THE Boy Jesus stands by the burger bar of Kalibo city's Mister Fastfood, a staff in one hand, a film of beef grease upon his clay face and an upturned finger beckoning worshippers to paradise: a bright blue cap covers his head, blue shorts his modesty and across his sculpted chest is a T-shirt emblazoned with one electric pink word: BORACAY.
Paradise isn't where or what it used to be. But then in a town where Jesus is dressed as a German tourist, nothing is. Over the last decade Boracay Island has been bestowed with a Bibleful of miracles. Where there was once just white powder sand there have risen more than 100 resorts.
Where there was once just an azure crystal sea there are now speedboats, water-skiiers, jet-skiiers, diving vessels, tour boats, luxury yachts and floating bars. A square metre of sunset-side beachfront worth only eight pesos in 1978 is today valued at 7,000. Mountains in Aklan province were rent asunder to make way for new roads. An airstrip became an airport and then an international airport.
The locals looked at the annual 100,000 tourists, with their money belts and credit cards, and saw they were on to a good thing. Fishermen found they had been drying their catch on a gold mine. They went into partnership with Westerners and they found themselves wealthy beyond their dreams and so started having new bigger dreams and that is perhaps when things began to go wrong.
Horribly wrong. So much so that in the last six months it appears to some outsiders that Boracay gone has from Genesis to Revelations, from Eden to Babylon in one greedy leap. There have been three signs: massive new building projects, a stack of lawsuits between western and local partners and - more ominously for the tourist trade - a spate of unholy crimes.
On June 17, a 28-year-old Hong Kong resident, Gill Martin, was raped by a local man as she walked home along the beach at night. He stalked her as she left a disco, overpowered her, battered her and tore the flesh off her face with his teeth. But it wasn't Gill Martin's rape that so damaged the image of the island - that was, after all, the work of one twisted man - it was her struggle for justice. The indifference of Boracay's tourist police and a legal system which demanded she pay more than HK$130,000 to bring her attacker to trial exposed the whole community's mindset as fundamentally rotten.