That must have crossed
Captain Junior's mind. Suddenly, he scrambled out onto the bamboo
port outrigger, balancing precariously on the slippery pole as he
held on to one of the thick nylon guy wires for support—he was just
in time to dampen the full force of a rogue wave, missed by the
steersman's watchful eyes, that heaved then rolled under us
harmlessly. Out there, his whole weight thrown into the balance,
Captain Junior cut a heroic, if unlikely, figure: naked to the
waist, long-limbed, short, humpbacked and in countenance, a reformed
pirate.
He is master of Roselyn
1 and one other very much like it (Roselyn 2,
appropriately enough) which he rents out for $26 to $35 for
whole-day sight-seeing tours of the island. He and his family,
though humble of circumstance now, still own a modest plot of prime
beachfront where cottages stand for lease to the tourist on a
budget. He was born on Boracay Island and knows its
ways.
For most visitors, Boracay
is the four kilometer White Beach, famed among beach lovers who came
and stayed, as the best beach in the world, and among those who came
but couldn't stay, as probably the best beach in the world.
Its reputation is well deserved and rests on two things: its
improbably white, powdery sand that stretches a good ways from the
tree line creating a clean, dazzling underwater carpet at high
noon.
But past the sandy
backyards of, say, Boracay Terraces, or Lorenzo South, or Pearl of
the Pacific (three of the bigger resorts on White Beach), another
Boracay keeps time with the tide. Older, less changeable, more
patient, perhaps, even more beautiful, this other Boracay thrives
even after the fun has waned for the day at White Beach. It embraces
fellows like Captain Junior in its daily history and receives the
sea on its surrender every night at ebb tide.
Seven and a half kilometers
long and less than two and a half kilometers at its widest, Boracay
sits at anchor just northwest of the picturesque island province of
Panay in central Philippines. From Caticlan on the mainland only 15
minutes away by motorized outrigger, it looks surprisingly
unprepossessing as far as tropical isles go but for its southern end
whose dark elevated terrain hints at adventure, even some mystery.
In days before Boracay became everyone's dream sandbox, its sole
visitors were the Cebuano- and Ilonggo-speaking mainlanders who
fished in the sea around it, and fauna (no doubt, including the big,
channel-crossing carpenter bees that from time to time are spotted
making a beeline for the island) from the mainland that sought
refuge in Boracay's small inland forest.
Subsistence fishing,
explains Captain Junior, is the main occupation of most Boracaynons,
in the sense that every able-bodied man is expected to know the old
trade, although a number do cultivate maize and bananas in the one
planting season of the year that the soil can sustain. To the
Boracay-born like him or the short, dark-skinned aboriginal Ati
(after whom the famous pounding Ati-Atihan festival of Kalibo
on the mainland is named), the islander who doesn't fish is
something of an oddity.
Of the few Boracaynons
who've taken to the land are folks like Consorcia Supetran who are
caretakers of the properties of the heirs of Ciriaco Tirol, whose
coconut and banana plantations constitute a substantial share of
Boracay's 1,083 hectares. Weathered but still active, 65-year-old
Supetran has been a resident of Boracay since
