Fifty Days in Paradise

As I can’t think of a proper excuse for not writing long ago, I won’t even attempt to explain my failure to drop you a line. Let’s just say “better late than never,” and move on from there. Furthermore, I apologize in advance for the millions of mistakes I’m bound to make in this column. So here goes. . . .

In the middle of Two Terrorists Meet (S. Psinakis, 1981), after a pleasant lunch of binagoongang baboy with chilies and coconut milk, and looking forward to an afternoon of welcome quiet . . . I pause to tap out a letter of puzzlingly pleasant despair. 

Today I lost a dear friend — my digital voice recorder from the Sharper Image. It has been with me since my wife got it from her previous employer five years ago, listening and documenting valuable words of wisdom from local icons and characters like Louie Ysmael and Rene Knecht. It has survived many dark storms, dangling in the pocket of my cargo shorts as I tagged along with the Manila Sports Car Club on their Nautical Run across six islands in two weeks. It has been with me all over the Philippines and in various parts of the world, through thick and thin, good or ill, and hell and high water. And today, after an extremely stressful turn of events, I think it may have finally kicked the bucket.  

The tragedy was especially painful because at the time of its death, the recorder contained six hours of data I needed for a big story I was writing for Rogue magazine. I had interviewed six members of the Boracay establishment — those two dozen or so men and women who comprise the island’s original community; folks who were born and raised there, folks from Iloilo and Manila who discovered the place in the ’60s and ’70s, and folks who migrated there from far-reaching points on the globe. An interesting lot, to say the least, and for an interesting variety of reasons—which is why I decided to find out as much as I could about them, and use the information to produce a special feature for the summer issue (April).

Or you could say I just wanted to spend a lot of time on the island — which I did, around 50 days in five separate trips since October. But my attraction to the island stemmed from more than just slothful reasons; I felt like I needed to experience it fully before it disappeared into the clutches of commercial development, which is happening rapidly as we speak. I had only been to Bora a handful of times before then so I was hardly an insider, and I felt like there was this incredibly unique and beautiful world right under my nose that I hadn’t yet fully explored and embraced.

Discovering paradise does not happen very often — almost never. Tourists don’t discover paradise when they go to places like the Maldives or Bora-Bora, they merely visit it. Discovery is when you find it first, which is what the people I interviewed did. What is fascinating about Boracay is that it is a new island; an innocent child thrust into the spotlight too early and corrupted, like Drew Barrymore. It was really only discovered in the ’60s, and before that there was nobody there but natives and itas. So it must have been interesting for a group of people to come together at the right time, find this beautiful place, and slowly build a small community that is now a major Philippine city. They were pilgrims and pioneers that brought civilization to Boracay, along with a what-me-worry vibe that developed into a full-blown culture. They brought tourism into the island by renting out nipa huts on the beach and opening small bars and restaurants; and they created a mystique by simply living their lives.

Not seizing the opportunity to time-travel to a special place through the various encounters I’ve had with these people is something only a fool would take upon himself. So through friends from the island who I already knew like Bong and Amanda Tirol, Binggoy Remedios, Juan and Bianca Elizalde, and Freida Dario and Mark Santiago; and friends who had been frequent and longtime visitors like Teddy Montelibano and Katrina Tuason-Cruz, I’ve established contact with the island’s most significant inhabitants — the people that discovered it, built it, and defined it. My family and I have forged meaningful friendships with some of them, but I’ve spent some time with all of them, usually in their homes or places of business, listening to their stories and imagining what it was like to discover a place like Boracay.

It would take reams of paper to develop this subject to fulfillment, but I’m glad that I am able to talk about it here, and build Rogue’s summer issue around it. The entire project turned out to be a fascinating character study, and a cultural diagnostic of an island that is both rare and new. There are very few islands in the world that possessed the natural qualities of what is widely accepted as true paradise: a seven-kilometer-long dog-bone-shaped little gem sparkling in the sun amid thousands of other isles in a tropical archipelago, blessed with what could accurately be described as “the perfect beach” — four kilometers long and wide as a five-lane highway, sand that’s soft as powder and white as snow, surrounded by cool, clear turquoise water and lined with hundreds of coconut trees, some of them so old they can barely stand up straight, succumbing instead to the weight of gravity and drooping down to almost kiss the sand.

In closing, I must say that all that is in serious danger of croaking, if people don’t stop building hotels or somebody provides a way to clean up their waste. Damage has already been done; the question is whether substantial efforts are being made to prevent any more. Some locals are hopeful, saying that the man in charge of the island, General Gil, appointed to lead a task force under the Department of Tourism, is a no-nonsense kind of guy determined to clean up the island and bring back the glory it enjoyed before the ’90s. But this is a can of worms that needs more time to pry open, and more research. I’ll just have to go back there and find out some more.