~manila, you're not that ugly

While many believe that Boracay is a lost cause, my love for the island will always push me hopeful.

So so very glad to read there’s now an ordinance to ban smoking on the beach.  Hope to see more positive actions like this from the newly launched Boracay Beach Management Program (BBMP), “a long-term project to address the island’s environmental concerns brought by the booming tourism industry” chaired by Boracay’s very mayor himself, John Yap.

Will finally be going on this 5-day boating expedition I’ve been dreaming about since July..woohoo!

(Image from Tao Philippines)

I came across Tao Expeditions while researching for a trip to El Nido, and raved to friends that it was exactly how I wanted to explore Palawan:

Open Expeditions take groups of independent travellers between El Nido and Coron through the Linapacan Group or vice versa. This is our playground of over 200 islands and covers a 150km journey through the most remote region in Palawan, connecting Coron and El Nido.

Was so downcast that I missed the voyage season by a hairline (boats don’t go out to sea during the rainy season of July to October), but all is fair to those who wait:  Am now good to go on my first ever island expedition in November, yahooo!

More about the boys behind Tao from their website, www.taophilippines.com:

Tao Philippines was founded in 2005 by Eddie Agamos Brock, a native from the Northern Province of Luzon. After 10 years of extensive exploration of the remote provinces of the Philippines, he finally chose to settle base in the Northern Palawan islands. His friend and cofounder Jack Foottit, a British architecture student,  designer of the business and build up the projects.  ‘We wanted to explore deep into the island culture of this vast archipelago, and experience real island living. This is one of the most beautiful regions in the Philippines. For us this province is a playground of hundreds of tropical islands, nobody comes up here, over the years of our expeditions we have never run into other travelers.’ (more…)

There’s a twitter “movement” now to #helpDOT, and not surprisingly, many people are jumping in and seeing how they can get involved.

It started with a post from Carlos Celdran about a tour he did with new Tourism Undersecretary @entengromano, which led to @TeamManila making tourism posters for free:

Bloggers journeyingjames and otherworldpixie made their own posts of support, not to mention countless tweeters, and voila, now we have one viral volunteer campaign for Philippine tourism created in an instant.

DOT Undersecretary Enteng Romano tweeted back: “Still thinking of how 2 harness d outpouring of volunteerism 4 DOT. Hope to come up w some ideas 2moro.”

Let’s hope this to be the start of a real dialogue for tourism development!

I dug up my old post on how to help tourism back in 2005, fresh from my Spain trip and right when I started manilarat:

I am a great fan of the potential of the Philippines (and of the Filipino). I was born and raised in Manila, but there has always been the curiosity and eagerness to explore our culture through travel, conversations, daily interactions with people.

A month ago I left the family business and started working for the Department of Tourism. On the premise that I was there #1 to help tourism, and #2 to find out how government works from the inside.

I left the DOT after the Island Paradise Adventure Race Project (which is still held every year, but under the Development Bank of the Philippines now), and my biggest take away then was that for what I saw as the necessary work for Philippine tourism, the place to start was not the national government, which I felt had very limited authoritative power development-wise.

Five years and a new Tourism Law after, I don’t know if things are still the same.

But for sure, in our own circles, there are lots to do, and do now!  Quoting from that same post in 2005:

everyone always has something to say about tourism. i know i always romanticized it, holding up high “how i think things can be improved.”

many ideas–bright ones at that–get lost in implementation. and im learning firsthand that most of the time, no one really wants to be accountable for implementation. especially in government.

coming up with a great project and starting it is actually doable.sustaining it is not, or at the least, it is difficult. according to a colleague who’s been with the DOT for more than 10 years, projects fail mostly because of politics– everyone wants to run his own show; no one wants to carry on flagship projects of previous officials.

fact of life.

so what’s a private citizen to do?
i say sell the country in his own circle… be a walking salesman of what it means to be a filipino, to live in the philippines. work within one’s reach, with what you have control over, and stop barking at the government (it’s not only exhausting, it’s really just not effective).

statistics show that word of mouth is still one of the preferred modes of securing information about our country. we should capitalize on this. that’s why i have such faith in blogs and travel writing!

Let’s hope things have taken a turn for the better in our government and #helpDOT, but let’s also do our part as private citizens!  Mabuhay ang Pilipinas!

Found this video through Carlos Celdran, who says it’s a “1960′s travelogue on The Philippines… from the ‘New Horizons’ series by Pan American Airways.”

The German narration made me zone out on some parts, but I especially loved the clip on sipa!  I always wondered why we were taught that sipa was our national sport given that I never ever played it or saw anyone play it, but wow here’s proof that it was part of Pinoy everydays once upon a time.

Interesting to note that even after fifty years, we’re still using some of the same travel come ons (both subject matter and style) for Philippine tourism…

Just the same,  what a lovely peep into our past!

Google’s Jane Butler shares trends on How Consumers Search Travel Online for 2009-2010.

Interesting to note:

• Popular keywords involve last minute deals:  “summer vacations” , “all inclusive vacations” , “travel packages” , “train tickets” , “cheap plane tickets” , “package deals” , “last minute flights” , “last minute cruises.”
• People looking for last minute deals book their trips online usually a week before they travel.
• Travel videos are important research tools for both business and personal travelers.
• Mobile research is key:  25 percent of business travelers access online travel information from their mobile device (vs. 8 percent of personal travelers and 16 percent of affluent travelers).
• Good for bloggers: “Travelers are searching more for local, point-of-interest-based information around a destination while planning for and during a trip,” more than hotel, car rental, and air searchers.
• Tip for those looking to build hotels: It’s still location, location, location. “Google has seen a 66 percent growth since 2004 in “Near +” and “Close To +” terms in the Hotels & Accommodations Category on Google.com”

Last March 2010, I visited the Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and was dumbfounded that such an atrocity happened, and happened in the 1970s.  The Cambodians made sure none of it was left unremembered, and right in the center of its capital is a museum where visitors–and Cambodians themselves–can understand, even in passing, what went on in that place, while the rest of world went about its business.

Today I read about a memorial in Bosnia put up by Phillip Ruch, a German activist who is demanding accountability for the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995.  “The Pillar of Shame” will be a mound of shoes–16,000 of them–each pair for a life lost in the ethnic cleansing that  still haunts people to this day.  Ruch says that the memorial serves as a “warning for all future U.N. employees never again just to stand by when genocide unfolds.”

We Filipinos should learn to be not so forgetful either.   Do you think we’ll someday see a memorial for our murdered journalists, or the Ampatuan victims?

Maybe we don’t really forget, but we don’t remember either.

(Image from pinoyvote.net)

Our new Tourism Secretary is Alberto Lim.  Didn’t know much about him until I read his irresponsible statements to AFP about Boracay! Oh no! We have someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about at the helm of DOT. Ace Durano, please come back!!!

Yes, Boracay’s been under threat of overdevelopment for a long time, and yes, it is nearing tipping point, but as the new head honcho for marketing our country, you just don’t don’t don’t go about saying things like, “The thing about Boracay is the quality of the sand, (it is) very white. But there are other places that have better quality sand, but (they are) very expensive,” and then adopting a position of resignation:

Lim suggested the government may in the end be unable to halt overdevelopment.

“We have world-class laws but nobody follows them,” he said, adding tourists may just have to look elsewhere.

Boracay is one of the most celebrated places the Philippines is known for, and to talk about it this way betrays not only a lack of love for it, but a lack of understanding of its real value!

There have been cases of overdevelopment elsewhere (e.g. Balearic Islands), but given concerted effort from stakeholders, with government at the helm, they were able to turn things around for the better.

Secretary Lim, Boracay is not dead, it’s certainly not dead YET, but with such a defeatist, dismissive attitude as this, then you might as well have asked for its death.

If Philippine Tourism is stuck with this kind of mindset for another 6 years, then we are definitely dead.

Last May 2010, I went on the worst bus ride of my life, something I described to friends as a nightmare I wouldn’t dare inflict on my enemies. I sat on a plastic stool on the aisle of a provincial bus for close to 4 hours of zigzaging roads from Iloilo to Caticlan, and for the life of me I couldn’t understand why the conductor kept inviting people aboard as if there was still so much room for passengers! Some of the late boarders had to sit on the aisle floor for crying out loud (and still pay the full fare)!

I wouldn’t have remembered this had I not read about an overloaded bus in Cebu that killed 15 people this month. Such reckless, GREEDY practices must not only go unchecked, punish those responsible!!!

Such a stark contrast to the budget buses in New York and the U.S. East Coast I just rode on the month before, with their comfy seats, power outlets and wifi-on-board service:

Our buses don’t even come close to the Mekong Express buses of Vietnam and Cambodia, with comparable fares of $10-12 from Ho Chi Minh to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, complete with snacks and an English-speaking tour guide!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Ceres Bus Company, if you can’t offer premium services, then please at the very least ensure that we can travel SAFELY with you and your buses!

The New York Times featured Boracay as possibly the next Phuket (thanks for the heads up, Teens!), and although the label, not to mention its marketing mileage, is arguably short of an award, I have misgivings about it.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of reading on sustainable tourism lately, and the mindset is that mass tourism (aka the party-loving crowd of Boracay) is not sustainable, which also translates to not profitable, for everyone involved.   More and more the trend should be moving towards high value tourism, which naturally has high entry costs, for both the businessman and the tourist, and high returns, for the businessman, the tourist AND the local population.

The Balearic Islands of Spain–Mallorca, Menorca, and Ibiza–keep coming up as models of sustainable development, and their story is worth looking into, especially given the dangerous edge that Boracay is finding itself close to. The key ingredients in the Balearics’ return to “profitable” tourism? Dialogue and tourism policy.

I remember singing this song over and over again when I was in first grade–my mom chose it as my piece for a singing contest in school…
I realize now that that was in 1987, a year after EDSA 1 (it puts me off the way we have to qualify which EDSA we mean now–the succeeding two were “not of the same spirit” and don’t belong with the first). Without pretense, in 1987, the spirit of Bayan Ko was alive in my mom, and was unknowingly passed on to me:

Ang bayan kong Pilipinas
Lupain ng ginto’t bulaklak
Pag-ibig na sa kanyang palad
Nag-alay ng ganda’t dilag

At sa kanyang yumi at ganda
Dayuhan ay nahalina
Bayan ko, binihag ka
Nasadlak sa dusa

CHORUS
Ibon mang may layang lumipad
Kulungin mo at umiiyak
Bayan pa kayang sakdal-dilag
Ang ‘di magnasang makaalpas

Pilipinas kong minumutya
Pugad ng luha at dalita
Aking adhika
Makita kang sakdal laya

I wonder how kids feel today, having lived through the inauguration of a new president who above all, promises to be good-hearted.

Do they believe him? Do they hope with him?