The white sands on the beaches of Anda, Bohol are said to be finer than those of Boracay. And resorts are starting to sprout there like mushrooms. And, like Boracay during its “developing” stage in the early 1980s, Anda’s beaches are beginning to show signs of wear and tear.
It was my first time to be in Anda the other weekend to carry out drone photos of Anda’s best treasure: not just its beaches but the famed Lamanoc Island, home to the earliest evidence of the peopling of Bohol some three thousand years ago. The photos were for a coffee table book about Bohol by Boholano cultural historian and writer Marianito Luspo on behalf of USC Press.
We were billeted at a strangely named resort called Anda de Boracay, which when translated would be “Anda of Boracay.” Someone must have skipped his or her Spanish 101, or maybe this is some kind of a branch resort whose main unit is in Boracay!
Anyway, Nits Luspo asked me not to billet him at this resort as he had some issues that were close to his heart regarding the way the resort was built. But because we wanted to be nearest to the town market, we decided to stay there. We arrived at around 7 p.m. in Anda, after a near-disastrous drone shoot on gale-swept Cabilao Island via Sandingan port in Loay.
Our car had to navigate through puddles of water filling up huge potholes on the street just behind the public market leading to the resort.
The resort itself was clean but the multiple levels and the crowding of buildings remind you of slum housing albeit writ large. The two concrete buildings of the resort seemed to have been built one after the other without any master plan so that one had a much lower floor level than the other. The problem was that these two buildings were attached to each other but their split levels forced one to go to an upper floor on one building to reach the lower floor of the other and vice-versa.
And instead of the promised “sea view” from our room, I had a view of the swimming pool and a restaurant up front and a parking lot at the back of the room. The crowding of facilities, including a stage for a rock band adjacent to the swimming pool, was reminiscent of some resorts I had been to in Mactan, in Moalboal, in Panglao and also in Boracay. Worse, the bar had almost hugged the shoreline in violation of the 20-meter (now 40-meter) easement zone. I finally understood why Nits told me he was not happy with the resort. It had encroached on the beach line.
Anda is just beginning to wake up to the huge potentials of beach resort development. And unlike Panglao in the 1990s and Malapascua in the mid-2000s where a bulldozer had to be brought in to clear the easement zone that has since been increased to 40 meters at high tide, this town still has time to plan out how it must be grown as a resort destination.
It will take political will on the part of the town mayor and of the Bohol governor to impose international standards to clear beaches of any permanent obstruction. And since election is just around the corner, I doubt if things can happen very soon. But after the elections, I really hope the people of Anda will pressure their mayor and their governor to act in favor of open access to its beaches for all and to prevent resorts from encroaching on the 40-meter easement zone.
Or they can also vote for someone who will exercise political will, even if it means fewer voters or financial contributors next time.
The people of Anda can end up like Mactan Island or Moalboal in southwestern Cebu to show how difficult it is now to impose such restrictions given the ineptitude and neglect of a generation of mayors and governors in the past who did nothing while access to beaches were slowly being gobbled up by commercial interests. Today you go through a myriad of extremely narrow roads to reach tiny resort beachfronts hugging other tiny beachfronts in both Mactan and Moalboal. Resorts in these two places, all-time favorites for divers all over the world, even pay monthly fees for access to owners of these private roads.
Or Anda can go to Malapascua and see what the former Cebu governor, Gwendolyn Garcia, did to its beachfront, sending a bulldozer supervised by her younger brother, Byron, to clear the shorelines and make it accessible to all.
Of course, in the elections of 2010, I heard that Gwen got zero votes there and was even abandoned by the barangay chairman of that island—a small price to pay, if indeed true, for the wonderful vista of white sands beaches freely accessible to everyone there now.
So, which is it going to be for you, Anda?
Disclaimer: The comments uploaded on this site do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of management and owner of Cebudailynews. We reserve the right to exclude comments that we deem to be inconsistent with our editorial standards.
