APPARENTLY the Kingdom of Thailand got wind of President Rodrigo Duterte’s order to shut down Boracay Island for six months so the famous go-to place for local and international sun worshipers could recover from years of environmental neglect.
Or maybe it didn’t.
But get this, Bangkok just closed down a secluded bay made famous by Leonardo di Caprio’s movie “The Beach” for four months to allow its coral reefs and sea life to recover from decades of unchecked tourism.
By the looks of it, the Duterte administration is not the only one willing to sacrifice millions of dollars in revenues for the sake of sustainable tourism.
It has only been in recent years that the onslaught of visitors to Maya Bay, which is on Phi Phi Leh Island in the Andaman Sea, picked up pace.
Tourists flock to the area for the “unspoiled view of the bay’s emerald waters and glittering white sand.”
But Maya Bay, like Boracay, has been a victim of its own success, and the Thai government realized that’s too high a price to pay for progress.
According to Thai authorities, “they are striving to balance profit and conservation and the closure will happen every year.”
Now that’s something Malacañang should consider. And so should local authorities.
It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when Cebu was marketed as “an island in the Pacific.”
Cebu needed to distance itself from the negative stereotype that shrouded the country during the dark days following the assassination of former senator Ninoy Aquino in 1983.
The strategy somehow defied all odds and succeeded to put Cebu on the tourism map.
The tourists arrived on board chartered flights from Japan, Taiwan and Korea. They stayed and frolicked and then returned to their respective countries without realizing that they just spent their vacation in the Philippines.
So much has changed, though, since then.
Don’t get me wrong. The tourists still come, albeit on direct international flights to the Mactan-Cebu International Airport.
But Cebu no longer has to falsely advertise itself as an “island in the Pacific,” although “island” is not the first thing that comes to mind when you look out of the plane window in the approach to Mactan.
It was different back in the 1980s.
I could imagine Tattoo waiting on the tarmac, yelling “Da plane! Da Plane!” as our plane landed on the runway. And as we stepped out of customs, the distinct smell of mangoes, the ubiquitous sound of the ukelele and the heat reminded us that we were in the tropics.
Sometimes, my grandmother’s white Ford Fiera would be waiting for us outside to whisk us to the city. The ride would be unhurried because there was hardly any traffic. The pace of life was definitely much slower.
Nowadays, though, if locals and visitors want a taste of island life, they have to go farther afield, outside the boundaries of Metro Cebu.
In a cruel twist of fate, the well-meaning dream to catch up with Imperial Manila has turned into a nightmare for Metro Cebu, which has sacrificed quality of life in the name of development.