Last summer, Amanda had a feeling that Bong would pop the question. Like any girl who was suspicious that something was afoot, she searched through his stuff for the engagement ring, according to Bong, but didn’t find it, so she felt that "this Holy Week dive was just one of those dives." Oh, but it wasn’t. Astute as ever, Bong had hidden the engagement ring in her bag.
On Good Friday, with Bong’s cousin and their dive buddies, they took a speedboat out to sea and went 15 meters underwater at Blue Lagoon, a spot that the original Boracay divers named after the movie. "The beauty of that dive spot," says Bong when we caught up with him at Seraph Hotel a day after the wedding, "is that it’s a vegetation with a single rock in the middle so it looks like a garden."
When Amanda went underwater, she found that some of their friends were already down there – one of them with an underwater camera to record the moment. That’s when her heart told her that the dive was going to be special and not just because of the perfect weather.
On top of an underwater rock was a giant clam shell. Bong opened the shell and written inside were the words "WILL U MARRY ME?" Also inside was the engagement ring in a velvet box and supposedly two stones, one with a "yes" scrawled on it, and the other with a "no." But Bong, taking no chances at all, had earlier pocketed the stone that said "no." He gave Amanda a bouquet of fake flowers (real ones wouldn’t withstand the currents), Amanda took the "yes" stone, Bong slipped the ring on her finger, and the couple removed their regulators for a kiss.
And that, my friends, is the proper way for a man who’s lived all his life with Boracay as his playground to propose to a woman who loves the sea as much as he does.
Back on dry land, all the people on the beach were clapping, even the foreign tourists. "You know already?" said Amanda, now sporting a 1.1-carat diamond ring and a wide smile. It was truly a feat how she was kept in the dark when the whole island knew – after all, as the locals will tell you, in Boracay word travels faster than the habagat winds.
The couple’s friend Miguel Mari had put together a video presentation for the wedding reception, which included clips of the proposal and other romantic moments, to which guests ooohed and aaahed. That was why last Saturday, November 23, the women at Seawind’s beach were swooning and the guys probably wanted to kick sand and sock it to the groom. How the hell can they top that? By skydiving? Hiring a balloon and bungee jumping with a placard that says, "Will you marry me?" Going down on one knee and reciting all of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets? Not even close.
"It took me a while to plan it and to divert her attention," says Bong of the now famous proposal. "It’s funny, I did the proposal on a Good Friday, walang Diyos. It was like, Bong, you’re on your own. But thank God everything was perfect, the weather was perfect, my dive buddies were there. I gave the ring to Mike Labatiao (who runs a dive shop in Boracay) and they put it inside the clam and underwater. I was planning to propose to Amanda last Christmas but we were all so drunk and wasted they didn’t want me to risk diving."
As the couple repeatedly said at the reception, the success of their wedding and the all-night luau the day before at Seawind was the work of all their family members and friends: Bong’s parents, Leonard and Nenette Tirol; Amanda’s parents Agu and Gina Guidotti and grandmother Aurora de Guzman; and Louie Cruz, Eddie Guidotti, Albert Meñez, Rachy Cuna and Seawind’s Susan Cocjin – all helped for the success of the wedding at the Holy Rosary Parish Church and the many celebrations that followed.
Bong and Amanda’s wedding sponsors were Tessie Bilbao, Deanna Magdayao, Maripaz Guidotti, Rosario Arnaldo, Maria Murray, Ruth Tirol Jarantilla, Governor Florencio Miraflores, Alberto Lina, Reynaldo G. David, Noel "Toti" Cariño, Lory Guidotti and Louie Cruz.
Amanda wore a white Randy Ortiz gown while her entourage wore beautiful blue gowns that reflected the color of the Boracay sea.
Louie Cruz, who naturally changed into his off-shoulder shirt for the reception (or he wouldn’t be Louie!), and his partner Mike Rieta worked on the decoration of the church and reception. The church was filled with flowers and flowing muslin for that added touch of romance while for the beach reception, Louie created two kinds of seating – one with Japanese-style tables near the water where the couple’s twentysomething friends could sit on the sand, and conventional tables for the, er, mature guests. At our table, Raul Teehankee, Peachie Veneracion, Edd Fuentes and I teased Louie that pretty soon, his stress-free life in Boracay would be inundated with requests for beach wedding planning.
I was in Boracay to do interviews for a book to be published by Fuentes and saw just why the place is now a popular venue for weddings. Bong says, "Words can’t explain how you can do things here in a magical way."
The couple met when Bong was tasked to look for a spokesperson for his Fil-Estate boss Toti Cariño’s basketball team, the Pasig Blue Pirates. He called Cal Carrie’s and other modeling agencies and they sent him pictures but he called back and said he wanted personal appearances. The first one to appear was Amanda Guidotti and Bong fell in love instantly. Needless to say, her being a spokesperson for a basketball team teeming with hormones was short-lived. "I abolished that position," Bong says laughing. That’s when he began to date her.
"At first I didn’t want to go out with him because I thought he was old already," she says with a laugh. He’s now 29 and she’s 25. (Amanda, by the way, owns her own preschool, Stepping Stones, in Philam Homes, QC.)
For their honeymoon, the couple is going on a cruise (a gift from Amanda’s relative, Marivic Murry). From Boracay to 10 days around the Grand Cayman, Jamaica, St. Tomas and the Bahamas. It seems the couple can’t be too far from the sea for too long.
"The wedding is something we can tell our kids about in the future," says Amanda, reflecting on how perfect everything went.
How it nearly rained on their wedding day but didn’t, how the girls in beautiful blue gowns walked barefoot on the sand, and how, some years ago, Bong and Amanda sat on their own patch of Boracay beach watching the sunset and drinking fruit shakes and he asked her, "Do you see yourself being with me in the next century?" and she said yes.