The Boracay I used to know

MY friend Daniel “Dan” Cajurao recently checked in at Hotel del Rio in Iloilo City and invited me for breakfast. He used to be a fellow journalist but had been working as a chemist in Winnipeg, Canada, for more than a decade.

He had just arrived from a few days’ vacation in Boracay but expressed disappointment.

“Prices of hotel accommodations, food, and basic services had gone much higher there,” he complained. “I should have spent more days and nights here at Hotel del Rio.”

For the same reason, I told Dan, I have not returned to Boracay since 2016.

Having missed the “paradise” that the beach used to be, I now wish for a time machine to take me back to the year 1982.

That was the year when I first set foot on Boracay (together with Panay News’ founder Danny Fajardo) on a sunny morning when the island was truly rustic. There was not a single concrete building on the beachfront. Spaced far apart were a score of nipa huts and carinderias. We rented a two-bedroom hut for an overnight stay for only PHP 25.

Backpackers from Germany made up most of the long-term occupants of the cottages at that time, according to our room boy. It was there that they could stretch the value of their meager pocket money.

The room boy briefed us on our own amenities: a wood-fueled parilla on which to broil fish, a box of matches, and a kerosene lamp. There was no electricity anywhere on the island yet.

While resting in the cottage, we saw a group of native fishermen pushing their small boat ashore. We strolled over to see what fish they had caught. Without haggling for a lower price, we paid them what they wanted for a plate of galunggong: PHP 5!

Today, the island no longer projects the ambiance of a natural hideaway. High-rise, air-conditioned hotels like those in Metro Manila now line the beachfront, replacing the bamboo-and-nipa cottages. Were it not for the crystal-clear sea kissing the white-sand beach, the place could be mistaken for any other Philippine city that betrays poor infrastructure planning.

The shopping center known as The Mall reminds one of the crowded shops in the space-starved Divisoria and Baclaran markets.

Unfortunately, Boracay is no longer friendly to poor Juan dela Cruz. If all you have is PHP 1,000 — which used to be a princely amount — you are now too poor to afford an overnight hotel accommodation, with no money left for a meal.

The bigger hotels are now mostly owned by big investors who have rich guests in mind. That these hotels have swimming pools seems to indicate that the overlooking sea is no longer fit for swimming.

That sort of “progress” must have driven away budget-conscious German backpackers. Most Boracay vacationers today are moneyed Chinese and South Koreans.

Like the German backpackers, however, these rich Asians might one day disappear. No thanks to the “green carpet” that often overlays the white-sand beach. The green algae could have sprouted as a consequence of untreated wastewater dumped into the sea.

If you have seen the Hollywood movie “Too Late the Hero,” you could have mistaken Boracay for another island outside the Philippines. Gone is the forest where actors Cliff Robertson, Ken Takakura, and Michael Caine, among others, filmed the movie in 1969.

-oOo-

‘WE DESERVE LOWER ELECTRICITY RATES’

COMING from Angel Tan, the spokesperson for MORE Electric and Power Corp. (MORE Power), that quotation seems inappropriate until one realizes that the distribution utility (DU) is not responsible for the higher cost of power amid rotating brownouts.

Like all other DUs, MORE Power is not to blame. The higher rates stem from generating power plants that do not produce sufficient electricity.

She compared electricity to “kamatis” (tomato).

“Kon kulang ang supply, barato ang kamatis,” she told me and broadcaster Nony Basco on the program “Reklamo Publiko” on Radyo Merkado. “Kon damu, barato ini, ukon ginapanghatag na lang gani.”

To quote the late Daily Guardian columnist Modesto Sa-onoy, “Expensive power cripples economic competitiveness.”