The most bizarre beach I’ve visited was in 2008 on the North Island of New Zealand. After spending a perfect day in the crystal blue water of Coromandel’s Hot Water Beach, my travel companion and I moved 30-minutes up the coast to Thames. Hoping for more sandy fun we grabbed our towels, but instead of turquoise water and white sand, our beach was a deserted murky shoal where many creatures dotted the shoreline with their carcasses. Among the unlucky were oysters, fish of all kinds, stingrays, and a baby hammerhead. As this was my only visit to Thames, I would suspect an algae bloom or toxic spill, but I’m not ruling out that it’s simply a cursed beach.
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