Last Call in Boracay The Great Re-Launch Pt. 4

'Welcome to Caticlan Airport. Gateway to Boracay.'

After a dicey landing, the herd lumbers through the humidity to Caticlan's jetty port, forming three separate lines to pay a Terminal Fee, Environmental Fee, and a Boat Fare Fee.

It's as I'm heading to an outrigger banca for a short boat ride to Boracay that I feel the shoulder tug. Instinctively, I whip around. A young Filipino with a bent mouth grinning from ear to eyebrow pulls at my roll away. Is this a brazen daylight rip-off or a good Samaritan? For some seconds we're locked in this unnerving tug-of-war contest of strength and weird smiles before my luggage careens to the ground.

What the shit is this? A distinctive buZZZZing emanates from the orange-on-grey Rockland carry-on. The good Samaritan shakes his head and snatches it up. Together, we walk the fifty feet to the boat, where he chucks my vibrating suitcase onboard and then holds out his tip hand for a job well done. Crap. I know the math but not in real time. Somewhere in the range of 40–45 Filipino pesos to a dollar, but what about all these coins in my pocket? Will they cover the spread?

As soon as I plunk them down into his palm he glares at me like I buggered his kid sister.

"Oh, here!" I peel off one of the six watches I impulse-guilt purchased outside Ninoy Aquino International Airport. The red one with the broken band that quit telling time before my cabbie left the confines of short-term parking. "You're lucky." A quick bunny hop onto the boat. "The guy I bought it from said it was a Rolex."

Surely that will cover the costs of our thirty-second friendship?

He yells something unintelligible, then slams the watch into the dock's planks.

The scowl fades as the fleet of narrow bancas launches. It's fifteen minutes of sea spray over bright blue waters before we reach Boracay's faded-red jetty, so I test my memory skills on the combo lock to check on the beehive colony bombinating in my luggage.

Let's see. 8–6–1–3? No. Fuck.

1–9–7–6? Nope. Fuck.

6–7–9–1? No. Fuck.

1–8–1–2. Nope. Nope. Double Fuck!

I look up. All the sunscreen-slathered tourists have migrated away towards the relative safety of the stern.

My ears ring and lungs choke from the acrid smell of the mototaxi's engine. The narrow road bisecting Boracay is a blaring mess, filled with honking horns and the constant whine of one-stroke engines cutting loose.

My driver's a young hard-charger, deftly smoking a Marlboro cigarette and carrying on small talk in broken English. "Bulalog?"

Why's the name changing? I thought it was Bully Something? "Bully Frog Beach."

Peering at the luggage vibrating in my lap, he frowns and tilts his head in thought, then spits and veers through a small puddle in the road. "Bully Bong?"

On the Google Map it seemed so simple: Bulabong Beach hugs the eastern shore of Boracay, unprotected from the sea winds and home to the island's thriving windsurfing and kiteboarding sales and rental industry.

An ashen-bearded, pudgy tourist in a bright red tropical shirt and coal black sandals drags his suitcase along the mud bog street, face straining from the intense heat. Despite the barrage of motorbikes swarming from every angle, he's all alone, without a single syllable to connect him to a tribe.

My driver dodges a deep mud puddle but catches enough wash to inundate the wandering Santa Claus. "Faaaaaack!"

"Sorry for — " I try making eye contact, but he lowers his head, plodding forward like a POW Kris Kringle dressed for Mardis Gras. A hapless misfit lost in the crowd.

The driver stops and straightens out his stiff arm down a narrow road pocked with muddy potholes to my right.

I'm hoofing it, sweating and swearing, dodging bustling bodies while listening to the whine of a bandsaw redounding from the skeletal innards of a hotel in the throes of construction. A worker whistles while chipping shards of mortar with a tiny hammer and chisel.

Another builder carries a large, nail-studded plank before it fumbles, piercing his big toe. "Ahhh!" Geysers of blood. He turns tail and hobbles away, cursing in Visayan.

Slowing down, wheezing. "It can't be too far . . .Wow."

Bulalog Beach pokes into view. An army of kiteboarders launch themselves in an unsynchronized pageant of bright colors, soaring on wind gusts like hanging mobiles being painted on a melting Salvador Dali postcard. A discombobulated ballet of windsurfers slice and slash through the slipstream below, darting dangerous zig-zags at one another. This entire technicolor gala perpetually sustains itself on a shimmering aquamarine palette cradled from mother ocean by a crescent-shaped reef piercing the whitecaps fading in the distance.

"Huwhuhhh! Hwaaaahhh! Huwaaaaahhh! Hwhuuuuhhh!" A bold kiteboarding Icarus flies higher than his compatriots, screaming like a demented Peter Pan having an orgasm inside a glass bong water cannon.

"Huwhuhhh! Hwaaaahhh! Huwaaaaahhh! Hwheeeehhh!"

Leaving the encumbering luggage behind like a tortoise slipping its shell, I dodge the ebbtide watermark for a closer gander at a rusted, rotting sewage pipe half-submerged in the lagoon's shoreline.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Progress has a way of mucking everything up. Take San Francisco. High-tech heavy hitters google up multi-million dollar mansions while human feces rots on the sidewalks. Maybe it's a nostalgic geek thing? The smell makes them homesick for when they were all crammed together sniffing each other's farts in their start-up incubator basement. Silicon Valley, really good at coding. City planning? Not so much.

What's that sparkle? Something's pinned underneath? Bending over, I scrape away clumps of sand covering a weathered octagon-sided ornament, inscribed with arcane filigree, 'bout the size of a dinner plate, with a perfectly round mirror inset dead center.

Back to standing, eyes strain from the sun. A measured gaze gauging where the pipe might run underground towards a thicket of palm grass a stone's throw away.