There was a time when Boracay was a simple island with an empty white sand beach. It had one unpaved road that ran across the island and thousands of coconut trees. The only decent hotel was a mom and pop operation called Friday’s, which was then the best place to stay in Boracay because it had its own generator.

Everyone else who couldn’t afford Friday’s stayed in private guest houses with no electricity. This meant dining by candlelight and dancing in the dark.

CRASHLANDING ON BORACAY

Boracay then was just so wonderful. And I would never have found myself on this most idyllic of islands if not for a New Yorker friend. He’d done graduate studies in Kyoto. Then, as part of a year-long trek around the world, he decided to spend three months in Boracay just swimming and surfing.

One day, over one of many dinners on his two-week stopover in Manila, he invited me to come along to Boracay for a few days.

“Boracay?” I said to him. I’d never heard of the place. There was no Internet then, you see, so news of this little paradise was simply passed around a network of adventurers and beach lovers who relished the rough and tumble side of life.

DRAMATIC DECISION. JUST LIKE IN THE MOVIES.

Five days was all I had, as I needed to return to school in Tokyo, and the trip to Boracay was literally a last-minute decision.

When he asked me to come along, I’d initially said no. But on the day I was set to fly to Japan, I had a change of heart at the international airport. My driver brought me to NAIA 1 to catch my flight back to Japan on Japan Airlines. Yes, I literally grew up with this airline and it feels like home.

As soon as I got off at the NAIA 1 airport driveway, I remembered this invitation to Boracay. Suddenly I was taking the escalator down to the arrivals terminal and hailing a taxi to the domestic airport. Call it serendipity. And, yes, it was exactly like in the TV tele-novelas.

And that holiday was just as innocent, sweet and fun as that Korean television series “Crashlanding on You,” too. Maybe that’s why I like Crashlanding on You so much. 

HOW TO GET TO BORACAY

I’ve had many perfect holidays in my life, including many to the most luxurious places on the planet. Interestingly, this spontaneous little no frills holiday is still among the most perfect. We rode the second tiniest airplane I’d ever seen from Manila to the Caticlan airstrip. The airstrip was really just cleared dirt at that time and there were no large planes landing here. And from Caticlan, we got on a wooden boat to the island.

As my friend was a free spirit, advance planning was not in his DNA. Of course we had no hotel reservations at Friday’s. So we walked around for the first few hours looking for a guest house that would pass my squeamish standards.

Eventually we hit upon a modest property that rented out little cottages. The owners served a breakfast of fish and rice under a makeshift canvas tent that doubled as a dance floor at night. It was in a quiet part of a quiet island and the sea was just a few meters away.

REMEMBERING THE ORIGINAL BORACAY

Boracay of old was completely untouched by commercialism. It was really a village where everyone knew everyone. My friend was Mr. Congeniality so he quickly made friends with the locals and soon we were visiting homes and joining get-togethers. That is, when we weren’t running around this amazing beach with warm waters and no one else around.

There was absolutely nothing in Boracay then. So everyone spent their days by the beach, and the little dance floor under a canvas tent in front of our guest house was the place to be on any night. In the evenings, I taught my friend how to dance the swing. He had two left feet but lots of enthusiasm, and the whole village would come out to watch this happy spectacle.

WINTER IN TOKYO

Finally I had to reluctantly fly back to Manila and onwards to Tokyo. School was waiting. I can’t even remember how I got my return ticket then. However, I ended up with one and for some reason, a priest was flying my plane back to Manila.

It was the smallest plane I had ever seen — it was a one-engine contraption with just two seats. I can’t ever forget this because the priest and I talked the whole way back to Manila as he piloted the plane. And I recall thinking that at least I had a priest for company if the plane crashed.

A TIME FOR EVERYTHING

There were no tears, regrets or elaborate goodbyes at the end of my Boracay holiday. Upon returning to Tokyo, I immediately plunged headlong into schoolwork and winter activities. Meanwhile my friend continued with the peaceful village life on Boracay. Interestingly, I never saw him again. Nor did I expect to.

And I never saw that original Boracay again either. Not long after we both left Boracay, he three months after me, the island changed quicker than I would ever imagine.

LETTER FROM BORACAY

But one day in late spring in Tokyo, I returned to my school dormitory to find a letter waiting for me. Yes, just like in the movies. It was postmarked from the island. When I opened it, it was six pages long, written on scrap school paper in a messy scrawl, and folded haphazardly like a bad origami. I smiled to myself. It was so like him to send something like this.

I imagine he’d written it one night by the beach after finishing a bottle of the local rum. In this letter, he’d written a dozen stories that now seemed so far away to me, as I was back to my regular life in Tokyo. But one story in particular stood out. He told me about a German we’d become casual friends with, who ran a small resort inland. Apparently, he’d been shot dead in revenge of a dispute.

Then my friend ended his letter with this line that still brings tears to my eyes even now: “And everyone still asks about you here. They want to know when you’re coming back.”

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A villa in Umbria, Italy

I would love to call this graceful seven-bedroom villa with a swimming pool, nestled among the vineyards and olive groves of Umbria in Italy, my house in the Italian countryside. But I don’t think Signora Patrizzi, of a patrician Roman family and owner of everything my eye rested on in this part of Umbria, would approve. 

However, for two weeks one summer, I felt this graceful house, with its rustic Italian decor — flower-laden awnings, wooden shutters and terra cotta floors — was truly mine. Some years back, you see, we rented Signora Patrizzi’s villa in Umbria, 90 minutes out of Rome, and experienced authentic Italian country life. With the house, it was love at first sight. It was a beautiful estate of rolling fields, and at the centre of it, at the end of a long driveway next to a helicopter landing pad, was the stone house.  

This Italian villa had large terraces on the second floor, two living rooms below that opened up onto stone patios, a flowery pergola for outdoor dining, and sprawling grounds that provided a closeness to nature impossible elsewhere. There was no other house within neighborly distance, although we did make out some lights from a farmhouse across a couple of hills.

During the day, we visited nearby iconic Italian hilltop towns including Spoleto, Assisi, and Perugia; and at night we cooked pasta dinners and ate al fresco under the stars. 

My own memories of this particular Italian summer consist of this: incredibly blue skies and the smell of flowers everywhere; scorching afternoons when the world shuts down for a nap, and cool evenings when entire towns in Italy reawake for the traditional passagiatto—which is basically a walk around the neighborhood square — and a drink at the local bar; long lines at the gelateria stands where people sought relief from the heat; and homegrown wine pumped like gasoline into large vats at five euros a pop and drunk by the locals like water.

I’ve been to Umbria in all four seasons, and in the summer I can say that it’s an entirely different animal. Outside of the famous hilltop villages, which are — thankfully — still more colorful vignettes of local Italian life rather than tourist traps for scrapbook photo ops, this provincia is very much a “salt of the earth” type of place all year-round, with none of the glamour and energetic frenzy of its fancier rural cousins on both sides, including Tuscany further North and the Amalfi region down south. 

And in the summer, Umbria temporarily sheds the heaviness and coarseness of its usual sensible agricultural existence for a mantle of carefree-ness and vitality that’s perfect for a #Travelife.

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