(Written on April 27, 2008)

On Sunday morning, we woke up to find everything in Manila looking a little bit brighter, less frightening, and a lot easier to navigate.  It took us only a few minutes to solve all the problems that were scaring the living hell out of us the night before—how do we get money?  How do we get plane tickets? How do we get back to the airport without getting massively ripped off?  Anne compared the part of Manila where we were staying to Castlevania—during the day, the people are friendly and helpful and everything is really easy.  At night, though, under the cover of darkness, everyone turns into a monster and things are scary as hell.  In retrospect, I like it a lot.

One interesting anecdote from this was that when we were walking around the area that as I mentioned in my last post was pretty much lined with brothel/bars, we kept seeing help wanted ads for GROs—almost every bar-othel had one.  When we went to our travel agent to book our tickets for Boracay, I finally just broke down and asked “what is a GRO?”   The travel agent (whose whole family, including a 12 year old girl who was booking air tickets for some Australians) and her family just busted out laughing.  They told me to ask the taxi driver from the night before (the one who ripped us off so badly) who had just happened to show up at the travel agent to see if he could help us with ANYTHING else.  In broken English, he explained that a GRO was “a lady who does the naked dance… and OTHER things.”   GRO means “Guest Relations Officer” which I think is a very wonderful way of describing a prostitute.

Anyway, we got our tickets for just a few hours later, and immediately went to the airport.  The flight was in a tiny little prop plane that at times heaved and convulsed in ways that I’ve just never felt a plane move before.  We did arrive safely though to Caticlan (just a ferry ride away from Boracay).  The airport at Caticlan was like a tropical jungle airstrip, and looked like something out of a movie.  It was just so small and … well tropical.  From the airport, you get herded pretty quickly through all the steps and minor fees that it takes to get to boracay-  money for a tricycle, money for “environmental fee”, money for standing in the station, money for going through the jetty station, money for taking the ferry.

Pretty simple procedure, but of course, along the way, we ended up picking up a guy who was trying to get us to stay at his friend’s hotel on Boracay.  We’d been told that we’d often be offered places to stay and food and all that, but this guy just would not quit.  After taking the card for the hotel, he ended up following us on the ferry, talking the hotel up the entire way.  Basically, he was trying to just take us directly to the hotel before we could do anything else.  With some suave maneuvering, though we were able to ditch him, and avoid picking up another lady doing the same thing for a hotel called “Alice in Wonderland”.
We ended up going to Station 1 (of three boat stations) after we arrived, and decided that we should just get a hotel room really quickly for one night so that we could go out and have some fun.  About the first place we saw was called Casa Fiesta, and it looked small and homely, so we went and got a room almost immediately.  We paid a little more than what we probably should have—but it was the same price as the Worst Hotel In The World (last post), except this one was really clean and nice, and had a window that looks out on the beach.   Later on that night while we were laying up in the hotel resting, we saw a salamander crawl across the wall, and decided that, indeed, we must stay here for the rest of the trip.  Later on we negotiated a lower price AND a room upgrade to the second level with it’s own private balcony, overlooking the beach and the ocean (SCORE!).

On our first day, we went swimming in the ocean for a few hours, and played with Anne’s new camera that has an underwater housing.  We also walked up and down the beach, which is a bit touristy.  The touristy bit has its benefits and drawbacks.  Things are more expensive and it’s not as private as we’d have liked and it’s a bit noisy sometimes, but at the same time, there are hundreds of restaurants, and little bars with tables on the beach, and access to doing all sorts of things from parasailing, to scuba diving, to renting little dune buggies.  White Beach, the touristy beach where we’re staying, also is consistently ranked in the top five beaches in the world.  This is not an exaggeration.  Sure, I don’t remember anything about my first trip to a beach when I was two, but I can’t imagine a beach that could possibly be nicer.  The sand is bright white and has the consistency of flour—no rocks or anything.  The water is crystal clear and has a perfect blue hue (like a swimming pool, except blue from the reflection of the wonderful sky, not the plastic liner.  The water is warm, and you can wade out about 50 yards before it gets deep enough to submerge your head.  Absolutely incredible; you’ll really just have to look at the pictures to see what I’m talking about.  Also, White Beach is just a hop away from more private beaches that you can get to by tricycle that are just as beautiful, but maybe have a few more rocks in the sand and the water has a bit more waves (and no restaurants or hotels or anything).  With just a few less people, White Beach would be the unbeatable tropical paradise.

That night, we walked down the beach, that was pretty deserted since it was sprinkling some, and found a nice little private bar with a patio over the ocean, appropriately named Heaven.  We sat there for a couple of hours and talked to the staff and got some advice for how much we should pay for different activities, and generally had a blast.
There was a lot more walking involved and really those two activities ended up being pretty exhausting, so we went to bed pretty early.

All Philippines Photos

All White Beach Photos - Day

All White Beach Photos - Night