The island of Boracay is about 7 km long and shaped like a drumstick. White Beach covers most of one side of the skinny leg part (Bulabong Beach is on the other side – maybe a six minute walk if you’re taking your time). White Beach is a Resort Area, which emphatic caps, and there’s no way around the crowd and the noise. However, there’s a reason for the crowd – it’s an absolutely gorgeous beach. The water looks and feels like a swimming pool, and it’s easily the clearest body of water I’ve ever seen in my life. I kept being surprised when I swallowed, inhaled, or got water in my eyes to feel that it was in fact salt water. And the sand is undeniably special. Chris compared it to flour, which is spot on. It’s white and soft and feels fantastic between your toes, provided you don’t get gnawed on by the termites that live in it and gave us itchy painful feet after prolonged exposure.
The entire beach front is lined with restaurants, bars, and hotels, most of which are expensive (on a Chinese salary) but decent. It’s about as well done as a beach resort strip can be done – it looks NICE, there’s no condo high rise, and in spite of a devastating lack of trash cans, it was impressively clean. Clean enough to walk out of the hotel barefoot to go searching for dinner. Most of the restaurants have tables and seating a few feet away from the shore, and it’s really, really, really nice to sip on a mango margarita and watch the waves and the rampant fire dancers.
The food’s also incredible, especially if you’re coming from China - mango shakes (DELICIOUS), crepes, hummus, feta cheese… these are things I haven’t had in my life for a while, and it was GOOD to have them back temporarily. I also tried to drink some young coconut juice (buko), but it was really warm and I thought it was sort of nasty.
The island is also almost unnervingly wholesome. Chris commented that it wasn’t a very druggy place at all, and Disney World came to mind a few times. Of course, there are a ton of security officers walking around with shotguns, so that might have something to do with it. That said, though, the security guys are really, really nice - when a beggar tried us at a restaurant, the cop just said, “maybe next time,” instead of rudely moving him along. We also bought a can of sardines for a friendly stray kitten and the cops helped us feed her and we got the impression that they’d been taking care of her for a while. Speaking of which, there are a lot of feral cats and dogs running around. As a general rule, the cats seem to fare better than the dogs, and all of them seem to know how to work a tourist site - they’re all pretty friendly.
The blessing and the curse of White Beach is its easy access to whatever you want to do. Blessing: you have something you want, and within five minutes someone offers to sell it to you. Curse: when you’re just trying to go swimming or walk down the beach, within five minutes about fifty thousand people have tried to sell you something. “Sir, ma’am, sunglasses?” “Ma’am, necklace?” “Jetski?” “No thank you.” “ATV? Parasail? Sailing boat?” They’re incredibly relentless, even when you’re clearly sitting down eating a meal they’ll give you a try. “Massage? Watch? Mangos?” It gets old extremely fast.
On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to find people to get you doing what you want to do. Our friends Leif and Lily rode a dune buggy up a mountain, and we wanted to try it, and it was just a matter of stepping outside and waiting for someone to offer it to us. You can also get a really nice and relatively secluded walk down the beach if you get right along the shoreline away from all the noise, lights, and tourist industry.
So I wouldn’t say White Beach is a bad place to stay. I actually liked it a lot better than the megaresorts we saw. Those places do a lot of things for you that are not even remotely difficult to do by yourself, and what’s the point of paying extra money for a swimming pool when the ocean is right in front of you? However, that said, if you stay at White Beach, I’d advise you to get off it as fast as you can, because there’s soooooo much to the island that isn’t all thumping bass and people pushing goods and services on you. It’s all easy to get to, also, either on foot or by tricycle. My favorite beach was Puka Beach, which had no hotels or restaurants on it, and only the occasional kid stopping by to see if you’re interested in some ice cream. Bulabong Beach was sort of nifty, but it’s not a good strolling spot or really much of a swimming place. If you’re into kiteboarding or windsurfing (I don’t even really know the difference), that’s where you should go, though. Really, as far as I could tell, any part of the island that isn’t White Beach is peaceful, pretty, and worth seeing.
If I had actually planned this trip in advance, I would have started with an island hopping tour (we did it on our last day). You can sail all the way around the island and see some places you can only get to from a boat and scope out all of the beaches. We saw some AWESOME rocks and tiny islands we didn’t get a chance to explore that didn’t seem hard to get to at all.
Make no mistake, Boracay is as touristy as it gets, but at the same time, there’s a lot of stuff to do that’s amazing, wherever you are, and the beaches are absolutely incredible. While you can rest assured that you’re being ripped off every time you take out your wallet, it’s almost worth it for how easy and close everything is.
I also learned exactly one word of Tagalog - for most of the trip I thought “mabuhay” was just the Tagalog version of “aloha,” but it’s actually cooler, as I learned from the in-flight magazine on the way back to Manila. It’s the imperative form of the verb “live,” and it’s used as hello, goodbye, welcome, congratulations, thank you, cheers, etc.
4 Comments
It’s nice to know that overall, you had fun in the Philippines. Pardon us for the inconveniences and the shameful characters that you met. We hope that someday, they’ll be obliterated from this planet.
Mabuhay ka!
not a druggy place? Hahha. Thats a good one. Its shabu (meth) capital. You mentioned the water being so pristine and clean yet posted a picture of the rampant algae bloom that take a quarter of the year here. Its not unsafe by any means, but its easily not ‘clean’ water. It cant grow without the seasonal phosphates that wash down. Either way, your own pic looked nasty and showed the beach to be nasty as well.
Its a dirty place. Trash is on the beach all day, every day. The sand is no closer to flour than dirt.the only fine sand is far down station 1 where they imported beach sand, if you can believe that, but the entire beach is coarse coral sand.
i’m glad you had a lovely time at boracay and that is a gorgeous, gorgeous photo (the first one of the sea and the boat!). i love boracay - have been going there since the 80s when you could only access it by chartered small planes and there were only really basic huts on the beach (Pearl of the Pacific which is now a massive hotel), chicken barbecue when you asked really nicely, and peanut shakes by the one enterprising guy with a blender. i’m sad it’s become such a resort island but i guess that was the only way for it to go. i wish the people with the influence and ability would make a real effort to address its environmental problems (shrinking sands because of the dying reef and pollution).
the previous commenter was quite uncharitable about the sand - which is truly beautiful on the top end. but under threat. sadly it’s true about the water quality which, on white beach, waxes and wanes depending on the way the wind is blowing.
good wishes and thanks for coming to the philippines.
Gosh, just noticed the date of this post. 2008! Mabuhay!
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