Why Life on the Beach Just Hits Different: A Love Letter

From Madagascar to Malibu and Indonesia to Isla Holbox, many of this writer’s best memories have been in a swimsuit on a slew (and counting) of diverse and inspiring beaches around the world. Who needs monuments and museums when the seashore is a temple to the force of Mother Nature and the literal sands of time?

I WAS A BEACH BABY from the start, even though I grew up five hours from the Atlantic Ocean. For me, stepping onto plush sand and then into cool water is like a shot of serotonin. I always knew, someday, I would live close enough to smell briny saltwater and hear the crash of clear blue waves. From my now home in Bali, please allow me to send this love letter to beaches, explaining the long, sandy road via some of the best, most secluded or awe-inspiring in the world that got me here.

My obsession came alive early. Just months old, I ate handfuls of sand at a lake beach in Georgia, U.S.A., and a couple years later got my first kiss from a sandcastle-building toddler in Naples, Florida. I wanted beach 24/7 but only once in a while would my family journey somewhere like Hilton Head Island where my father taught us to make epic drip castles and bury each other in the sand. To me it might as well have been the Maldives. (You can imagine my amazement when I actually did experience the Maldives!) I wanted to live inside a Beach Boys song and be a “California Girl.”

So, when I started surfing in Malibu in my early twenties, I really thought I’d made it. A couple of years earlier, I had found ultimate freedom in Costa Rica, lazing in the sun by day, taking surf lessons with a Venezuelan Matthew McConaughey lookalike, and doing tipsy cartwheels and handstands on the wide beaches as the sun set in its blazing glory each evening. Ever since then, I’ve almost always chosen somewhere I could surf over, say, stroll among historic architecture. To me, the presence of an ocean only enhances the place. Take Morocco: rich, diverse and storied yet all the more dynamic because I was able to ride some of the longest, most perfect waves of my life at Imsouane’s Magic Bay.

All beaches are special and unique, like snowflakes scattered around the world. No single one is the best, yet with the right mindset, all of them are. There’s always opportunity to be awed. The star-shaped sand on Taketomi Island. The beauty of an E Ala E sunrise chant of gratitude from an outrigger canoe at Mauna Lani, which brought me to happy tears. The squeaky sound of the snow-hued Whitehaven Beach in the Great Barrier Reef. Sydney’s Bronte Beach, which served up the most immediate and exceptional access to a beach that I’d ever been privileged to have. (It was from this homebase that I walked portions of the Bondi to Coogee Walk, showcasing different ridiculously gorgeous beaches and novel ocean pools daily.) Cape Town’s windswept stretches of jewel-flecked water—they even have penguins.

Yes, the wildlife. So many of my memories are rooted in wonder-inducing encounters with animals unique to the beaches I’ve visited. I’ve tracked flamingos with my best friend on Mexico’s Isla Holbox. I was stunned at the kaleidoscope of marine life streaming by while drift snorkeling in French Polynesia. In Madagascar, at Time + Tide Miavana, I was as enchanted by the crowned lemurs who stared me down from trees as I was the surreal ways water moved over ripples of sand at the island’s edge. I never once imagined I’d sit bareback on a horse riding through aquamarine waves but when I did at The Sanubari on Sumba island I felt a surprising wave of calm and peace.

At Shipwreck Lodge on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, I spied elephant tracks while surf fishing. And from the rooftop of my favorite California hotel, The Surfrider Malibu, I once spotted a massive pod of dolphins and was able to run down with a SUP to paddle amid them and admire their ebullient leaps and twirls. I’ve been privileged to swim with whale sharks and manta rays, nurse sharks and penguins, and release hatchling sea turtles into the surf at sunset.

I now live in southern Bali in Uluwatu, a legendary but little-known-outside-Asia surf destination. Here’s why: on my first visit, I ate grilled fresh catch on Bingin Beach, floated in the crystalline azure of Thomas Beach, cut my bum on coral while swimming at Balangan, trekked breathlessly down to deserted Nyang Nyang, witnessed Hindu ceremonies on Padang Padang and fell completely head over heels in love with it all.

Indeed, the most romantic moments of my life have all taken place beside the sea. My husband proposed to me while we were on a surf camping trip at California’s San Onofre Beach, we eloped in Big Sur, and later celebrated our marriage with loved ones on the Wickaninnish Inn’s intimate Shell Beach in Tofino, Canada, a painterly pink sunset kicking off a flawless night of euphoric singalongs and dancing in the deep, soft sand.

My love affair with beaches truly came full circle when our daughter was four months old and we traveled to Hawaii Island. Like a rite of passage, she scooped and inhaled her first dollop of gritty, apparently delicious sand, just as I had as a baby. It’s for her sake that I now seek shade, not full rays, and we visit quieter beaches in early mornings—better to hear the waves and her exuberant squeals in response to hermit crabs, interesting bits of coral, and ankle-licking waves.

Whether or not we are old enough to be conscious of it, there is existential magic in those remarkable, ephemeral places where the world’s oceans slosh and crash onto sand broken down over millennia, where every factor—swell, tide, wind—is out of our control and in Mother Nature’s hands.

Hero image courtesy of Uluwatu Surf Villas. All other images courtesy of Kathryn Romeyn.