The Worst Beaches

Haina Beach photo courtesy of news.com.au.

This website is dedicated to bringing you the world’s best beaches. But, how can you recognize a best beach if you don’t know what makes a beach a worst beach? Allow me to enlighten you with these worst beaches reviews.

The worst beaches generally fall into 6 categories. Some beaches may fit in more than one, but all bad beaches have at least one of the following characteristics.

They are dirty. They may be covered with litter or the water may be very polluted or possibly both. Eeww!

Repulse Bay in Hong Kong has been nicknamed “Repulsive Bay.” Pollution from constant construction has caused frequent outbreaks of red tide algae growths that kill marine life. Red tide also smells bad.

Doheny State Beach in Orange County, CA is consistently found to have extremely polluted water.

Chowpatty Beach in India has the reputation for being extremely polluted.

Kamilo Beach in Hawaii is in the unfortunate position of being a repository for washed-up consumer waste from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a giant swath of floating debris from around the world. 90% of the garbage covering Kamilo Beach is plastic.

Haina Beach in the Dominican Republican is nicknamed the “Dominican Chernobyl” due to the tremendous amounts of lead and battery acid that have been dumped there.

They may be home to undesirable animal life.

New Smyrna Beach in Florida consistently sees more shark attacks annually than any other beach in the world.

Gaansbai Beach in South Africa is notorious for its large population of great white sharks. Chumming the waters to attract sharks for cage diving tourists doesn’t help the situation.

Cows roam the beaches in Goa, India where they can’t be removed because they are sacred.

They may smell bad. Possibly from pollution or stagnant water.

Marunda Beach in Jakarta is particularly odiferous due to the cooking oil dumped in the water from a nearby factory.

The sand may contain sharp objects, either natural or manmade or both.

Port Philip Bay in Melbourne, Australia is known as a beach where lifeguards spend most of their time combing the sand for syringes and broken glass.

It may be unsafe due to human misbehavior.

Blackpool Beach in England is a place you want to avoid due to the many surly, drunken youth regularly spilling out of beachside bars.

The beach may be severely overcrowded.

Xinghai Beach in China gets so crowded on sunny weekends some people have said it feels as if China’s entire population of 1.3 billion people has descended on it.

Dirty Beaches

Dirty beaches don’t only refer to unclean beaches. There’s a musician named Dirty Beaches. That’s his stage name; his birth name is Alex Zhang Hungtai. Dirty Beaches’ most recent album (11/2014) is Stateless, which is also the name of a song on the album. (Additionally, Stateless is the name of another band.) Prior albums include:

• Love Is The Devil
• Drifters
• Badlands, which includes the song Lord Knows Best
• Night City
• Horror
• Old Blood

To many joyful beach experiences!

— Lisa Dworkin