Boracay: A New Place With An Old Face

I self identify as an oenophile.

I’m an Angel member of Naked Wines, I have a wine club membership to a wonderful boutique winery in Sonoma, and I even have a small wine fridge in my condo.

Whenever I go wine tasting, I greatly appreciate it when the person orchestrating the tasting says “Are there any wines you would like to revisit?”

It’s an elegant turn of phrase that relieves my inner lush from having to say “Please sir, I want some more.”

Going back to the Philippines, I knew that I wanted to explore places I had not yet been, but also wanted to revisit an encounter I had during my 2019 visit to the nation of 7,000 islands.

I had to visit Boracay, a picturesque island with gorgeous stretches of white sand beaches on shallow shores. The island has been listed on the top islands and beaches lists for the last decade or so, and is one of the biggest tourist destinations in Asia. So much so that after years of overtoursim, ecological damage and pollution, the island was actually closed off to tourism in 2018. It has opened and closed a few times since then, following some major cleanup efforts, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The island was open again, so I had to go.

While touring Boracay would be a new experience, I had the pleasure of enjoying the 5 night visit with a vibrant young lady I had met in Cebu back in 2019: Sami.

Sami and I had a brief encounter at the end of my stay in Cebu four years ago, and have kept in touch over social media. I knew I couldn’t come to the Philippines and not reconnect with her, and thankfully she was willing to have a little beach vacation with me.

Getting to Boracay is a bit of an ordeal however. Sami met me at the Cebu airport where we caught a flight over to the Caticlan airport on Malay. From there, we took a shuttle van over to a port, and then a short 10 minute boat ride over to Boracay, followed by another shuttle van ride to our hotel.

The crystalline blue waters and extremely flat sands of Boracay’s White Beach makes it one of the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever seen. The water is so shallow for meters and meters, you have to walk out really far to get not just knee deep.

Truthfully, we didn’t do a lot of activities in Boracay. Mostly we ate, swam at one of the two pools at our hotel, drank a little bit, did a little shopping, did some dancing in a bar by the beach, had a massage, took way too many photos (Sami is particularly keen on recording memories and documenting her life) and spent some quality time reconnecting.

We did however do a little bit of jet skiing one day. We did a package deal so Sami could do a sexy photoshoot in a clear kayak, and each of us got to drive our own jet ski for 30 minutes. It’s been at least six years since I’ve driven a jet ski, and these new jet skis were hella fast, I was scared to really go full-throttle.

Sami also managed to make friends with one of the front desk staff at our hotel, and invited her to hang out with us on our last night. We ended up going to Jollibee for lunch, then had some cocktails and watched the sunset on the beach. She was even able to squeeze in some dinner with us at an Italian restaurant before her shift started.

It's funny, spending 5 whole days with someone you had really only met one time. But it was nice to revisit Sami, whose wild tannins have softened and complexities have grown with a little bit of aging (motherhood tends to have that effect).

I’m glad that I was able to experience a new place with an old face.