I know that last week was sort of anti-climactic to my Balabac series. The easier thing to do would be to showcase the seemingly unspoiled beaches of this hard-to-reach destination but I wouldn’t be true to myself if I raved about how beautiful this place is and not talk about its ‘dirty side’. Like all imperfect beings, there is still beauty to be seen despite the damage we humans have done.
It’s unfortunate that I somehow lost my list of the islands’ names so this first island we went to, I totally forgot. I tried asking the other people in my group but nobody knew the name. I guess the tour operators in Balabac could improve on their tour information dissemination. Unless you ask, you’ll never know and I asked but the excitement of seeing such a beautiful island dotted with lots of whitewashed driftwood and plants I’ve never seen on islands before — I completely forgot the name.
At one point in the journey to reach this paradise, I asked myself why I had allowed myself to go through the hassles. Seriously, the boat ride to Balabac was no mere tourist joy ride. It wasn’t something I was used to and being vulnerable to seasickness if I can’t have fresh air, it was terrible. I guess I owe it to the fact that we did travel with a low-pressure area (LPA) leaving out of the country at that time but none of the trips was cancelled by authorities so it must be fine, right? Yes but not for the faint-hearted, if you can’t entertain yourself for 5 hours on a boat then you should probably go to a destination that doesn’t involve too much travel.
Then again a huge part of what makes travel so memorable is the journey more than the destination. In this case, the destination is really something awe-inspiring. The sand on the first island that we visited was out of this place! The soles of my feet have never touched such soft sand ever. The island seemed to just have looked straight out of a movie and the water was all the different shades of blue.
The irony of this island’s beauty is the amount of plastic trash I found on the other side of its shore. The one where people weren’t hanging out, there was where all the nightmares were. This was the windward side of the island and there weren’t huts for tourists to hide from the sun’s heat so automatically the team headed to this side.
We wanted the island to ourselves and one of my companions took out his drone for a test flight to see if his toy could handle the wind. With whatever energy was left in our quarter-life bodies, we quickly ran around to just take in everything and started taking photos. There was a storm a few days before so the island was in a different shape than before, our boat crew mentioned.
I’m sharing these set of photos to show the beauty of this place even with a storm that passed through and seeing all our trash in random places along the island. Even in this state where it’s inevitable to not find human-made trash in driftwood, fishnets or plastic ropes decorating dead trees and such, there’s still an allure to this.
