STAND where the warm sea laps the gleaming white sand of the 4km-long beach on the resort island of Boracay and whip out your selfie stick. You can capture an image of yourself against the impossibly beautiful backdrop of an orange sun dropping from a pink sky into a deep blue sea. Or you could, if the parasailors and banana-boat riders would only get out of the way. And then there is the local feature that your camera cannot capture: the peculiar whiff wafting up from the water at your feet.
“Boracay is a cesspool,” President Rodrigo Duterte declared, with customary frankness, in a speech last month. “You go into the water, it’s smelly. Smells of what? Shit.” Look down, and your toes curl up in the green algae washed ashore from the shallows where it grows, fed by sewage that seeps untreated into the sea from the resorts and ancillary businesses that cram the island. Look up, and you see the start of the evening parade of tourists up and down the beach-front. They are Chinese or Koreans,...Continue reading
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