Boracay bombed

Henna tattoos, braided hair and lumot stuck in the crevices of your tsinelas. It could be one of two things: you either just swam home from Jamaica or you spent your summer vacation in Boracay  

Upon the invitation of The Tides Hotel Boracay and Seair Airlines, to celebrate their Bacardi Boracay Bound “Live Well, Party Hard” series, I spent a star studded-weekend in this little sliver of Aklanon paradise. These included such luminaries as the heterosexual life partners Marc Nelson (my imaginary arch-nemesis whose abs look better than me) and Rovilson Fernandez (who owes me an hour of my life for letting me watch The Duke on AXN, an hour of which I will never get back again), Amazing Race-rs Geoff Rodriguez and Tisha Silang, Kjwan lead singer and closet Star Wars geek Marc Abaya, actress Angelu de Leon and other balls of plasma, As for me, I pretty much fell into the category of a stud (but not in the animal husbandry kind of way).

During this little vay-cay, I happily hit Boracay under a new civil status. Braving Typhoon Emong, I enjoyed Boracay for the first time with my beach-addicted wife, my three-month-old baby girl and, of course, my all-powerful and all-knowing yaya. For those of you who have traveled with an infant, I am sure you can commiserate with me when I say that this trip was the logistical equivalent of performing in the Saturday edition of That’s Entertainment. However, my wife and I were lucky that our yaya had the mutant power of opening up extra-dimensional space inside of our maletas to include our beach outfits, the baby’s entire wardrobe, a generator set and a life-support system.

Although I did live up to Boracay Bound’s edict to “Live Well,” I probably fared as well as a bidder for the Comelec poll automation when it came to “Party Hard.” Much to my wife’s delight, I have exorcised the heathen spirit of bachelorhood from my system (I tried hard to exorcise Rovilson, but he refused to dissipate into a wisp of smoke).   Instead of negotiating my way back to my hotel room in the wee hours of the morning after my earwax had been blasted away by techno-funk-chill-deephouse or whatever they call disco music nowadays, I am now negotiating a stroller through thick, wet slush looking for a place to sink my baby’s feet for into the sand just so I can hear her coo. And you know what, my three female readers? I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But, dare I say it, those heathen days were fun too. Especially those heathen days before Boracay was blasted into national consciousness by a short-lived TV sitcom that gave away the location of our little Visayan hideaway to the rest of the world.

Those were the days when indiscretion was the norm. This was when Boracay could steal a page from the Vegas playbook and brag that “Whatever happens in Boracay, stays in Boracay.” Nowadays, it’s more of “Whatever happens in Boracay, gets captured in the video function of a cell phone, posted on Facebook, Multiply, Plurk, Twitter and finally YouTube, then downloaded, burned onto a DVD and sold under the title Boracay Scandal Volume 13 in Quiapo for P60.” Who knew (besides Paris Hilton) that indiscretion could be so profitable?

There are Bora stories that we do not share because they are too close to our hearts, livers and other irreplaceable organs. There are Bora stories that we do not share because of a court order. And there are Bora stories that, depending on our audience, can be recounted in a General Patronage version (if lola is around), PG-13 version (if parents are around), R-rated version (if barkada is around), and a version that will never be approved by the MTRCB (if hardened criminals who are not allowed conjugal visits are around). Especially if the last version involves midget transsexuals, gerbils and engine-oil wrestling.

But I hazard to guess that the common theme most of our Bora stories share, aside from mud-wrestling midget transsexuals, is tales of excess. After all, as most vice-ridden addicts and DPWH contractors are wont to say, excess is always best. 

The first time I planted my feet in Bora, the shoreline was still free of franchise restaurants and coffee shops, of itinerant vendors hawking fake watches, cheap pearls and wooden ship replicas, and of brazenly discarded cigarette butts, empty plastic wrappers and discarded water bottles. And I was still a pasty-white 36-inch-waisted corporate peon with a stress-induced bowel problem, who so desperately needed a respite from the Makati rat race. During the early ‘90s, Bora was already well-known for its restorative powers: aside from the island’s ability to recharge your overtaxed gray matter by lazing away your day with a mojito in hand while zoning out in front of whatever beach station fit your vacation budget, the island also had the ability to improve eyesight and blood circulation because it was visited by young buxom European women whose English skills were inversely proportional to their cup sizes.     

And what was the first thing we end up doing in Paradise Island (with apologies to Joey Gosengfiao)? Since there were no neighborhood hair braiders at the time, we ended up drinking.

Since I was brought up in the Negrense culture, I have been reared to think that the only pastime an avowed Ilonggo could have was to drink himself into cirrhosis. So the first thing my friends and I did was to trudge up to Moondog’s bar, and sacrifice my liver to their infamous “15… and Still Standing” challenge. For the blissfully uninitiated, this challenge involves consuming 15 of the vilest alcoholic concoctions known to man or to buxom European women. Some of these drinks are so lethal that you need to sign a waiver that lists your next of kin.

If you consume all 15 shots, whether in five minutes or five hours, your name will not only be etched onto a mini “Hall of Fame” trophy wall inside the bar, but your triumph will also be added in chalk to the credit of your country of origin on a blackboard displayed at the bar bearing the plaque: “Crazy $%#^&^%$^ from around the world that drank this s^&% and lived” (or something like that). Aside from that rather dubious honor, for the P850 you spent on the 15 shots, you also go home with a limited-edition “15 and Still Standing” T-shirt and stomach pump. 

However, if you do not finish all the shots because — I don’t know, maybe you are unconscious and spread-eagled on the floor while lying in a pool of your various bodily fluids — the bar management is free to take your picture, blow it up to poster size, hang it outside the bar, with the words “Females Beware! Pathetic Loser Who Couldn’t Hold His Drink” written below your blotto face (or something like that).

I strode up to the bar, closed my eyes, and downed my first shot, which was appropriately called “Hair of the Dog.” I later found out that it was composed of white tequila, Tabasco sauce and some radioactive waste. And frankly, I would much rather have drank the hair of a dog. 

Once the drink burned its way down my throat and into my stomach, I barged out of the bar searching for an open sewer where I could spew out my intestines. Unfortunately, all that I could throw up was spit, bile and what was left of my pride. “Dear Lord”, I thought, “If I can’t even down this one drink, people are going to call me a pathetic loser… again today!” If that happens, what will my be chances with those young, buxom European women? So I reluctantly steeled myself, went back to my hotel to change into clean underwear, cried for about 15 minutes, and made my way back to the bar.

Maybe it was the clean underwear, maybe it was years of Ilonggo genetic material finally kicking in, or maybe it was because that first drink managed to cauterize all my internal organs, but I miraculously breezed through the rest of the 14 drinks. It didn’t matter if they were serving me vodka, whiskey, absinthe, moonshine, mouthwash or muriatic acid, I was chugging down these shots like my stomach was made of asbestos. Even after the 15th drink, as my friends grew glassy-eyed and thick-tongued, I was still inexplicably sober. I pumped my fist in the air and yelled, “Thank you, Lord! I am not a pathetic loser after all!” I asked my friends to join in the toast, but it was difficult as they were busy decorating the bar with their stomach contents.

Thinking that divine intervention had granted me a reprieve from getting piss-stinking drunk that evening, I decided to binge a “wee bit” more. So I had a wee bit more Red Horse, a wee bit more Cuervo, a wee bit more Fundador, and a wee bit more Kulafu rice wine. And, trust me, I did a lot of weeing that night. After I washed down my last glass of Kulafu, I let out a very satisfied belch, jiggled my now 40-inch waistline, and was ready to ferret out those young, buxom European women before any of the DOMs got to them. But once I stood from my seat, I discovered that gravity was my new arch-nemesis. My legs turned to gulaman as I keeled over and became intimate with the bar’s barf-coated concrete floor. I don’t remember much else except for fleeting images of engine oil-smothered midget wrestling transsexuals. And some squeaking gerbils, too.  

The next day, I woke up to an askal inappropriately licking my body parts, and found myself still sprawled on the bar’s floor. “Whew,” I thought, “at least there isn’t a poster outside the bar that says I’m a pathetic loser.” I dragged myself up, lumbered towards the bar’s restroom to wash my face. And when I looked into the mirror, I saw that someone had henna-tattooed the words “Pathetic Loser” across my chest.  

So, my new Bora story is that my wife and I had an early Sunday breakfast at Real Coffee (one of the D’Boracay originals) where we had a great chat with the owner, Nadine, over the secret origin of their Calamansi muffin. That will be my Bora story from now on. Now, if only I can find some muriatic acid to scrub the words “Pathetic Loser” from my chest before my daughter is old enough to read.  

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Thanks again to Stephen Ku, Eventscape and Tides hotel for hosting Boracay Bound 8! For comments, suggestions or a henna tattoo, please text PM POGI <text message> to 2948 for Globe, Smart and Sun subscribers. Or e-mail ledesma.rj@gmail.com or visit www.rjledesma.net.