Boracay: 10 Things to Do on the Island, From Cliff Diving to Helmet Diving
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In January 2015, I spent 2 weeks on Boracay with a group of friends. It is a small island in the Philippines with some of the best beaches in Asia, and 2 weeks turned out to be enough time to try almost everything on it.
If you are looking for your next beach holiday, here are the 10 things I would do again.
Where is Boracay?
Boracay sits just off the northern tip of Panay, one of the larger islands in the middle of the Philippines, about an hour’s flight from Manila or Cebu, then a short boat ride across. Its main beach, White Beach, runs for about 4 km of fine white sand, and it is the reason most people come.
The island is small enough to cross in a few minutes, and the best way to think about it is in 2 halves. By day, it is water sports. By night, the bars and restaurants along the beach stay open late.
1. Cheap drinks on the beach
Drinks on Boracay are cheap. 4 cocktails on the beach came to about SGD 10 in total.
2. Seafood, picked fresh
Along the beach, the seafood is laid out on ice or still swimming in tanks, and you pick what you want and how you want it cooked. Check that it is still alive first. Some of the prawns were the size of my hand.
3. Cliff diving
Around Boracay, there are cliffs you can jump from into deep, clear water, from a few metres up to much higher, for the brave. Start low.
4. Helmet diving
This was the strangest one. You wear a heavy glass helmet, fed with air from a hose, and walk along the sea floor among the fish, with no diving licence needed. The photo is not edited. That really is me, standing on the bottom of the sea.
5. Kiteboarding
Bulabog Beach, on the east side, is where the wind is, and from about November to April it is one of the best kiteboarding spots in Asia. You let the kite drag you out to sea and hope it brings you back.
6. Island hopping and snorkelling
A day on a boat around the small islands nearby, with stops to snorkel, swim and kayak, is the classic Boracay day. Our boat was a mix of people from Singapore, Sweden, Korea, Canada and Australia, and by the end of the day we were all friends.
7. Stand-up paddleboarding
Harder than it looks. The first 10 minutes were mostly falling in. Once you find your balance, the water is calm and clear enough to see the bottom.
8. The nightlife
Boracay’s beach bars and clubs stay open until dawn, and one night we joined the island’s pub crawl.
9. Trading from the beach
Boracay is on the same time as Singapore, so the US market opened at about 10.30pm and closed before breakfast. A check of my positions on my phone and a few alerts, and the rest of the day was for the beach. That is the point of a routine that takes about 15 minutes a day: it travels.
I wrote up how that routine works on the road, the watchlist, the alerts and the time zones, in how I trade while travelling.
10. Building sandcastles
Because on a beach this good, why not? Ours had style.
Is Boracay still worth it?
A note from today: in 2018, the government closed Boracay to visitors for 6 months to clean it up, and it reopened with new limits on visitor numbers and on parties on the beach. So some of this list may have changed. Check before you go.
I went back to the Philippines in 2018, for a talk in Manila and a few days on the coast, which I wrote up in Manila and the Batangas coast.
Have you been to Boracay? Which would you try first, cliff diving or helmet diving? Let me know in the comments.
All my other trips are on the travel log, country by country, and more photos are on Instagram, @iamrecneps.
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