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Panglao Island, Bohol. It looked
perfect, sitting there in the middle of
the map of the Philippine islands. Last
year, my husband and I decided that
while France is a good place to live in,
it could be, as the Joni Mitchell song
went, “too old and cold and settled in
its ways…” Of course, Joni was talking
about Paris, while we were somewhere
down in the south; not as cold maybe,
but just as attached to its traditions.
After spending 10 years in Aigues-
Mortes, a sleepy village that turns into
a tourist madhouse in the spring and
summer months, we wanted a change.
Manila, where I used to live, was out
of the question — too fast-paced, with
not enough accessible green spaces.
Boracay, where Pierre used to work,
was considered for maybe one minute
before being dropped. We had had
enough of tourist madhouses.
While we had heard that Panglao
was becoming a popular travel
destination, we had also been told that
compared to Boracay, the island’s main
tourist strip, Alona Beach, was a “ghost
town”. We were sold on the idea of it in
an instant.
We were going to stay for a year,
we decided. Home in the beginning
was just a month-long reservation on
a one-bedroom apartment in a resort
called Vanilla Sky, just opened last
September, which we’d chosen largely
because we’d read that the owner was
a young Italian who had decided to quit
Europe to begin life anew in the tropics.
Alessandro, when we met him,
seemed like an earnest man who
knew what he was doing — judging
from how the rooms were all booked,
how efficient the staff were, and how
well maintained the whole place was.
Soon we learned that he came to
the Philippines for the first time three
years ago. He hadn’t really traveled
much outside of Europe and spoke no
English, but he decided to come all the
way to Bohol and build a resort from
the ground up anyway. We decided
We had been told that the island
,
s
main tourist strip, Alona Beach, was a “ghost
town”. We were sold on the idea in an instant
