Boracay

What the Fuss Is About

Let me be honest about Boracay: I went prepared to be underwhelmed. I’d read the articles about the overcrowding, the sewage problems that prompted the government to shut the island down for six months in 2018, the bars pumping bass at noon. I arrived by tricycle from the Caticlan jetty with modest expectations and then walked onto White Beach and stood there slightly stunned for a while.

The sand is not a metaphor. It is genuinely, almost offensively fine — pure silica ground to a powder, so white it looks backlit even in flat light, cool underfoot even in the afternoon heat because of how it reflects rather than absorbs the sun. The water at the shoreline is a specific turquoise that shifts to cobalt as the seabed drops away. I have seen beautiful beaches. This one has a quantitative edge.

The island is 7 kilometers long. Station 2 at the center of White Beach is where the restaurants, bars, and tourist infrastructure concentrate. Station 1 to the north is quieter and, in my estimation, the better end to base yourself. Diniwid Beach, just around the northern headland from Station 1, is almost serene by comparison — a shorter crescent of the same sand, accessible by a path along the rocks, where a couple of small restaurants hang over the water.

The Organized Chaos of D’Mall

D’Mall — an open-air shopping cluster in the Station 2 area — is the island’s commercial heart, and spending an hour in it is instructive about what Boracay actually is: a resort economy built for volume, efficient in its way, friendly to any budget level, and entirely unapologetic about being exactly what it is. I ate halo-halo at a plastic table in the shade while a group of Korean tourists took photos of their matching shell necklaces. A man walked past carrying a parrot on his shoulder for tourist photo opportunities. Another man was selling fresh mango shakes from a wheeled cart.

I liked it more than I expected to.

The evening along White Beach, when the kiosks light up and fire dancers begin their practice runs on the sand and the paraw outriggers return from sunset sails, has a specific romance that the Instagram saturation of this place has somehow not managed to entirely flatten.

Puka Beach and What Lies North

Most visitors stay on White Beach and miss the island’s north end entirely. A tricycle north to Puka Beach takes twenty minutes and deposits you on a different proposition altogether — longer, less manicured, scattered with puka shells (the same ones that ended up in every craft-store necklace in the 1970s), with stronger surf and a fraction of the crowd. The water is choppier but the light is extraordinary in the late afternoon. I sat there for two hours, reading, periodically watching a group of local kids negotiate the waves on improvised boogie boards.

Between Puka and White Beach lie coconut groves, motorcycle rental shops, and the occasional unexpectedly excellent restaurant. One lunch I stumbled into a Filipino-owned place in Station 3 serving sinigang na baboy — pork in tamarind broth — that was sour and porky and precisely right in the humidity.

After the Rehabilitation

The 2018 closure and cleanup did matter. The water quality is noticeably better than it was in earlier reports I’d read. Environmental rules now prohibit motorized water sports in certain zones, limit construction, and mandate that boats use proper waste management. Boracay remains crowded in high season, but the crisis-level degradation that prompted the closure has been genuinely addressed rather than cosmetically managed. It’s still commercial. It’s also still one of the best beaches in Southeast Asia.

When to go: November through May is peak season, with December through March bringing the most reliable winds for kite surfing and sailing. The habagat (southwest monsoon, June through October) brings rain and rougher seas to White Beach, though the eastern Bulabog Beach becomes excellent for kiteboarding.