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17 reviews of Boracay

Charming Island

Excellent

Blessed with fine white sand beaches, Boracay is a place where people from everywhere find peace and tranquility. Walking through its long beaches is fun for the eyes, mouth and ears. There are a variety of activities here: diving, snorkeling and feeding the fish, kite surfing, kayaking, visiting the islands of Crystal Cove, Magical Island, etc. And for night-owls there are plenty of bars around the island where you can see live music and mixtures of the country's best-known DJs. I came back after three years to this sublime and charming place, I find it changed by the "invasion" of tourists but

The main attraction remains: the beauty of the landscape and human nature.
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+5

Full

Boracay lies limp, fragile like a soggy French-fry.

The moccasin-shaped island sits just two kilometers from Panay Island in the Philippines’ western Visayas.

Traditional bancas – wooden Flipino boats with outriggers designed for increased stability – line the pier waiting to ship truckloads of tourists over to the seductive sliver of sand.

I have arrived in the rainy season and venomous clouds have amassed over Panay and look ready to strike little Boracay, only seven kilometers long and one kilometer wide.

A motorized rickshaw drives me from Boracay’s harbor to my hotel. For a minuscule island, the traffic is intense. Exhaust fumes billow from parked vans and motorbikes; horns wail as piggish-coloured tourists dart across the island’s only road. Filipinos bustle about trying to get on with their day. Of all the photos I had seen of Boracay’s palm-fringed, chalk-white beaches, none of them showed what transpired on the other side: Raw life. Unlike other idyllic isles, Boracay seems a functioning albeit chaotic place but, perhaps, on its last legs.


I drop my bags and head to the beach. And yes, it is alluring: the sand’s white powder massages feet, the sea a million shades of green. Countless palm trees lean towards the water as if wanting to cool themselves. Retreating waves leaves the sand softer and polisher, a shiny coating. Dozens of blue sailboats wait at the sand’s edge daring visitors to head out into the darkening skies.

I walk the sandy pedestrian strip past dive shops, chicken restaurants, bar, tourist stalls, nightclubs, resorts, budget hotels, bungalows, travel agencies, hawkers, internet cafes, coffee joints and any other of the innumerable business dedicated to the sighing and sun-bathing tourist.

I talk to one Filipino man who reminisces about the island twenty years earlier when only a half-dozen hotels and a handful of foreigners graced it. It was intimate, hidden – an adult’s playground, he muses, eyes fixed with romance and nostalgia. A veritable Eden.

At night, the bars pulsate and shake with awful music and indecent inhibitions. It is perpetual spring-break. Mostly white bodies occupy the dance floor while those of darker complexion spin the tracks and serve the drinks. Cops patrol the beach trying to keep a semblance of order to an island where people do work and do live.

The island’s segregation intrigues me the most. The interplay between tourists who have come here to escape their lives and the locals who call here home remains fascinating. I wonder if the people who live here find the island a Paradise.

I later learn the island’s excrement is dumped on their side of the island.

As more and more people come to the island to live, to work and to play, these pressures could very well push this pretty strip of sand and trees and sea past its capacity.

A shame. But a story well-trodden. The rain starts to fall.
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+4

Unforgettable Experience

My trip to Boracay was an unforgettable experience. Landing at the small airport which was lost at sea, you see immediately how they people will do anything to please you, how you are led to your accommodation on another small island that is in front of your eyes ... The people who live there welcome in visitors, even when they live with little, in small half-built houses sometimes. Tourism is everything to Boracay. But tourism doesn't invade into everything, it still keeps a respectable balance with the environment so that the magic of this place is never lost. There the sun rises long before it does in the other places I visited and the days seem to always start a few hours earlier than planned.

That life is quiet, but also full of exoticism, and customs of a thousand things to discover in just 10 square kilometers. Boracay is a paradise that while opening itself up to tourism has never lost the essence of that word: Paradise.
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