Like most of my vacations - as it seems- It was raining when I arrived and the weather wasn't that great. We had one good day of sunshine with the days overcast of sprinkling most of the other time. Boracay is really pretty nice with the main beach- called White Beach- stretching several kilometers along almost the whole west side of the island. People have been coming to Boracay for a decades and but recently I think the tourism is really starting to grow fast and most of the beach front is built up with small hotels or relaxed cafes and bars but it's nowhere near as commercialized as places like Phuket or Koh Samui in Thailand. It's also a top destination for kite boarding because of the strong sea breezes. It's also nice since there were hardly any motor boats around the beach as in Thailand- most of the boats here were sailboats for tours around the islands. We rented horses and took a tour up to the highest peak on the island, Mt. Luho on one of the days which was a lot of fun....and also hired a driver to take us around the different beaches on the island.
Some photos of the beach during sunset
A cock fighting rooster. Cock fighting is pretty big in the Philippines and there are a lot of these kinds of roosters all over the place (actually there are two in this picture). We didn't go to watch one of the actual cock fights... I think it's pretty sad to watch from what I've heard and it normally not even a real fight as often one of the two won't really even put up a fight at all. Often razors are attached to the claws of the roosters and I've heard a legend that at one fight one of the roosters flew up into the air and slashed at one of the spectators throat, killing him. Seriously, that's almost about like the last thing I need to happen on my vacation.One particularly cool place we found was a resort on the beach north of the main beaches on the island. this resort was called Baling Hai and we found it only by coincidence from looking at different places on the island by hiring a driver to take us around. There were not really any rooms per say... each room was a separate building built out of stone and sea shells terraces down from the mainland to the beach- only seven different rooms are available to rent. Once you reached the water there was a private "port" where boats could dock and a private bar also made of rock and seashell where no bartender was stationed. to order a drink you could write it on the pad of paper, put the order in the bucket and use the pulley and rope to lift it back up to the top of the cliff where they would drop in the drinks and lower it back down. Pretty cool.
looking from the Baling Hai bar out to the water maybe five feet away.. this was a private dock where boat from the main land could drop the people staying at the resort.... definitely something worth looking into if there is ever another trip to Boracay
Anyway, despite the rain, we had a fun time on the trip and really enjoyed the island. There was one full day of sun... which really burnt me... but it's since turned into a nice tan. There was also very cheap beer and lots of really nice food all basically just on the beach. I'm not sure if I would go back to Boracay or not- for sure we had a really nice time there- but more than anything else it's made me realize there should be a lot of other great places to visit in the Philippines. Having never seriously considered the Philippines a vacation destination, now I've changed my opinion, and sometime soon I could see myself going to see what other places it has to offer.
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