An Ode to the Playa

Todos Santos is not considered a beach town, primarily because the town itself is located a kilometre inland and the paths to the beach a bit tough to navigate. This suits me just fine, because it means the swaths of golden sand are virtually empty every day. While swarms of daytrippers from Cabo wander around the town's quaint shops, celebrated art galleries, and the Hotel California, the beach we go to is only visited by a few "in the know".

It is my ideal kind of beach - no, make that my IDEAL beach - the perfect combination of many factors. First, the sand. It's all golden tiny spheres...soft, yet sturdy. Not talc fine. No bits of shell fragments, seaweed, or anything sharp. You can walk comfortably bare feet for miles without having to watch your step while your feet are treated to a sand pedicure. The sand is suitably deep and wide, and backed by palms and cacti-covered hills.

The slope of the sand creates endlessly mesmerizing thunderous waves, which subside enough at regular intervals to wade into and bob like a cork in the clear blue water. In sections, the waves have shaped dunes and valleys that create magical cross-currents and ebbs where the ocean meets the land. An area of boulders is heavily eroded into fantastical shapes with crevices that spill like mini waterfalls and rivers with each crash.

There are tiny crabs in the sand but otherwise the shore is devoid of anything that could sting, maim or just gross you out. I have a profound hate of slime and vegetation in the water, but there is none of that here. Being that there is so little development around and the currents so strong, there is no sewage-y cloudiness in the water that can occur at popular beaches. Offshore I can watch for whales breaching, pelicans sailing and dolphins jumping.

I guess there are as many types of beaches as there are beachgoers. This is not for the jet set people-watcher, or the family with toddlers who want to test their toes, or for the water sports fanatic (though a few km north the breaks are suitable for surfing). But for me - lazy, book-reading, memorized by the rhythms of nature me - it's absolute heaven.