If You Like Vodka Sodas and Getting Caught in the Rain – A Boracay New Years Story

Here is a pretty solid double header for you guys. I’ve been a bit busy alternating between drunk and hungover for the past few days, but better late than never…

Saturday, December 30, 2017

It’s our first full day in Boracay! We passed out last night after a long day of travel and I was up at 4 am chomping at the bit and ready to start the day. We hit the breakfast buffet early and celebrated our first day with a bottle of champagne. After a massacre of chocolate croissants and omelets we caught a tricycle into town and made a booze run at the local supermarket before settling in at the beach. For those of you not familiar, a tricycle is a motorcycle with both a side car and back car for passengers and is the main mode of transporting tourists around town. I know, I had most of you at “side car”. They also cost about $2 USD. What’s not to love? Doesn’t quite beat the hogg with a side car that delivers pizza we found in Costa Rica about ten years ago, but it comes damn close.

Marissa and I took a walk down the beach. It’s been raining on Boracay for the past week or so, so when I saw the sun starting to break through I decided we had better get our asses on a boat today, just in case the rain comes back. We met a nice Filipino guy named Nikki and I haggled him down about 40% on a private snorkel tour around the island. We headed back into our hotel to grab our booze, at which point we realized we had no cooler to transport the large quantity of alcohol that I require to embark on any boat journey. It was at that point I realized we all had dry bags and could fill one with ice and turn it into a cooler. How’s that for a little alcoholic ingenuity? We headed back down to the beach to meet Nikki, who chuckled to himself as we popped a bottle of champagne and started blasting country music the second we got on the banca boa

We snorkeled for a bit, but you know my patience for looking at coral and small fish lasts about ten minutes at best. Perhaps if there were bottles of champagne hiding between the coral instead of sea urchin I’d have a longer attention span. At our next snorkel site, we just said fuck it and turned our life jackets into diaper-like floaties and got drunk in the water. We are thinking about going into business selling “diaper floaties” so you can sit fully submerged in the water and comfortably drink, but something tells me this is one of those ideas that only sounds earth shattering while intoxicated. Other tourists watched us drinking with serious jealousy. I will never understand how or why people get on a dry boat. Many of them were on big boats packed with tons of other tourists. Seriously, a private boat costs like $40 USD. Prioritize, people. We got back to the hotel and promptly passed out on lounge chairs at the rooftop infinity pool.

After a quick nap, we pulled ourselves together and headed to dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant down the beach called “Kasbah”, which gets rave reviews (on tripadvisor). I had actually made a reservation for dinner here earlier in the night but we obviously missed that as we were busy recovering from our first drunk of the day. Ordering dinner proved far more difficult that we anticipated as half of the items on the menu weren’t available. This problem was compounded by the fact that Filipinos in the service industry here are apparently required to answer every questions with “yes”, even when the answer is “no”. Kristie to the waiter: “Is the lamb available?”. Waiter to Kristie: “Yes, ma’am. We are out of the lamb”. I think the confusion here speaks for itself. Those Filipinos, such teases. The food that we were able to order was fucking amazing. The owner wanted us to stay to listen to his co-owner musician, Steven, play his set. Apparently he’s a big deal in the Philippines. But we had a pre-party to start.

We headed back to the hotel for our little pre-party (translation: Rory taking shots, Kristie drinking vodka sodas, and Marissa crushing a bottle of champagne) before heading out for the night. We hit a few bars as we walked down the beach before settling in at Epic in Station 2, where we met a nice group of Australian boys. The drinks started flowing quite freely and soon a group of tourists were smashing a cake onto the floor of the bar with gusto. I have no other details to offer. It was as weird as it sounds. And what a waste of perfectly good cake. For some reason, one of the Aussies and I kept ordering vodka sodas and yelling “skull it!”, and then chugging them like it was a race – and you know Rory likes to win. This behavior may or may not have been followed by a very public make out session with said Australian boy on the bar. Yes, ON the bar. As in, on top of the actual bar. One by one the girls left the bar and headed home until there was one. A late night beach walk didn’t interest me, so I opted instead for a ride home on the back of a random Filipino guy’s motorbike for the steep price of $2. Oh, and there might have been some late night tater tots.

Sunday, December 31, 2017

We woke up to a gloomy day with a bit of rain. And a hangover. I definitely woke up to a hangover. We hit the giant breakfast buffet pretty hard and then settled into our respective post-hangover locations. Mar and Kristie went to nap on the beach and I went back to the room where I attempted to nap. I actually just binged watched season 1 of Homeland. When it comes to bad ass spy chicks, I’m more of a team Keri Russel over Claire Danes, but ya know, in a pinch. The rest of the day continued in this same vain. I eventually moved my little Netflix and chill to the beach to join the girls where we were intermittently rained on. Apparently there is a curse on Boracay and it always rains on New Years Eve – which we learned when we ran into one of Marissa’s coworkers who were also staying at our hotel. That would have been useful information a few months ago when crafting the itinerary, but we’re making the best of it. Thank god we got on a boat yesterday.

Our hotel was hosting a big NYE event for all the guests, starting with a reception, followed by a buffet dinner. I was still on the struggle bus as we got ready, but managed to make myself somewhat presentable. Mar gave me a makeup tutorial so I looked like a real girl. It was a lot of work so I don’t plan on making a habit of it. We headed up to the reception, which looked like a seventh grade school dance. If seventh grade dances had open bars. We had a few drinks and people watched, which is a nice way of saying we talked shit while sitting on a couch. The buffet dinner that followed was a huge spread. They even had an entire cow roasting on a spit. It was a small cow, but still slightly creepy. I did my best to limit myself to one plate. If I let my fat ass tendencies run wild I’d never make it to midnight. Our bizarre dinner conversation consisted of a discussing the weird or quirky qualities of people we know that would justify the fact that they are a serial killer. Marissa said mine was the fact that I literally say I’m going to kill everyone. Out loud. All the time. I guess some of us would be more convincing as homicidal maniacs than others. For the record, the fact that you are all reading this blog right now would probably count against all of you in that game.

At this point it was about 8 pm. Too early to go out, but also too early to get fully shit faced. We don’t want to be hot blacked-out messes by the time the clock strikes midnight, so we took about an hour to chill before we hit the shots and then headed down the beach, back to Epic for their New Year’s Eve party. On our way down the beach we passed by a big group of what I can only assume to be young backpackers in matching shirts on a bar crawl. B-team at best. There’s nothing wrong with a good old sleazy bar crawl, but must you actually wear the matching shirts? We arrived at the Epic beach party to some light rain. The party was in a big open tent on the sand, which gave us a great view of the fireworks, but also resulted in a big wet, rainy mess. First order of business was getting vodka sodas. Second order of business was to find a New Year’s Eve kiss for old Rory – preferably one with an umbrella. After making a round and being generally disappointed by the talent, I spotted a group of cute-enough white boys holding umbrellas. It was close to midnight so I decided my limited criteria had been met and we settled in dancing and chatting under their umbrellas. Twenty minutes from a kissless countdown is no time to be picky, my friends. Our new friends were Swedish and quite fun on the dance floor. The countdown started and I held the boy at bay long enough to first give my gal pals a kiss. Chicks before dicks, yo.

Fireworks ensued on and off for most of the night, and the party turned into a slippery, drunk, amazing mess as we danced in the rain. Everyone looked like wet rats, which was fine with me because I always appreciate when the playing field is leveled. One of the Swedish boys began to grind on a tree, which no one found odd. A random Asian guy actually joined him. The boys also had a weird move where they danced with their drinks on their head. Must be a Swedish thing? Please comment if any of you can confirm this. My favorite part was when all the boys went to separate bars at the same time to buy a round of drinks, so we were standing there with no less than twenty drinks between the seven of us. Eventually, Kristie and Mar walked home down the beach yet again and caught another fireworks show on the way. I flagged down another motorbike, because apparently I’m quite the thrill seeker when drunk now. Oh, and tater tots. Happy New Years, ass holes.