BY ROBIN HEMLEY
At the Caticlan airport on our way back from Boracay, my six-year-old daughter Shoshie got nabbed with a small bag full of seashells. Most of them were little pieces of bleached coral, nothing anyone but a six-year-old would think worthy of picking up. The policeman who found the contraband was all smiles and apologetic, but something seemed to be going on in his eyes, suggesting that he was weighing options. “Where are you traveling?” he asked my wife, Margie.
“Manila,” she said, and I thought, yes, good, that’s the right answer. We’re not even taking the shells out of the country. If she had answered America, would that have been the wrong answer? What did it matter where we were traveling if we couldn’t bring shells from Boracay.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “Bawal (forbidden).” But then he looked around. Other people were watching. He placed Shoshie’s seashells under the table.
I want to bribe you, I thought, but didn’t voice. Not that I’d do it in front of Shoshie, but yeah, I would have given a lot for that bag. On the other hand, I applauded the effort to protect Boracay for future generations—it’s a slippery beach. Everyone has done such a great job of protecting Boracay that it’s understandable why the line needs to be drawn with my daughter’s bag of broken seashells.
The problem with Boracay as with all beautiful places, is that everyone wants a seashell, and there aren’t so many left.
For years, Boracay has been touted as one of the best beaches in the world. The New York Times recently named it one of the 44 places to go in 2009, “the new Phuket.” Something about that phrase doesn’t sit right, though truly, it does have an amazing beach, with the finest white sand I’ve ever seen, warm turquoise waters, and a gently sloping beach, no sudden drops.
The tiny four-mile long island was discovered hundreds if not thousands of years ago by the Ati, a small group of indigenous Negritos whom I’m wagering never thought of it as “the new Phuket.” The Japanese next discovered it, one of their “44 Places to Conquer in 1944,” and built a small airstrip on it. Discovered again by a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s, this young woman relayed her discovery to my friend, Michael Parsons, an actor and amateur pilot who flew down the next weekend, landed on the Japanese airstrip, and two weeks later, decided to build a house on it.
The latest discoverers of Boracay are the Siberians. Tall women who look like Paris Hilton knockoffs stroll “D’Mall in the company of husbands and boyfriends and children, to the strains of every Bob Marley song ever recorded. Four years ago “D’Mall” was as laid back as its name suggests, a few boutique stores, a restaurant or two. Now a kind of Ferris Wheel turns in its center, and it’s packed with expensive tourist shops, restaurants, and bars, including the Manila transplant, The Hobbit House, a folk-music bar that famously employs, “The Smallest Waiters in the World,” as their tee-shirts proclaim. Hookers, too, have discovered that Boracay is the new Thailand, and they vie for customers at night along the walkways, as do the men and women holding menus in front of restaurants, and the locals offering to take you jet skiing, para-sailing, banana boating, snorkeling, wind surfing, diving, island hopping, as well as the children on the beach who, after building a sand castle, tug at your arm, yelling “Donation, Donation!!!”
I couldn’t help feeling during my most recent visit a little sad that the lovely little island I had discovered in 1999 was no longer. A six month moratorium on new building on Boracay simply delayed the inevitable a few months back, and now new resorts and hotels are rising unabated—the Shangri-la hotel will open this year with 219 rooms, a 61,000 square-foot spa and its own private bay—in a country that makes the list of the most corrupt year after year, concern for the environment is brushed aside routinely by greed.
Those who care and speak out are ignored or receive death threats, as architect Felino Palafox Jr. did when he withdrew from a $120 million casino-hotel proposed by a Korean company with the wonderfully ironic name, Grand Utopia Inc. His offense? He reportedly refused a million-dollar bribe offered by corrupt officials of the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority so he’d ignore the cutting of 320 trees in virgin forest. Right now, in the Cagayan Valley, thousand-year-old Podocorpus trees are being dug up and illegally shipped to Taiwan and Hong Kong to grace the houses of rich businessmen. They’re just going to waste in the forest anyway.
Happily, the government of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has fixed its own blind eye (but with laser precision and breathtaking creativity) on the seashell problem in Boracay. In 2006, someone in the government had the brilliant idea to declare Boaracay “agrarian and forest land.” Never mind that it wasn’t and hadn’t been for years. There’s a scene in Woody Allen’s 1971 film “Bananas” in which a power-mad dictator tells everyone that from now on all underwear will be worn on the outside of their clothing. This was the environmental equivalent of the Underwear Edict. No one really has title to the land of Boracay, the argument goes, and it has never been reclassified as the new Phuket or the new anything else and so the government decided to give everything back to the Ati so that they could fish and hunt and farm on all the land once occupied by Ferris wheels and beach chairs with sunning Siberians.
Well, not exactly.
The government has assured resort owners that none of their resorts will be demolished. While I’m not clear how else to turn resorts into forest land and farms, I’m sure they’ll find a way to compromise and make everyone happy, with a few happier than others so that they can buy their own islands (there are more than 7,000 others here!) and collect all the seashells they can carry.
But I don’t want to be a KJ, a “killjoy” as my wife sometimes calls me. I could enjoy myself on Boracay. I was happy to be happy on the island, though it’s true that high tide is much higher than it was only four years ago and there’s a lot of dog poop on the beach now, and I spent a lot of time over my four days on the island picking up shards of glass from broken beer bottles so none of my kids or anyone else would slice their feet open.
I guess one of the remarkable things about humanity is that the status quo keeps changing. We can and do adapt to just about anything. My older daughters, Olivia and Isabel had never been to Boracay, and as its most recent discoverers, loved the place, especially 14-year-old Isabel. She spent most of her days in the water or skim boarding. And even my 17-year-old Olivia, who claims she's “not a beach person,” pronounced the beach “really beautiful.”
And that was good enough for me. I wandered over one night to The Hobbit House, where I drank a couple of beers with the owner, Jim Turner, who had come to the Philippines in 1962 as a Peace Corps volunteer and never left. He told me “D’Mall” was suffering from the economic downturn, but as far as I could see it was filled with free-spending Siberians. “I should have opened the place down here 10 years ago.” Jim, whom I’ve known for years, treated me to a Czech beer, and we chatted about all the changes the island has seen.
Walking the beach alone on my way home from The Hobbit House, a mile or so back to our rental, I passed the hotels that specialize in beach weddings (we saw four weddings in two days), past the transgendered fire dancer, past The Grotto, a coral outcropping covered by water during high tide, where a steady stream of Siberians snap photos during the day beside a cement statue of Mary, past the mansion of Freddy Elizalde who owns “D’Mall.” My beacon? A light in the distance, a restaurant sign, Kasbah.
But that night, I overshot it. The restaurant was closed, its sign off. I looked up in the sky and saw a shooting star, the first I’d seen in years. For a minute, I forgot to wish, then remembered, wished, and changed my wish, which seemed immediately to cancel out the possibility of either wish coming true, according to the Rule Book of Shooting Stars.
Essentially, like most humans, I’m greedy and dissatisfied and never know when to stop or what I truly want. I watched the space where the shooting star had been, hoping impossibly for another. In the distance, fireworks went off at a resort, leftover from New Years a couple of nights before. And beyond that, from some nightclub, two searchlights crisscrossing the sky as though looking for something special.
“Manila,” she said, and I thought, yes, good, that’s the right answer. We’re not even taking the shells out of the country. If she had answered America, would that have been the wrong answer? What did it matter where we were traveling if we couldn’t bring shells from Boracay.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “Bawal (forbidden).” But then he looked around. Other people were watching. He placed Shoshie’s seashells under the table.
I want to bribe you, I thought, but didn’t voice. Not that I’d do it in front of Shoshie, but yeah, I would have given a lot for that bag. On the other hand, I applauded the effort to protect Boracay for future generations—it’s a slippery beach. Everyone has done such a great job of protecting Boracay that it’s understandable why the line needs to be drawn with my daughter’s bag of broken seashells.
The problem with Boracay as with all beautiful places, is that everyone wants a seashell, and there aren’t so many left.
For years, Boracay has been touted as one of the best beaches in the world. The New York Times recently named it one of the 44 places to go in 2009, “the new Phuket.” Something about that phrase doesn’t sit right, though truly, it does have an amazing beach, with the finest white sand I’ve ever seen, warm turquoise waters, and a gently sloping beach, no sudden drops.
The tiny four-mile long island was discovered hundreds if not thousands of years ago by the Ati, a small group of indigenous Negritos whom I’m wagering never thought of it as “the new Phuket.” The Japanese next discovered it, one of their “44 Places to Conquer in 1944,” and built a small airstrip on it. Discovered again by a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s, this young woman relayed her discovery to my friend, Michael Parsons, an actor and amateur pilot who flew down the next weekend, landed on the Japanese airstrip, and two weeks later, decided to build a house on it.
The latest discoverers of Boracay are the Siberians. Tall women who look like Paris Hilton knockoffs stroll “D’Mall in the company of husbands and boyfriends and children, to the strains of every Bob Marley song ever recorded. Four years ago “D’Mall” was as laid back as its name suggests, a few boutique stores, a restaurant or two. Now a kind of Ferris Wheel turns in its center, and it’s packed with expensive tourist shops, restaurants, and bars, including the Manila transplant, The Hobbit House, a folk-music bar that famously employs, “The Smallest Waiters in the World,” as their tee-shirts proclaim. Hookers, too, have discovered that Boracay is the new Thailand, and they vie for customers at night along the walkways, as do the men and women holding menus in front of restaurants, and the locals offering to take you jet skiing, para-sailing, banana boating, snorkeling, wind surfing, diving, island hopping, as well as the children on the beach who, after building a sand castle, tug at your arm, yelling “Donation, Donation!!!”
I couldn’t help feeling during my most recent visit a little sad that the lovely little island I had discovered in 1999 was no longer. A six month moratorium on new building on Boracay simply delayed the inevitable a few months back, and now new resorts and hotels are rising unabated—the Shangri-la hotel will open this year with 219 rooms, a 61,000 square-foot spa and its own private bay—in a country that makes the list of the most corrupt year after year, concern for the environment is brushed aside routinely by greed.
Those who care and speak out are ignored or receive death threats, as architect Felino Palafox Jr. did when he withdrew from a $120 million casino-hotel proposed by a Korean company with the wonderfully ironic name, Grand Utopia Inc. His offense? He reportedly refused a million-dollar bribe offered by corrupt officials of the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority so he’d ignore the cutting of 320 trees in virgin forest. Right now, in the Cagayan Valley, thousand-year-old Podocorpus trees are being dug up and illegally shipped to Taiwan and Hong Kong to grace the houses of rich businessmen. They’re just going to waste in the forest anyway.
Happily, the government of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has fixed its own blind eye (but with laser precision and breathtaking creativity) on the seashell problem in Boracay. In 2006, someone in the government had the brilliant idea to declare Boaracay “agrarian and forest land.” Never mind that it wasn’t and hadn’t been for years. There’s a scene in Woody Allen’s 1971 film “Bananas” in which a power-mad dictator tells everyone that from now on all underwear will be worn on the outside of their clothing. This was the environmental equivalent of the Underwear Edict. No one really has title to the land of Boracay, the argument goes, and it has never been reclassified as the new Phuket or the new anything else and so the government decided to give everything back to the Ati so that they could fish and hunt and farm on all the land once occupied by Ferris wheels and beach chairs with sunning Siberians.
Well, not exactly.
The government has assured resort owners that none of their resorts will be demolished. While I’m not clear how else to turn resorts into forest land and farms, I’m sure they’ll find a way to compromise and make everyone happy, with a few happier than others so that they can buy their own islands (there are more than 7,000 others here!) and collect all the seashells they can carry.
But I don’t want to be a KJ, a “killjoy” as my wife sometimes calls me. I could enjoy myself on Boracay. I was happy to be happy on the island, though it’s true that high tide is much higher than it was only four years ago and there’s a lot of dog poop on the beach now, and I spent a lot of time over my four days on the island picking up shards of glass from broken beer bottles so none of my kids or anyone else would slice their feet open.
I guess one of the remarkable things about humanity is that the status quo keeps changing. We can and do adapt to just about anything. My older daughters, Olivia and Isabel had never been to Boracay, and as its most recent discoverers, loved the place, especially 14-year-old Isabel. She spent most of her days in the water or skim boarding. And even my 17-year-old Olivia, who claims she's “not a beach person,” pronounced the beach “really beautiful.”
And that was good enough for me. I wandered over one night to The Hobbit House, where I drank a couple of beers with the owner, Jim Turner, who had come to the Philippines in 1962 as a Peace Corps volunteer and never left. He told me “D’Mall” was suffering from the economic downturn, but as far as I could see it was filled with free-spending Siberians. “I should have opened the place down here 10 years ago.” Jim, whom I’ve known for years, treated me to a Czech beer, and we chatted about all the changes the island has seen.
Walking the beach alone on my way home from The Hobbit House, a mile or so back to our rental, I passed the hotels that specialize in beach weddings (we saw four weddings in two days), past the transgendered fire dancer, past The Grotto, a coral outcropping covered by water during high tide, where a steady stream of Siberians snap photos during the day beside a cement statue of Mary, past the mansion of Freddy Elizalde who owns “D’Mall.” My beacon? A light in the distance, a restaurant sign, Kasbah.
But that night, I overshot it. The restaurant was closed, its sign off. I looked up in the sky and saw a shooting star, the first I’d seen in years. For a minute, I forgot to wish, then remembered, wished, and changed my wish, which seemed immediately to cancel out the possibility of either wish coming true, according to the Rule Book of Shooting Stars.
Essentially, like most humans, I’m greedy and dissatisfied and never know when to stop or what I truly want. I watched the space where the shooting star had been, hoping impossibly for another. In the distance, fireworks went off at a resort, leftover from New Years a couple of nights before. And beyond that, from some nightclub, two searchlights crisscrossing the sky as though looking for something special.
only a foreigner would shed tears for the expected demise of boracay but not one of the "bahala na" pinoys.
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