I've Got Sand in My Ass (Boracay Part two)

The sun shone on day two of our Boracay vacation, and the gang was up at 7am to grab a quick breakfast and head on down to the beach. It was wonderfully sunny, and the sand under our feet was the color of polvoron.
The wind was blowing stronger than it did the day before, and though I was itching to jump in and swim, I was far too afraid to get towed away by the waves. It was hard enough for me to stand thigh-deep in churning water on my one good foot, so I decided not to tempt fate and settled for sitting down and letting the waves crash over my head.
The saltwater stung my eyes, my hair was a godawful mess, and I ended up carrying a whole lot of sand in the inside of my swimsuit bottom, but oh how I love the beach. I am allergic to seawater and I plodded back to the inn with a rash all over my face, but half an hour under a hot shower fixed all that.
An enterprising pedicab driver named Buboy (my sister thought his name was "My" at first because that was the name that came with the cellphone number he gave her -- I found out later that he stores it as 'My' to mean 'my number'...get it? get it?) -showed up at the alley entrance two minutes after being texted, and we were spared a long walk to the restaurant for lunch. Zuzuni's was yet again out of our reach, as it was closed for a special event, so we made do with Sea Lovers, where most of us ordered curried shrimps. Delicious. And this time around there were no cats having bathroom breaks on the floor. There was, however, the matter of annoyingly slow service, and their chef's salad looked suspiciously like a giant dish of coleslaw.
My sister, May, Tita Angel and I then went looking for Real Coffee to try out their Kalamansi muffin, which my sister had read about in a MarketMan restaurant review on the Web. It was moist, it was tangy, it was perfect with coffee or tea. We ended up buying all the remaining muffins to take back home to Manila, enough to wangle a discount from the american proprietress. My sister ordered a pot of ginger tea and didn't finish all of it. They didn't have anything but a peanut butter jar in which to put the remains of the tea, but rather than let half of what she paid for go to waste, she carried back to Station 3 what must have appeared to everyone else as a urine sample. On the way back to the inn we kept stopping to take a look at the trinkets being hawked all along the beach. One wonders whether there is only one manufactory of bead bracelets and necklaces in the whole of Boracay because the vendors all seemed to be selling the same stuff, only at varying prices, depending on which part of the island you are at -- the tony end (prohibitive, clueless white tourist prices), or the backpacker end (significantly cheaper).

If in Manila there are ambulant vendors selling passport jackets and cellphone chargers in a traffic jam, in Boracay there are hawkers of wood carvings of religious figures.
I don't know if anybody in his right mind would want to purchase a Virgin Mary carving on the beach, but judging from the number of vendors I saw selling these things there, I imagine there must be people out there willing to stuff a large block of wood into their luggage on their trip back home. I was content to grab a few colorful cord-and-bead bracelets for my friends.
We had our last dinner in the quiet dining area of Dave's, away from the hustle and bustle of Boracay nightlife. It was here that I tasted the best fried chicken I've ever had in my entire life (sorry, Max's and KFC. Sorry, Renny -- but your 7up chicken comes a close second). Light and crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside. Even Freckles the dog must have thought it was the best item on the menu, as he was caught stealing a chicken leg from the kitchen (this particular chicken leg was not to end up being served to the guests -- they let him have it, after a token scolding from his owner).
I found myself spending my last evening at the inn sitting on the porch again with pen and journal, wishing life could always be spent only two minutes away from cream-colored sand and clear blue water. In all honesty it bothers me that Boracay has turned itself into a seaside Greenbelt since I last visited in 1998, when there were still wide empty spaces for greenery to breathe. I suppose development often goes out of control wherever there's a living to be made, but as long as the water runs blue and sand stays fine as powder, perhaps the charm of Boracay will live on to keep us returning to its shores.