Life’s A Beach

It's Summer in the Northern Hemisphere and that’s got me thinking of the beach. I really love the beach and wish I lived in a beach house where I could wake up to the sound of ocean waves every morning.

Of course, it’s still too soon to actually visit a beach because of the COVID pandemic and I’m not about to take that risk just yet. In situations like these, you can never be too cautious. Instead, I’ll just look through my travel album and only daydream about re-visiting some of these amazing beaches that I was fortunate to experience in my life. Why don’t you come along with me?

I can feel calm just by looking at the beautiful blue Southern Caribbean waters at Arashi Beach in Aruba. Ocean is my favourite colour.

THIS amazing black sand beach is at the Waianapanapa State Park in Maui. We visited this beach along the coastal drive on the road to Hana. The sand is black from the weathering and erosion of volcanic rock as well as the rapid cooling of hot lava that flowed towards the ocean and collided upon the crashing waves, only to shatter into a trillion fragments of soft black sand. We even got to walk inside the lava tubes nearby.

Here is a gentle and peaceful beach in Danang, Vietnam that we got to enjoy a few summers ago, during the off season with hardly anybody around.

So, I found one of those leaning coconut trees at a beach in Bintan, Indonesia. Did you know that coconut trees can grow towards the light, wind and water, so that they can better propagate their seeds to a new island when ripe coconuts fall?

There was a magnificent beach next to some Mayan ruins at Tulum Mexico. I love archeology as much as I love the beach because I'm always so fascinated by the ways of life in ancient human civilizations. It was truly a dream to see these archeological sites in person and it felt like I was time-travelling into the past!

CHEMISTRY OF SAND

At the beach, you will usually find sand. Sand is the resulting granular material arising from the erosion of larger rocks. Most of the sand in the world in its chemical form is made up of silicon dioxide molecules. See what it looks like in the Life's A Beach Tote. This would make a great beach bag!

Another type of sand is calcium carbonate, found on beaches where extensive coral reef ecosystems used to exist half a billion years ago. This variety of sand dominates the white sand beaches in the Yucatan Peninsula and Caribbean.

A very rare type of sand is composed of calcium sulfate that originates from gypsum and forms under special hot and dry climatic conditions. You can find this rare sand at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, United States.

Do you like the beach? Where is your favourite beach? Let me know in the comments below.