White Beach, with its beautiful fine-grained sand, has to be the main and just about the only tourist spot on Boracay. The beach is really long so it’s split into sections, and D’Mall sits roughly in the middle – a shopping mall and the main drag of Boracay, where the shops and restaurants are all gathered. Unlike the other hotels on Boracay, the Shangri-La resort is a long way from White Beach, so it runs a regular shuttle bus to D’Mall for its guests. Of course you can pay for a taxi instead, but you may as well make good use of a free service.
The entrance to D’Mall
It’s busy and packed with people. From what I heard, Boracay gets more than 100,000 Korean visitors alone every year. That explains why this small island is so crowded.
Sky
Another tropical day coming to a close.
There are plenty of restaurants.
There are a few famous restaurants here that even make the guidebooks, but none of them looked all that impressive. A shopping mall’s restaurants were never going to beat the Shangri-La resort, I suppose. Still, we had to have dinner wherever our guide took us so we could hear what the rest of the itinerary looked like, so on the first day we just went along with it.
San Miguel
We’re in the Philippines, so it has to be a San Miguel.
Rice
Our guide picked a barbecue specialty place, but the menu was pretty run-of-the-mill.
Fried
Talk about high-calorie food..
Skewers
The ingredients are a bit disappointing. Considering the general standard in the Philippines it’s probably not bad, but it wasn’t something worth travelling all this way to eat.
Barbecue ribs
With a dish like this it’s all about the sauce.
Skewers
There was quite a lot of it, but not much worth eating, so we left a fair bit behind. On the first day we ate together as a group, but from the second day on we just ate at the hotel. For a package tour there was a lot of freedom, which I was happy about.
Mango for dessert!
Our guide bought it from the shop next door and cut it up for us right there. This was when I started eating mangoes in earnest – the local mangoes are cheap and incredibly good. Oddly enough, the mangoes we had back at the hotel tasted even better than these, and I have no idea why. Maybe the hotel has its own farm.
White Beach in the evening
After dinner we walked along the beach, and there were an unbelievable number of people. So many that it got annoying. Developing into a tourist destination in such a short time, the shops and the crowds seem to have grown beyond anything that can be kept in order. It’s only going to get busier, so if I ever come back to Boracay I don’t think I’d leave the resort.
Green mango juice
We went into a restaurant on the beach and ordered drinks. I’d heard green mango is better than regular mango so I gave it a try, and the sourness stood out more. It tasted decent enough, but prices in a tourist spot aren’t exactly cheap, which soured my mood a little. After finishing the juice we headed back to the hotel and wrapped up the first day.