Why The East Coast Of Barbados Is, Like, Totally Better Than The West

The secret’s out: if you truly want to appreciate Barbados, skip the expensive resorts and leathery visitors on the west coast of the island and Go East Young Surfer! to the authentic Barbados.

As Danielle Pergament explains in her piece in this Sunday’s NYT (try to remember her? we blogged about her appearance — with video — at the NYT Travel Present this year), “sequestered from the posh resorts by acres of sugar cane fields, thick, verdant forests, and trees total of wild monkeys, [the west coast ] is Barbados’s rougher side.”

Dwelling to one of the hemisphere’s premier (however small known) surf spots, “much of the eastern and southern coasts currently have the trappings of a laidback surfer town — makeshift beer bars, street foods vendors offering fried fish, and cheap guesthouses with blue painted walls.”

Thanks Danielle, just in time for my trip to rainy Ireland you have to go ahead and publish a story about hanging out and surfing on a beach paradise just hrs away from my dwelling by plane. I will spite you and come across my own beach paradise on the Emerald Isle and do a little surfing myself, maybe I’ll even make the nearby news when I’m helivaced to the nearest frostbite therapy center.