If you think Boracay is paradise, you’d only be half right. True, the quality of the fine white sand is not exaggerated, and the water is still cleaner and clearer than a lot of other beaches in the country. But Boracay isn’t for me. My idea of a beach as a getaway venue is one where there are lots of spaces not only when I am looking toward the sea but even when I am looking in the opposite direction. Sadly, Boracay’s White Beach does not offer that kind of thing. If decent accommodations were available, I would have packed my bags, thumbed my nose at Boracay and spent my vacation instead at nearby Puca Island.

Most of the time, I wonder if the popularity of Boracay during the past few years isn’t largely due to the “endorsement” of foreigners. It has been said that Boracay was just a sleepy little island until foreigners discovered it. All of a sudden, it was hot. I wonder too if Boracay would be as popular if it hadn’t become a favorite destination among celebrities and socialites.

Filipinos being Filipinos, many simply accept as gospel truth anything that the white man says. Filipinos being Filipinos, what celebrities like must be good. One of my Web log readers said it correctly. In so many ways, a Boracay vacation is a status symbol more than anything. A few years ago, it was hip to be seen jetskiing in resorts like Montemar. Today’s generation hasn’t heard of Montemar. Everyone wants to go to Boracay.

To say that Boracay is congested would be an understatement. And I don’t think it’s only because we went there during the peak season. Even if all those people weren’t there, Boracay would still be suffocating. All those establishments lining the beachfront will be there crowd or no crowd. And it’s bound to get worse. When we went island-hopping, we saw parts of Boracay Island where huge resorts are on their final stages of construction. We asked the boatmen who owned them. The largest among these, they said, would be the future Shangri-La Boracay.

Naturally, Shangril-La Boracay is in Station 1. True to Filipino tradition, the social divide in Boracay is evident even when no physical boundaries are set. Station 1 is for the very rich, Station 2 is for the middle classes and Station 3 is for the rest.

There’s this strange feeling too that the Boracay phenomenon is a modern-day colonization. The island was once inhabited by humble fisherfolk. The foreigners arrived, built their bars and restaurants and invited their compatriots to visit. The original residents got displaced and are now living on the vestiges of the new economic order on the island. Where once they had free access of the island and shared it freely, today they are peddlers and boatmen to whom most establishments specifically deny entry. Lots of bold signs in Boracay say vendors and boatmen are not allowed inside.

The strange thing is that the government actually encourages this modern-day colonization by hailing it as an opportunity to market the Philippines to tourists. Where the sultan of Panay once sold the island for a golden salakot, the current government is selling Boracay and the vicinity for dollars, euros and yens. Check out the resorts in Bohol and see for yourself how many are owned and operated by foreigners.

The even stranger thing is how modern education justifies all that. The theory goes that local capital is not sufficient to develop potential tourist spots like Boracay so we encourage foreigners to do it for us.

I’m not a foreigner hater. It’s just that there is this implicit mandate that the state first take care of its own people. And I don’t see how that is happening. In Roxas City where we spent three days and nights after the four-day stay in Aklan, a friend wanted to take us island-hopping to show the establishments that truly owned the fishing industry in Roxas City. You know, point out the irony. It is the seafood capital of the Philippines but the setup says that the seafood capital is supplying seafood to the rest of the world and only provides the rejects to the Filipinos. Foreign businesses harvest the best prawns, lobsters and fish, pack them and airlift them directly to their mother countries.

It’s a story as old as the Marcos era when Japanese fishing corporations were granted rights to fish in the Philippine seas. It’s a story as old as the pineapple and banana plantations of Dole and Del Monte in Mindanao.

The glaring truth is that our seas and our lands yield enough to feed the Filipinos in such a way that the supply will assure that prices will be affordable. But the artificial factors make that impossible. Harvest a hundred tons of prawns, export 90 percent of the harvest and the meager supply left for the local market—rejects at that—ensures that the high demand will jack up the prices.

Such is the irony of an export-oriented economy. And it isn’t just foreign corporations that are responsible for the situation. Local business entities are doing the same. So, it really bothers me when our economic experts gauge Philippine progress on the amount of agricultural products we export every year. Weird.

The beaches are just the same. Just as we export our seafood, our pineapples and our bananas, we are also giving away our beaches in such a way there we will never be able to call them truly ours.

Generations ago, the beaches were public domain in the real sense. One walked along the beach and went swimming—it was free. Today we don’t even own our beaches. Or, to be more precise, 90 percent or so of the population has no access to the good ones. They are obliged to swim in the rejects—the polluted ones, the ones that aren’t so pretty, the ones not worth the attention of the foreigners and the celebrities.