My Boracay Travel Journal (part 2)
May 26, 2007
Morning
I woke up at 730 AM. I don’t know if I was earlier than most people
but thankfully I wasn’t so late that people had to call me tardy
(that distinction did go to someone though).
Breakfast is usually the most convenient for vegetarians.
Particularly for lacto-ovo vegetarians, which is my kind. Also, I
have a penchant for hotel’s or resort’s breakfast buffet, and the
selection in Garden Cafe (the same place where we had yesterday’s
supper) looked quite good. So of course I made a mistake of taking
more foods than my stomach could handle. I cleaned plate being so
full, that I got dizzy. Blech. I don’t like the way this feels.
Later in the morning was the beginning of the heart of this trip,
i.e. The Team-Building events. Yay! There was an activity coordinator
who led the gist of the team-building games and tasks. We started
with morning exercises to get warmed up, led by two exercise
instructors who were introduced as some sort of “gigolos for hire,
single and available”. Eww. Of course the girls were all
giddy-giddy. Not to be unfair, Joana was re-introduced to the boys in
much the same way. Double eww. Gee, can’t people ever stop doing
this?!
We were then divided into four groups, and then we played a couple of
weird games. The first one involved getting around an obstacle course
while picking fake eggs. We lost this game, much to the anger of some
of my members (but the loss was something I didn’t care about). We
did better on the second game. Coins were thrown to the pool and each
group had to assign one diver who would pick certain amount depending
on the answer of a problem the rest of the group was to solve. Math
nerds revel. Wee. We came in first. Double wee. Guess math nerds
belonged to our group.
We want to get funked up!
"Bora-bora" is how we spell "awesome" (our team)
First game
Second game
Current mood: Funky
Current
song: Mothership Connection (Star Child) - Parliament
And if you hear any noise,
It’s just me and the boys
Hit me, you gotta hit the band
Noon
We had lunch on a different place, but it’s still an establishment
from the same resort. What’s different was that Vanilla Lounge was a
lounge, which meant that there were comfortable chairs, house
sommeliers and audio equipments. And karaoke machines too for people
who like to bring out the singer in them. Our colleagues sang to the
tune of Air Supply, Barry Manilow, James Ingram and their ilks. Hmm,
I thought the preferable ambiance to a lounge was standards. Anyway,
people had so much more fun than I did, because karaoke isn’t my cup
of coffee.
Noontime = sleeptime. Again. The sleep was shorter though as I really
wasn’t that tired. Afternoon, a number of people from our company
went to mountain-bike while the remaining went to ride the banana
boat. I prefer mountain-biking, so I went with the former group.
Mountain-biking was a lot of fun, and I can imagine that it was more
so than banana boat riding. The common percept is that beach is what
represents life in Boracay; step on the pedal and follow the
Boracay’s different roads, and one can see that Boracay isn’t simply
about beaches, and that the locals in comparison aren’t actually very
well-off. Their life is actually pretty basic, especially for our
standards. Banana boat riding was just an experience of ephemeral
thrills not too different from the kind you get when dropping from
great heights to a loop de loop on a roller coaster; mountain-biking
was a great workout and an actual sightseeing. It was also an
activity that taught important life lessons: with highs come lows;
slow and steady wins the race; with hardship come great rewards. And
rewarding it indeed was: the end point of our journey was actually a
near-derelict beach (Manoc-Manoc) which was every bit as sightly as
our resort’s yonder beach.
Of course, every workout comes with sweat, and sweat comes with
thirst. After 2 hours of mountain-biking, we went to a beverages bar
inventively named Juice *rolleyes*. But don’t let the uncreative name
fool you, the drinks they serve are actually very, very good and
refreshing. I would recommend it to anyone who passes by.
Singing their hearts out
Cue battle cry!
To the other team: this is what you missed!
At Juice
Current mood: Worked-up
Current
song: You Bring Me Joy – Mary J. Blige
It’s not hard
To say what I
feel
Night
Supper was meh. Nothing too memorable. It was still in Vanilla lounge
but at this point people had become bored with karaoke.
And so I went back to my room to read Ubik.
Ubik is a book about alternate realities. People who clamor in The
Matrix’s philosophy of the world should know that the concept actually originated from Ubik. Of
course, being a sci-fi novel meant that Ubik had a lot of technical
jargons that I struggled to understand. There are psis, people who
has telekinetic powers. Anti-psis, people who counters psis.
Precogs, people who can predict the future, much like those trio from
Minority Report, which was unsurprisingly a short story written by
the same author.
But wait, this isn’t a book review article, and at chapter 5 I was
starting to get quite distracted with this notion: if I was thrust
into an island from far away then why was I wasting time-space
continuum answering home-proclivities? Besides, Boracay wasn’t exactly
the entity that inspired ideas of the parallax of reality to
pseudo-reality. I had a cognitive shift, finally cognizant that
reading garbled science and philosophy jargons while imagining
space and satellites wasn’t a good way to spend time in Boracay.
Enough reading. Enough sci-fi geekspeak too. ^_^
I walked to the yonder beach. This time I decided to explore on my
own. I always wondered about how it’s like to have a quiet stroll on
the beach, and I’ve read from various places that it’s a very
romantic experience. Well, I can’t say if I felt romantic since I
didn’t take the stroll holding hands with a loved one, but I did feel
that it was quite relaxing and that it did put me in the
contemplative mood. Standing there, being touched by the evening
breeze, smelling the salty air, hearing the music of seawater rinsing
the shore, and appreciating the unperturbed serenity, while putting
all of the world’s worries on the back burner, is actually the kind
of sensation that puts me on a high. I don’t need to be intoxicated
to feel euphoric.
I came to a realization that I’ve not been making a very good use of
my vacation time, and so I had a change of heart. From this moment I
made it a point to savor every minute I could spend experiencing
Boracay.
I went back to the resort so that I could go out again with a group
of colleagues. We just walked around the beach, sightseeing. There
was a chance meeting between me and one of my high school best
friends, Vincent Tiu; so Rache (my friend) was correct in telling me,
weeks before, that it’s nearly impossible to go to Boracay without
meeting someone I know of. After briefly chatting with Vincent and
his companions, I went back with my companions and we chose a spot
near the sea, where we had small talks and where we made good-natured
fools of ourselves (despite being near an untalented band performing
tacky renditions of The Beatles’ songs). I was finally enjoying this
vacation and I feel like I was at the beginning of a new season of my
life.
Night talks around the fireplace (really?!)
We leave our mark!
Current mood: Introspective
Current
song: My Sweet Lord – George Harrison
I
really want to know you
I really want to go with you
Really
want to show you, Lord
That it won’t take long,
my
Lord Hallelujah
(CONTINUED HERE)
