Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Eddie Waters, asks, I need to know about beaches. Who doesn’t love a great beach? In your travels, I would love to know which beaches you found the most beautiful, relaxing, welcoming, etc… The US beaches are being gobbled up by development and franchise restaurants. Where is the best beach experience in the world?

Well, Eddie, you are correct. Lots of people love a great beach, but what makes a great beach?

For starters, there is a finite amount of beachfront property in the world. Without getting into the very tricky question of how you measure a coast, which is an introduction to fractal mathematics, they really aren’t making many more.

Many of the prime beaches in the world have been developed. However, you’ll be happy to know there are a lot of beaches which have almost no development.

I remember being on a beach on a small island in Fiji that was about a long as a city block that I had all to myself. There wasn’t another person on the beach by myself.

When I was in the Solomon Islands, I visited an island called Rennell. Rennell gets almost no visitors and has a population of maybe 2000 people. When I was there, they took me to a beach that they said no one had visited in several years.

Most beaches, especially in tropical areas, are actually very similar. The sand is made out of eroded shells and coral, aka calcium carbonate.

What makes for a great beach isn’t necessarily the beach itself. It might be the community around it, the people you meet, or the experiences you have. There are some beaches which have great sand. There are a couple that come to mind. One is Flamenco Beach on the island of Culebra in Puerto Rico, and the other is many of the great beaches on the island of Anguilla. Again, I’m evaluating these just on the basis of the quality of their sand.

If you want to find a great beach, just go somewhere that isn’t a popular tourist destination. It is usually as simple as that. That compromises an enormous part of the world. You just need to do some research to find these places, and it really isn’t that hard.