MY BORACAY TIMELINE BEGINS. WHY NOT?

And so in an hour this 2Go ship will arrive in Caticlan Port. In about an hour, I will finally get to anchor myself yet again to a new place. Well… not really a new place that I am not familiar with rather a place I have fallen in love with the first time I saw it years ago. Boracay.

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Way back, mid 2000s, I saved enough money and got the opportunity to visit Boracay and see what was all the rave about. I told myself then that I will one day stay there, work and live the rest of my life as an islander.

Years passed, I have become so busy to even remember and that Boracay dream remained to be just a dream… a seemingly distant reality. The regular news about its degradation and alarming pollution made it less attractive for me to even reconsider reliving the dream. Its closure on April 26, 2018 was the ultimate sign for me to kill the dream.

Then came October 2018. While backpacking in Southern Leyte, my long time friend of 10 years, Jen, asked me to join her in Boracay on October 26, 2018, exactly 6 months after its closure for rehabilitation. She said that it would be a great subject for my vlog. I could not agree more. Featuring Boracay on my blog and vlog after six months of closure would certainly be a hit. I said I needed to be there. Jen told me that I just needed to pay for my airline tickets and she will shoulder the accommodations. How could I say no to that? Who would? So, without batting an eyelash and without checking my cash flow, I booked the cheapest flight to Caticlan. You see, keeping track of my expenses became vital since I left the corporate world in 2016 when I got a redundancy package. Working as a freelance digital nomad now requires a higher level of financial acumen and emotional quotient so to speak.

After seven years, alas, I was back on the island. Boracay is back… back to how it was… back to how it should be. I fell in love again and that dream of living on the island got resuscitated. But the odds were against me and chances were slim. How can I even do it when I have financial responsibilities in the city? There were a lot of questions that needed to be answered before I could even begin to entertain the idea of Boracay.

But as they say, be careful what you wish for because you might just get it… sooner than later.

After my 12-day stay on the island, I was back in Metro Manila in November to do my usual grind. Before leaving the island, Jen and I agreed to be back in February 2019 with meaner beach bodies. Funny. So I booked the cheapest ticket I could find and remained religious to my intermittent fasting cycle.

On February 21, 2019, with meaner bodies, Jen and I met at the Clark International Airport to board a flight to Caticlan. We were supposed to meet at Trinoma to catch the P2P bus to Clark together at 5 AM. But as expected, Jen did not make it on time.

I stayed on the island for 11 days. My stay surprisingly did not push through as planned. You see, I intended to stay on the beach more often which did not happen. I think I only got to swim twice. I planned to stay up late bar hopping which did not happen. I was mostly in the hotel room either doing a teleconference or editing videos. I planned to spend more alone time but instead I was busy arranging island activities for a group of 126. I planned to visit my friends on Carabao Island but I was busy meeting new friends on the island instead. And that was when things started to happen.

To be continued…