I’m setting down an account of my journey through this virus era. I’m piecing it together as I go using photos, a few journal entries I made, and my wife, Jill’s, and my recollections. I began this story began in the May 7, 2021 post.
We ate breakfast outside our door each day and were visited by kittens on most of the days. For a few days our neighbors were a family of Chinese mainlanders with 2 children. The cats were scarce for that weekend because the children wanted to use them as toys. Jill and I took a long walk on our third day. We wandered to the beach and north along the jungle roads. We passed derelict hotels and restaurants, places that didn’t meet the new safety codes of the island. Along the sunrise beach there were even a few hotels that were bulldozed back to a respectable distance from the beach. The ruins seemed abandoned with no life or visible attempts to repair the structure except for some token caution tape.
We walked past resorts that were open and had a fair number of guests but there seemed more that were closed. It didn’t seem that the island was recovering quickly from the government’s reset. One of our destinations was the highest hill on the island. When we arrived, a ticket vendor sitting on the bottom step said the vista was closed for repairs.
One thing that I didn’t mention was that a typhoon had passed through the Philippines a week or two prior to our trip. The path was well north of Boracay but some of the island’s unkemptness was dues to this. Probably more than few vacations were cancelled as well.
We did find the Boracay Wetlands Conservation Park in the jungle and spent a an hour walking amongst the plants and trees and reading the signs. Instead of taking the long trek back to our kitten litter apartment in the midday tropical sun. We continued up a hill and discovered the main road again.
We ventured up to the only real bona fide shopping center on the island, it had the only movie theatre for goodness sakes. It is, obviously, named City Mall. I pictured a multi-mezzanine shopping paradise to fit the islands magazine image. Like many things on the island, the mall was did not fit that image. It, like other of the places on the island, seemed to have been built to the mantra, if you build they will come. The crowds had yet to arrive. That was fine, we were mostly looking for a taxi, those were in no short supply. The mall was miles from the beach district. We went to the bathroom and bought a bottle of water. In front of the mall was a strip of restaurants. We decided by lucky chance to have lunch at Masala Moe’s. It was here that we had a long-walk-earned feast of Chicken Masala. The walls were adorned with newspaper articles of the life of the owners. Behind the counter, the cashier/cook/waitress/probably-part-owner looked at her phone. We ate every last grain of rice and basked in the afterglow. Then we took a harrowing motorcycle taxi back to our apartment for a nap to recharge for the sunset on the beach.
It was January 20, 2020. January 21 is my father’s birthday. News of a SARS-like virus was being reported already in international media. I had probably read a story or two about it at this point. There were less than two hundred cases reported. It was something to take note of, but nothing to worry about.
The park sign looks similar to the ones at our Preseve on Barrancas! And, why does it feel like you leave me hanging at the end of each page you write? Is that a writer’s trick?
That was the best chicken masala I’ve ever had!