface has texture, small swells pushed by a wind that’s been crossing the Indian Ocean since late April. … Lire plus
The viewing platform on Navagio’s northern cape is packed by 9am. Phones out, everyone angled toward the same shot: white cliffs, turquoise water, a rusting ship on gray-white sand. Nobody at the railing is wet. Nobody smells salt and iron. The photograph that made Navagio Beach one of the most recognized images in European travel … Lire plus
The direct flight from Boston to Ponta Delgada takes roughly 4 hours. That’s shorter than Boston to Los Angeles, and it lands you on a volcanic island sitting 850 miles into the Atlantic where the coast smells of salt and something faintly sulfurous. Most visitors rent a car, follow the scenic road past Lagoa das … Lire plus