DAY 456: I woke up in the Hangin House on Bulabog Beach with a slight hangover headache to a welcoming sound coming from behind my room's window: the rustling of palm trees blowing in the ocean breeze. Wind. Soon, kiteboarders were inflating their kites on the beach, launching them, and venturing off into the surf -- but not without some snags.

"It's gusty," Mars the German-Filipino reported.

"Gusty" meant the winds were blowing, but weren't consistent in the flow. There were unpredictable updrafts that made kiteboarding a tad harder, even for the most experienced. One portly eastern European kiteboarder could barely get his kite in the air without losing control of it. At one point it flew out towards the crowd on the beach with no tension, and then quickly caught a draft and tensed up the lines in a sort of dangerous way. If anyone was in the way, there might have been one of those throat-slitting accidents I had heard about.

The morning kiteboarding session of the pro boarders was cut short because a heavy downpour came through, grounding everyone except a few of the insane hardcore guys (picture above).

"There's wind now, but now there's rain!" my instructor Merck said on the shoreline.

The downpour was just a passing storm as most tropical storms are, and soon there was a blue sky again, but with lot more gusts -- not a good condition for a boarder-in-training like myself.

"Are you going out?" one of the female pro-boarders asked me as I sat on the beach with Merck.

"I don't know. What's going on?" I asked Merck. "Are we going?" I was eager to complete my training, getting more and more restless as every kiteboarder zipped by.

"It's too gusty," he said. "Just one mistake..." He didn't have to complete the sentence, I got the gist of it. I could accidentally kill a guy or something. Still wasn't I just better than when I first arrived at Bulabog with no experience? But I've learned so much since then! I whined in my head like Luke Skywalker.

"HEY."

"Hey," I answered. Erik the Vancouverite came by to visit and check out the scene of Boracayan kiteboarding culture. "I haven't been on a board yet," I told him. "There's too much wind."

"Too much wind?"

"Yeah. Funny, huh?" We made plans to meet for dinner; I hoped to arrive with news that I finally got out there on a board after all. Erik went off to work on his blog, while I continued to wait for better wind conditions on Bulabog Beach. I hoped I wasn't waiting in vain.

I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I don't wanna wait in vain, I sang in my head to the melody of the legendary song by Bob Marley and The Wailers.

"Maybe eight meters," Merck suggested. The winds were too strong for a regular eleven- or twelve-meter one, but eight might do the trick. Of course I assumed he was talking about an eight-meter kite for me, and I grabbed a harness.

"What? You're going out?" he said to me.

"Yeah. Let's go!"

"[We'll see. I'll try out with eight-meters first.]" Merck went out into the surf with the eight-meter kite and zipped back and forth around the bay, catching air and doing some jumps with the updrafts. It only made me more restless and eager to get out there.

"What's the word?" I asked him when he came back.

"Gusty. It's scary when I do the jumps," he replied. I think he noticed the disappointed look on my face -- it was my last day in Boracay, my last opportunity to kiteboard after all -- and so he suggested, "Okay. Eight meters. After the black clouds."

The drizzle that was coming down had turned into another heavy downpour, which everyone assumed would pass as fast as the first one, but it just kept on raining for another hour, then another, and another -- all afternoon.

Oh c'mon. I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I don't wanna wait in vain. I sat in the Hangin Kite Cafe, covered with an awning, wearing my shoes and harness, still optimistic that the weather would clear before dusk. Most of the other kiteboarders were grounded in the cafe with me, eating soups, pasta, and sandwiches as the hardcore boarders and windsurfers still went out to challenge themselves and Mother Nature.

By four o'clock I saw that the kites were being deflated and gear was being put away into the gear shed. My waiting around for my last opportunity to finish my Jedi kiteboarding training had been in vain after all. To make things more depressing, I had been kicked out of the Hangin House since someone else had a reservation for that room that night. I was shifted over to a rundown house down the beach that looked like it had been abandoned for months. (At least it had a private bathroom.)

With the day gone bust, the only thing I could think to do to salvage the rainy afternoon was get a much-need haircut.

TWO DAYS BACK IN BORACAY to go kiteboarding and it didn't happen. Fortunately my return to Boracay wasn't a complete bust; it led me to meet Canadian Blogreader and fellow traveler Erik, a decent fellow, who I met for dinner that night. He couldn't believe I had waited all day for nothing.

"We had a lot to drink last night," he came to a realization. With that said, we just had a couple of beers over a couple of pizzas at an Italian place on the beach. The beer was cold, the pizza was tasty, and really I had nothing to complain about. Suddenly I was singing a different Marley tune, for pizza, beer, and good company is all I ever need... Redemption Song. Redemption Song.

SAVE THE DATE; DAY 503 IS COMING. MARCH 5, 2005, NYC.
DETAILS AND TRAILER COMING SOON...

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