We woke up at 3 a.m. our first day in Manila to head back to the airport we arrived at less than a day prior. On the first flight of the day, we headed to Boracay.

Lately, Boracay has gotten a bad rep for being overcrowded and overrated. The week before we arrived was the Easter holiday–the busiest weekend of the year, so we may have gotten a different side of the island. We really enjoyed it.

You can’t just fly into Boracay. We had to take a van to a speedboat to another van to get to our hotel. Mark’s dad, who we were there with, along with his girlfriend, told us that it wasn’t too long ago when you had to take a tricycle, get in a ROW boat, then take another tricycle to get to white beach. Which is a little like… But for partying, which is amazing and when I started to understand why the Philippine Department of Tourism has declared their tagline, “It’s more fun in the Philippines.”

From the boat headed to Boracay.

If you read “tricycle” and thought of this: , don’t worry, it wasn’t that bad. They’re motorcycles with large sidecars, like this:  White Beach is beautiful… …but it’s known for its vibrancy, day and night.

As The Philippines’ largest tourist draw, Boracay has plenty of things to do in the way of water sports. Our first stop was parasailing. It was our first time!

They offered to take printed pictures but Mark tried to talk them down to making them two dollars and they wouldn’t budge from four (everything is that cheap down there!) but, lucky for us, one of the workers on the boat took some pictures with my phone for free.99!

And, by ‘some’ I mean, like 40. He had some fun with it.
We were still pretty tired from our early start, so we napped for a while and relaxed. We needed to try and have energy for the evening, after all.

This sign perfectly describes my travel diet:

So we did. But first, Turon.

Turon is the only street food I ate in The Philippines, though we were all planning on me eating some balut and making a big spectacle of it. This ishh is everything (I shouldn’t eat.) Find out how to make Turon (and why you probably shouldn’t).

We took a sunset sailboat cruise. it was very romantic. 

After the sun went down, the beach began changing immediately. Lights, live music, and fire dancers were a plenty. Screams from the reverse bungee became louder as lights, dry ice, and crowds surrounded it. Vendors changed from selling pearls, selfie sticks and waterproof phone bags to all things that light up.

We walked the strip for quite a while and stopped when we saw the best fire dancers. These guys were really stunning, and had some killler choreography!   

Everyone is my height in The Philippines! The taller one was one of the fire dancers. She kept giving me mean looks throughout her performance and pretending to throw fire at me. It was scary!

They would swing the fire right next to you! I hardly had the space (or bravery) to take this picture!

 They let me give it a go, but I’m very clumsy and didn’t trust myself. Mark took roughly 45 pictures of me making all the I Love Lucy faces as I scared myself–and those around me–with the fireballs in my hand.