The secret’s out: if you really want to enjoy Barbados, skip the pricey resorts and leathery tourists on the west coast of the island and Go East Young Surfer! to the real Barbados.

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

Home to one of the hemisphere’s premier (yet little known) surf spots, “much of the eastern and southern coasts already have the trappings of a laidback surfer town — makeshift beer bars, street food vendors selling 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 write a story about hanging out and surfing on a beach paradise just hours away from my home by plane. I will spite you and find my own beach paradise on the Emerald Isle and do a little surfing myself, perhaps I’ll even make the local news when I’m helivaced to the nearest frostbite treatment center.

The post Why The East Coast Of Barbados Is, Like, Totally Better Than The West appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.