The Enchanted Island Of Boracay – Breaking The Spell

by Maria Z. (Russia)

Making a local connection Philippines

I remember it as if it were yesterday… It is nine o’clock in the morning and I’m standing in the middle of an azure lagoon up to my waist in water. I slowly turn around and face lush greenery of tiny Diniwig beach with straw-roof bungalows and slender palm-trees in the midst of white powdery sand. It’s stunningly quiet and I can’t help but imagine that this must be the heaven on Earth. It feels like I’m hanging in the air between the sky and the ground, alone in the entire world. The water around me is incredibly calm and smooth like a mirror, so that it feels odd, almost wrong, to disturb its glassy surface. Then, a small motorboat rushes into the bay nearly knocking me on the head and makes the sea wrinkly with waves. The illusion is gone and without further doubts I splash into the water producing millions of brilliant sparks around me. This is the first day in Boracay for our small family; we flew in last night after a long trip with a stop over in Manila. A small airplane brought us to the village of Caticlan, from where we caught a boat that didn’t seem very reliable. As precarious as they seem these boats used to be the only means of transportation between Boracay and the rest of the world and the locals are very skillful in handling them. We disembarked the boat up to our knees in water. I kept thinking of pirates and adventure books. When the darkness fell, myriads of the stars appeared in the velvet sky and we saw a cosmic view that city dwellers never ever get to observe. We stayed at the small inn, which we online and loved its secluded location on the small and cozy Diniwig beach, a 20-minute walk from the White Beach - 4 kilometers of snow-white coral sand that is considered to be one of the best beaches in the world. We’ve soon got acquainted with the hotel owner – Jimmy, a tall Swiss in his early 50s who loves talking about the older days of Boracay. The island is Jimmy’s passion, the love of his life and his home. Some twenty years ago Boracay was nothing more than an unknown, undeveloped and unappreciated island put on the map by backpackers who were captivated by the island’s virgin beauty. Young people from the West - students, artists, adventurers, Krishna worshipers and out-and-out eccentrics, came here to camp and party under the southern stars. Together with the local residents they made up the cheerful and carefree population of Boracay in those days. No one knew about Boracay then; there weren’t even proper maps. The telltales of the magic island circulated among backpackers’ crowd and directions were given by word of mouth just like in the movie, The Beach. There was no electricity, no transportation, no hotels. The visitors stayed in tents, or at the locals’ houses. The whole life was one big beach party. Jimmy came back some 15 years later after his first visit to Boracay. He bought a lovely Filipino style house and settled down on the Diniwig beach. Quite a number of former backpackers did the same thing. Along the rocky shore on the western part of Diniwig beach one can see their houses, the owners have to repair them pretty much after every big typhoon. A lot has changed since then. The island is too expensive for backpackers now, and the entire atmosphere has changed. “The island is just this big,’ says Jimmy, ‘we have to either control the number of visitors or turn into a cheap crowded and polluted resort. We can’t accommodate, transport and entertain all these tourists at once.” In April 2018, Boracay was closed for travellers for six months to rehabilitate and resovle numerous environmental issues. Today, the island is recovering, but it’s no longer that enchanted fragment of paradise that I’d had a chance to see. I will never forget that overwhelming feeling of being one with the endless ocean of water and stars. I see it in my dreams sometimes.