Paved paradise, put up a parking lot

And Philippine President Duterte is doing something about it:

As Philippines Shuts Down A Popular Tourist Island, Residents Fear For Their Future

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The Philippine island of Boracay is a tourist magnet, with its beaches regularly appearing on lists of the world's best. It's easy to see why. "I think this is an amazing beach," says Frida Roemer from Copenhagen, lounging on the island's White Beach. "The clear water, the white sand ... I extended my ticket because I just liked it so much." Her Swedish friend Erika Havskot agrees. She's been here five times in as many years. The only caveat, Havskot says, is this: It's become overcrowded — with tourists like her — since she first started coming. Boracay received some 2 million visitors last year, according to the Philippine government, mostly Chinese and South Koreans. Tourism brought an estimated $1 billion to the local economy last year alone. But Boracay, with a population of 45,000, has fallen victim to its own popularity, its infrastructure unable to accommodate the influx of visitors and the new hotels being built to host them. The island's sewage system in particular can't cope, which has left many of the island's streets and alleys in a constant state of repair as maintenance crews desperately try to clear clogged pipes. Duterte's decision to close Boracay was sudden. The first inkling came in February, when he threatened to close the island to tourism after seeing a video of raw sewage spewing out of a pipe on Bulabog Beach, a popular area with wind and kite surfers.

The island, a quiet and beautiful place until a few years ago, is a victim of commercial success, unable to cope with the mess that comes with millions of tourists.

And it's not just the beaches:

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And the government's general plan to clean up the island may be too ambitious, given the six month time frame. A walk from White Beach to Bulabog Beach on the other side of the island offers a stark reminder of the challenges ahead. In street after street, sanitation workers in hip waders haul up buckets of sewage from overflowing pipes. Streets are clogged with tourists on their way to Starbucks and McDonald's that sprang up in the development boom here.

Perhaps Duterte is doing something good and sensible for a change? He's stopping the tourism, at least for awhile, but if he didn't do something, it wouldn't be long before the island was so bad that the tourists stopped coming anyway.

As Yogi Berra said, "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

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