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Snorkeling in Boracay
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Our Boracay Video
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Why Do Ladyboys Firedance in Boracay?
As I mentioned in a previous posting, after initially deciding not to go to Boracay, Janet and I changed our schedule and spent five days in the most popular tourist beach in the Philippines.
Boracay has a lot of pluses: a long, white beach; island hopping and snorkeling; decent restaurants and hotels; dinner served on the beach; nightly free entertainment; massage places every ten feet. You can eat and drink yourself to exhaustion (and I did).
After 5:30PM the beach is magically transformed into the Philippines largest and longest restaurant. Each restaurant and hotel gets a strip of beach and sets up tables. Cute Pinays call to you as you walk by to check out the menu or buffet. All you can eat buffets line the beach; you can typically eat all you want for $10 or less and many sell two drinks for the price of one.
Each night two of my strongest characteristics clashed; my fundamentally lightweight drinking vs. my cheap-assed love of the bargain. The latter generally won and my standard one San Miguel became two. Most of the buffets served lechon and Janet was overwhelmed by the notion of unlimited lechon, a concept far removed from her upbringing, where lechon is a prized treat only served on very special occasions.
As you can see from the photo, one buffet advertised “organic lechon.” When I asked what made the pig in question organic, I was told that it was fed vegetables. Sounds organic to me 🙂 Janet actually said that it tasted different from standard lechon, but that didn’t stop her from going back for seconds.
As darkness set in and the tables filled with patrons, the music and entertainment began. The Philippines, known as one of the karaoke capitals of the world, where romantic 70s music is revered as if brand new, is also a hotbed of very talented singers and musicians. Go to most Asian cities and you will see imported Filipino musicians. On the beach in Boracay the musicians were plentiful and of good quality; that is if you’re an old fart like me and want to hear the tunes of yesteryear.
But in addition, bands of fire dancers entertained and generally brought in bigger crowds than the singers. The fire dancers in the Philippines are almost always ladyboys. I asked Janet why most fire dancers are ladyboys and got what would in the West be a politically incorrect answer; something about their loose limbed style of movement.
For that matter the moniker, ladyboy, would be highly incorrect here, yet the term is pervasive in Asia. Considering the Philippines is a conservative and Catholic culture, ladyboys, and indeed all manner of “alternative” cultures are accepted and enjoyed in the Philippines. I am not saying that they are as accepting as we aspire to be in the West, but I suspect that they are more accepting than we actually are.
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I really love snorkeling and so island hopping is something that I look forward to when I come to the Philippines. Because I had injured my finger the first day we arrived and the doctor that patched me up discouraged me from getting into the ocean for a week, Boracay was my first opportunity to snorkel.
You can hop on a boat with a bunch of other people or find a private boat, which is what Janet and I did. The prices are reasonable and in my experience the vendors do not conform to US laws; that is price fixing is the norm. I actually found the system to be a little bit different from when I was in Bora 3 years ago. I didn’t pay the boat; I was led to a table where I paid and was given an actual, real life, no shit receipt, after which we were taken to the boat.
The snorkeling was fun if not spectacular. I think the most fun was that after I climbed back on the boat after a tiring dive, I saw a man in a small kayak paddling toward the snorkeling boats. Who says Filipinos aren’t creative business people? The man rowed to each boat yelling “ice cream.” He had a cooler in the boat. Now if only he’d had a cooler filled with San Miguels.
One of the biggest negatives in Boracay is the price of hotels. I guess most tourists want a fancy hotel and room with all the amenities. If you need this you’re going to pay. Janet and I are too cheap for such luxury. I want a decent bed, aircon (it was April, which is summer in the Philippines) and a shower with decent pressure and warm water.
So, for the second time I stayed at the Island Jewel Inn. The room is the size of a postage stamp but it has all the amenities we want. It’s not right on the beach (maybe 200 feet away) and best of all it’s located in Station 3, which is a 10 minute walk away from party central and consequently a place you can actually sleep. Actually, best of all is that at $50/night, it met our cheap-assed traveling budget.
Another improvement I noticed since three years ago is the process of transferring to Boracay. It’s still mass insanity but there is now a sense of organized insanity. Here’s how it works: you fly into Caticlan, take a car/van ride (just a few minutes) to a ferry, take the ferry to Boracay, and then a van from the ferry station to your hotel. Almost everyone sets up the transfer in advance. The transfer company grabs you right off the plane and tags your shirt like you’re a new student in the first grade. Hundreds of people are thrown into vans, then various ferries, and then onto other vans for the ride to your hotel. Only in the Philippines could such an insane system actually work. The price was not horrible, although every porter along the way wanted a tip. It ended up being easier just to grab our own bags.
Overall Janet loved Boracay, but after 5 days we’d both had enough and were anxious to get back to something that resembled the real Philippines. More on that with my next installment.
One more positive regarding Boracay. Before our trip I had scheduled my annual physical for the week we arrived home. When we got home I was worried. After all, I spent three weeks eating and drinking. I am a lightweight drinker and literally had more beer than I have ever consumed. I figured my blood work would be through the roof. Imagine my surprise when the tests came back with my cholesterol down and the doctor saying “whatever you’re doing, keep it up.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that what I was doing was eating pork, drinking like a fish and chasing my young wife 🙂
Back to the Beach (Boracay)
“Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.” Michael Corleone, Godfather III.
So in our last episode of As the PI Turns, my frugal and lovely wife had decided not to go to Boracay and I booked five days in beautiful Camiguin.
That meant that the first week of our upcoming three week vacation was set. The last week would be spent in Alcoy, Cebu, Janet’s wonderful home town on the beach.
This left six days in between. While nothing had been booked we had a tentative plan. OK, truth be told – I had a tentative plan; a few days on the West side of Cebu, checking out Moalboal and the falls at Badian, and then taking the bus south to the tip of Cebu and crossing into Negros and heading for Dumaguete. A day on Apo Island, across from Dumaguete was a strong possibility. Then cross back into Cebu again, heading north about an hour to Alcoy. Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together!
Now, it just so happens that my good friend and mentor, Pete, had taken his lovely Filipina wife, Cathy, to Thailand for a much needed vacation. For days we got to see the great pictures on FB of their trip to Bangkok and Phuket. Janet and I spent a week in Thailand a couple years ago and had a good time – although I always thought I had a bit better time than Janet did.
For one thing Janet struggled with the Thai food, which is much spicier than anything in the Philippines. But her biggest issue was that virtually every Thai person we met took one look at Janet and assumed she was Thai. They immediately began speaking Thai to her – I mean every single person – for a week! She looked like a deer in the headlights. I’d have to come in and say, “She’s not Thai. She’s Filipina,” which would create a surprised response, each one claiming how much Janet looked like she was Thai. Frankly, some looked at us as if they thought I was lying.
So, I was a bit surprised when she suddenly said, “We have six days. Maybe we should go to Bangkok.” It took me a pained minute to change the focus of my brain, but I quickly adjusted. Over dinner I began looking at flight schedules. After all, she reasoned, we would be in the Cebu airport in the early morning after returning from Camiguin; we might as well stay there and go somewhere else. I checked flights for Thailand, Vietnam (where I spent a wonderful week several years ago, before meeting Janet), Bali, Singapore, Hong Kong. I even checked out what it would take to get to Beijing, a place I have always wanted to visit.
In each case there were layovers that meant that we wouldn’t arrive at a destination until early the next day. While I was excited about the possibility of taking Janet to another country, I was not excited about spending a day in another airport. The six days would essentially end up becoming four.
I went to the website of my favorite Philippines airline, Cebu Pacific, the airline with bright orange planes, cute orange flight attendants, and a slow as Philippines molasses website. I began just typing in the destinations listed on the website for any destination that might coordinate with our schedule.
And then, just for fun, I checked out flights to Boracay. Now remember, just a couple weeks before, wise Janet had rejected Bora because of it’s $500+ airfare for the two of us. But here I plugged in my dates, just a week later than what I had looked at before, and to my surprise discovered that the flights were $200 less. For me it was just an intellectual exercise; a curiosity. I mentioned it to Janet.
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Well you guessed it. “Let’s go to Boracay!” she declared.
“But you just said two weeks ago that you didn’t want to go. That after all it was only a beach with snorkeling and island hopping on a crowded touristy island.”
“But it’s much cheaper now.” Of course cheaper is relative. The flight’s cheaper than Thailand, cheaper than Vietnam and all the other countries. And $200 cheaper than it was for the previous week. Suddenly, Boracay was a steal!
I am nothing if not a devoted husband, determined to keep his wife happy. I booked the flight and booked the Island Jewel hotel, the hotel I had stayed at once before, as I detailed in our last episode. We will spend four days in Boracay, leaving two days left for a quick stop in Moalboal and Badian before our return to Alcoy.
The saying goes, “Happy wife – happy life.” Well I’m happy too. The GoPro ought to get a pretty good workout!
Addendum: I will be doing some video blogs of the trip, so get ready to see the real Philippines; or at least the real PI from my warped perspective.
Camiguin and I Win Big Time!
It’s about two months till we return to the Philippines. As excited as Janet is to see her family and home, I may be even more excited! I really like the place and can’t wait for some serious heat and humidity. I’m ready to tear my coat off, throw on some sandals, shorts and shades and soak in what’s become my second home.
Our vacation will entail three weeks in the Philippines. The last week is easy. We’ll spend it in Alcoy, Cebu, Janet’s hometown, with her family. I am looking forward to seeing them again and looking forward to seeing Alcoy again – it’s a beautiful spot. And it makes Janet happy to be there and I will get the credit – so there’s that, as well.
But what to do for the two weeks before then? We had been considering many options and had in fact asked all of you for opinions. Thanks to those who weighed in. Finally, one recent evening I suggesting to Janet that we needed to pry ourselves away from Facebook long enough to make a decision.
It wasn’t long into the discussion before Boracay came up. Now in some ways this would be a natural vacation consideration. Boracay is, after all, the best known and most popular tourist destination in the Philippines. Many lists include it among the best beaches in the world. For many Filipinos/as Boracay is a dream destination, since by Philippines standards it’s expensive and most Filipinas never get to go, unless they’re attached to a rich kano 🙂
But for Janet and I the name Boracay holds a bit more weight. You see, I’ve been to Boracay before, prior to meeting, falling in love with and marrying Janet. And most significantly, I was in Boracay with another girl.
But for Janet and I the name Boracay holds a bit more weight. You see, I’ve been to Boracay before, prior to meeting, falling in love with and marrying Janet. And most significantly, I was in Boracay with another girl.
So for us it’s not even an issue of what a nice white sand beach Bora has (it does) or whether it’s overcrowded with Chinese and Korean tourists (it is). The issue is “you took ‘her’ to Boracay.” This remark comes up perhaps every couple months and invariably I say, “I am happy to take you there if you’d like. We can go on our next visit.”
Now between you and me, here’s my honest appraisal of Boracay. The white beach is beautiful but it’s mobbed. It’s like Atlantic City when I was a kid. Bora is exciting and island hopping is fun. But I’m too damn old to need so much excitement and guys will ask you “Island hopping, Sir?” at least 10 times an hour as you walk the beach or boardwalk, until you wish they’d island hop themselves off the island or at least out of your way.
All this said, I liked Boracay, and would be happy to take Janet, but it’s not the be all and end all. It’s a fun place to go if you’re a tourist looking for fun and sun, but if you want to see the real Philippines – Boracay ain’t it.
As far as the notion that it’s expensive, it’s really not that bad. Decent hotels can be had for as low as $50/night (I’ll get to that soon) and you can eat dinner on the beach for under $10. Drinking and partying yourself silly every night might be another matter, but I’m not much of a drinker.
What is expensive about Boracay – is getting there. Cebu Pacific, my local favorite airline, has many flights a day from Cebu to Bora. They have an interesting way to market your trip. The flight to Bora is cheap, but getting off the island and back to Cebu is expensive!
Anyway, Janet and I had broken away from Facebook long enough to talk and decide to spend some time in Bora. I pulled up Agoda’s website (my fave hotel site) and we looked at many hotels. Janet’s only criteria was, “I don’t want to stay where you took her!” I readily agreed.
We did what we have done many times before; looked at prices and hotel reviews. Sometimes the price was right but the reviews sucked and other times it was the other way around. We are middle of the road travelers. Unlike our good friend, Jim, who declares as a badge of honor, “Life is too short to stay in a cheap hotel,” our motto is “Money is too tight to piss it away on a space we’re not going to spend time in.” So we want a nice bed, reasonable amenities, and aircon (April is summertime in the Philippines). And if breakfast is included that’s a big plus.
After looking at about a dozen hotels, Janet spotted one that was cheap and had a great Agoda review score.
“Let’s look at that one,” she said.
“Hmm. Maybe not, baby,” I quietly responded. “That’s the one I went to before.”
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Now, this is my worst nightmare come true. But I did as I was told and showed her the pics of the hotel and the reviews which are uniformly good. Most importantly, at $51/night with breakfast included, by Bora standards, the place is a steal. Plus it’s located at Station 3, which if you’ve every been to Bora, is away from the heart of the party madness.
Well, you guessed it. Janet liked the place and said, “Let’s stay there. Just not the same room,” she added giggling. I rolled my eyes, imagined the upcoming potential OA moments (OA means “over acting” for those not married to a Filipina) and agreed. “Book it now,” she said.
“No no. First I have to make sure we can get the flights, then I’ll book the hotel.”
So I left Agoda behind and proceeded to Cebu Pacific’s website. As I mentioned before, I like Cebu Pacific. I like their cheap fares, number of flights, cute orange planes, and cuter orange clad Flight Attendants. I love the games they play onboard; I even won once. But their website – that’s all Philippines. It’s convoluted and incredibly slow. The fare starts out very cheap, but as you click each page more charges are added; taxes, baggage charges, seat assignment charges, etc.
But this night was as slow as I’d ever seen the website work. Each click took about 5 minutes to get to the next page and with each page the price grew. Now I had explained many times to Janet that the airfare to Bora was expensive but here she was seeing it – and seeing it in slow motion. As minutes would go by between page refreshes she would exclaim, “OMG that’s expensive.”
“It’s OK ,” I’d respond. “We want to go. We’ll have a great time.”
Finally after 20 minutes staring at the Cebu Pacific site as it moved in Filipino time, it became clear to Janet (I already knew) that the airfare from Cebu to Boracay for two would top $500. She announced, “It’s too expensive. I don’t want to go.”
“It’s OK, baby. We can afford it.” But I could see her mind at work. I could tell she was thinking about what we could do with $500. Actually I figured she was thinking about all the clothes she could buy at Ayala Mall for $500!
“I don’t want to go there,” she announced.
“Are you sure,” I asked her several times. She was more adamant each time.
And that’s how we decided to spend five days in Camiguin. Total round trip airfare from Cebu to Camiguin for two = $160.
And if you don’t think that Camiguin is a total winner, check out this video. I already know I’m a total winner!