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Published: March 9th 2013
Beautiful from far
But far from beautiful26 February - 5 March
The name Boracay conjures up dreamscapes of talcum powder white sand beaches, crystal clear sapphire waters, swaying palm trees and relaxation. The reality is quite different. I think this will be the great disappointment of Andrew's Asia trip. He has always wanted to visit this island which has been touted as having the most beautiful beaches in the world. It regularly gets awarded such accolades as "island of tranquility" " whitest beaches and clearest water in the world" "worlds best beach" etc. etc. by travel magazines and agencies. But this turns out to be a marketing fraud. To put it bluntly, Boracay is a cesspool - literally!!
The oxymoron that is beautiful Boracay:Rampant and unbridled over-development has left what must once have been a paradise in a state of abject decay. Boracay has been a victim of its own success. This tiny island of about 10sqkm lies off the coast of the much larger Panay Island and is reachable only by boat, but this has not kept the crowds at bay. Boracay saw the arrival of about 1 million tourists last year, peaking at around 75 000 at any one time. Besides this, it
Algal bloom
Turns White Sand Beach green and the water too has a permanent population of 12000. You don't need to be able to do the maths to see that this is not even nearly sustainable.
The coral reef around Boracay has been completely destroyed. Fishing has apparently been banned and a coral garden started, but this will take several generations to begin to show dividends, and only if it is furiously protected.
The town dump is almost the highest point on the island. There is a farcical effort at some kind of recycling programme, but this is obviously only for show and is not enforced. All the rubbish seems to end up in the same place, or somewhere on the side of the road fly tipped down a cliff or in a forest.
And then there is the sewage issue, which you can't miss if you have a nose on your face. On arrival from the jetty at our accommodation, we stepped off our tricycle into an ankle deep dam of sewage flowing directly out of the elementary school nearby. The smell! In the week that followed the dam drained partly and then grew again daily. We attribute the lack of civil service action to the pipe-laying
Algal bloom
Due to high fecal content in the water off Boracay works happening down the road, but then discover that the pipe layers are just pumping their sewage overflow straight onto Bulabog beach. The big problem here is that the sewage system is a waterborne system which is just over stretched and has reached breaking point. I am not naive about where the sewage goes in coastal areas. I grew up watching a pipeline to sea being built for this purpose and continued to swim at the beach, but in Boracay there is just too much shit going into the water - again, literally. The fecal content is so high that an algal bloom develops around the island turning the famous White Sand Beach into a slimy green carpet and the azure waters emerald. It has also been discovered, though not publicised, that with this algal bloom comes ecoli outbreaks. And we have heard stories about "allergies" to the sea water. Why is this being ignored? Because the management can't afford to risk the PHP 14 billion per annum turnover that tourism achieves on Boracay.
This leads us aptly to the next big issue:Boracay is also a place of political intrigue and corruption. When you begin to scratch the surface
you find all sorts of depravity and malfeasance. The most in-your-face manifestation of this ( besides obvious planning negligence) is the way in which the indigenous people are treated. The native inhabitants of Boracay and neighbouring Panay are the Ati people. They are the ancestors of the first wave of people to leave Africa. The same people who landed in Australia. They have been completely disenfranchised and lead a life of abject poverty, with very little access to education and health services. They have no land rights ( but then apparently no one on Boracay owns titled land, except maybe one well known politician; it is all just claimed and held) and the activist Dexter Condez, who was helping them fight for their corner of paradise, was shot dead for his efforts the day before we arrived. (There is quite a bit of assassination that goes on here in Boracay. It is not an unusual way of settling differences and erasing problems).There are 40 Ati families who live in an encampment right next to the new and highly publicised YOO designed development. I'm wondering who is benefitting from this....
Then the planning issues - apparently there are 150 demolition
orders on White Sand Beach alone, but no money to implement them... Go figure...
Or read this for some light entertainment:http://www.asianpacificpost.com/article/4223-brouhaha-boracay.html
We arrived in Boracay, expecting to spend 11 days relaxing on the beach and learning to kiteboard. We were booked into Blue Bayou Bungalows, run by Dian and Hans, and this was the best part of our Boracay experience. Blue Bayou offer basic but comfortable accommodation at very reasonable prices in a shady, easy and friendly environment. They are well situated in Bulabog area 5, near both the main beaches and have wonderful staff and breakfasts and gardens and chill out space. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them to anyone going to Boracay; but I would not recommend going to Boracay.
Maybe if I was twenty three and all I was after was cheap beer and a steady breeze for kite boarding, I would have loved it; alas, I am not.
As far as relaxing goes, it is nigh on impossible. The traffic is fierce - hundreds of tricycles and motorbikes and vans buzzing the main road and the narrow side roads; the beaches are generally over crowded and mostly dirty; the food is expensive
No smoking on the beach
One thing they've got right in Boracay and terrible - we ended up buying pot noodles and mangoes every night and having dinner at BBB; and the noise is inescapable - motorbikes, pumping music, dogs and those f****** roosters!!!
The kiteboarding setup seemed quite professional, but we ended up with Natural Kiteboarders, the new kids on the block, and didn't finish our course because it just became ridiculously expensive. Bulabog beach is also sooooo crowded that learning can be extremely intimidating among the hundreds of kites out there every day. We did do a trip to Panay, Union Beach, where Freestyle Kiteboarding have a camp, and that was a much better environment for learning. Anyway, we ended up paying £180 each just to fly some kites, which hardly seemed worth it.
On the positive side though, the smoothies available everywhere are generally great, but you have to ask for no sugar otherwise you get a double heaped tablespoon every time. The assortment of flavours is vast and interesting, but be prepared to pay London prices.
Baling Hai and the restaurant half way up Puka Beach have good food, as does the small local place on Bulabog 5 just past BBB. But again, you can't
Puka Beach
Far from the maddening crowds at White Sand Beach really get away with spending much less than £20.00 for a meal for 2.
There is a no smoking policy on the beach which seems to be mostly enforced and this is fantastic!
And the mangoes are sublime. Best in the world so far.
We have renamed White Sand Beach, Green Slime Beach; and Bulabog Beach, Plasticbog Beach; but there are still some pretty beaches on Boracay. We spent a day at the quiet far end of Puka beach, a wild and lovely place on the north side of the island where you can escape the crowd by walking a little way past the bancas ( local outrigger boats) that bring day trippers in, and finding a secluded shady spot under the verdant cliffs that tower over the sand at the western end of the beach.
Baling Hai on the west coast is another little gem of a cove which is only accessible through the Baling Hai Hotel grounds and you have to pay a couvert charge to enter, so it keeps the crowds out. The algae does not get so thick here and there is even some living sea weed and a couple of tiny
Stoffel & Pantoffel
On Puka Beach, Boracay fish to be seen from the swimming platforms anchored off shore.
If it wasn't for the ugly buildings on Ilig Iligan Beach, then this would be a beautiful and wild beach too.
Apparently there is a move to better things in Boracay. We met the lovely chairman of the Boracay Rotary Club and ardent Red Cross supporter and talked a bit with Dian and Hans, and they all still seem to believe in a positive future for the island. Lets keep our fingers crossed, because under the right management, this little island has potential. But, we are leaving early.....
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Donna and Neil
Donna and Neil
We so agree!
Very astute observations about Boracay. We have been going to Boracay over the last 6 years and have witnessed it's steady and (over the last year) more rapid decline. Anyone who says otherwise must be looking at it through rose-tinted glasses, as Boracay now doesn't even rank in our Top 20 of SE Asian beaches. There are a lot of Filipinos with good intentions but you are correct in that nothing will come to fruition because of the money factor involved and rampant corruption. Our last blog for Boracay highlighted similar issues to you have here and that was a year ago, it seems like things have declined even more.