Boracay day 1

Up at 7am to have breakfast and finish packing for Boracay. Got in a taxi which took about 30 mins to get to the bus station. From here we found the bus bound for Caticlan and prepared ourselves for a long journey. Luckily the bus had air con, WiFi and movies on including Harry Potter (although they were too quiet to here properly). Altogether took about 6 hours. Was pretty bumpy so napping was difficult. Made it to Caticlan ferry port to a scene of absolute carnage. Hundreds of people queueing in random directions and a ticketing system that made no sense at all. We eventually figured out that we needed 3 separate tickets from 3 separate windows, one for the actual boat ticket, one for an environmental fee and one for a terminal fee. Not sure why they couldn’t all be bought together in 1 queue but I feel like inefficiency is pretty standard here. Tickets bought we then had to queue again to get inside. We had to put our bags through airport style scanners and metal detectors. Eventually got inside and then had to fight our way onto a boat. Again, no clear system of how to do this so we stood somewhere near a boat that was pulling in and fought our way on! All in all we had spent about an hour getting from outside the terminal to this point. The boat itself only took about 15 mins. We arrived at a point at the south of the island and so had to get a private van to take us to the hotel.
Driving down the roads to the hotel, you could see why Boracay needs to be shut down for refurbishment. The main central parts are pretty gross with building work everywhere and puddles of water everywhere due to inefficient sewage drainage. We got to our hotel at around 4.30pm. Check in was then difficult as the initial credit card we had tried to pay online with didn’t work. We then had to pay 8000 pesos as a security deposit which equates to about 100 quid and is completely ridiculous.
Once we sorted that we dropped stuff off in the room and went in search of food as we hadn’t really eaten since breakfast. The beach is about 200m from the hotel and on route is a McDonald’s, handy for end of the night snacks! We got onto the beach to find the most beautiful white sand and a gorgeous pink sunset sky. Worth the days stresses. We found a pizza place called Shakeys where we could sit on the beach. I had a scallop pizza and we got a pitcher of beer to start the evening off. After food we went back to the hotel to get ready for the night out. We also bought a few alcopops to have while we were getting ready.
When we went out, we find a bar called Om bar where we could sit on beanbags on the beach. Here we had watermelon flavour shisha and cocktails. We made friends with a couple of Philippino girls who were on the table next to us - Elle and ?. As the night progressed we discovered that you could buy 3 meters of cocktail so we got a mojito one. From this point it started descending into chaos.
We went inside to dance and felt like celebrities because everyone (guys and girls) wanted to dance with us! Later on we went to a club called Epic which has a bar/dance floor on the beach. We wandered home at about 6am and got a McDonalds on the way.Read more