Triumph and Failure in Palawan Part One: Puerto Princesa

Most travellers opt to fly into Palawan, either directly to the main city of Puerto Princesa, to beautiful El Nido or even to Coron where you can book an onwards island-hopping tour to make your way to the main island in style. Ever the fan of slow travel, I decided to arrive via the lesser-known ferry, which departs from Manila once every 10 days to make the 26-hour journey. As a start to my Palawan adventure, things could only get better. Or so I thought.

Waiting to depart Manila on the Palawan-bound ferry

Manila to Puerto Princesa by Ferry

The check-in process was just as chaotic as you might imagine, made all the more fun by lugging around 25kg of baggage in 35°C heat. After eventually working out that the check-in counter is, of course, outside of the ferry terminal, I crammed myself into the waiting lounge along with hundreds of other passengers and a distinct lack of air conditioning.

The ferry company actually bills the trip as a cruise, which is a bit of a stretch of the imagination but, in true Asian style, the house band were there to welcome us aboard. The stage would later become a karaoke lounge, which I’m pretty sure didn’t let up for the entire time I was on board.

The accommodation was truly spartan, with plastic mattresses adorning the cramped bunk beds and no electricity available (unless you’re willing to pay for a power station by the minute which, as a budget traveller and certified cheapskate, I was not). As the hours dragged by, I was increasingly grateful to have a good book with me, and increasingly resentful of the well-stocked bar, which many of the passengers had decided to patronise. Avoid the Drunk Haranguer became my favourite game to play, which was surprisingly challenging given the few spaces and total lack of privacy on the boat.

Passing through the beautiful islands of Coron on the ferry

There were definitely some interesting characters on board, including Palawan’s self-proclaimed most famous competitive dog trainer (whose local knowledge would later get me out of a sticky spot) and a steaming drunk US veteran with a bad karaoke habit and stigmata tattooed across his body. Perhaps the ferry’s one redeeming feature was waking up at 5am to watch the beautiful tropical islands of Coron swim by under a golden sunrise.

Puerto Princesa

After spending two full days in chaotic Manilla waiting for the ferry (which is approximately one full day more than anyone has any business spending in Manila), I’d decided to book myself into a quiet hostel on the island’s northern coast, approximately 25km from the city centre. This was a decision I would come to rue.

I had wanted to check out Nagtabon Beach, which is renowned for its surfing, and which my hostel’s booking description had proudly touted as the third most popular tourist attraction on Palawan. What the description had neglected to mention, was that it was a several kilometre hike away over very steep terrain, making it practically inaccessible in the stifling Filipino humidity. Save for a solitary shawarma bar, it was also the only attraction within walking distance.

Nagtabon Beach

Unfortunately, a poorly tied pair of laces and an exceptionally heavy pack had rendered my knees immobile and put my surfing dreams to rest the previous day but, after two months of travel, I was thankful to have finally arrived at a beach. I guess there’s a reason Nagtabon Beach is allegedly the third most popular tourist destination on Palawan. With pristine white sand bordered by luscious palm trees and boisterous waves, I enjoyed a swim in the rain before drying off at one of the local food stalls.

And that’s when my Palawan adventure took a turn for the worse and my choice of isolated, rustic hostel really turned around to bite me in the ass. With the rains increasing, I headed back to my bungalow where I would involuntarily remain for the next two days.

When it rains in the Philippines, it really rains. The sound is deafening and the ground is waterlogged within minutes. Sometimes it’s a brief shower and sometimes it doesn’t let up for days. Unfortunately for me, this time it turned out to be the latter.

I awoke at 2am the following morning drenched in sweat. My bungalow had turned itself into a sauna, the two fans that kept it cool having inexplicably stopped during the night. I flicked the light on to examine the problem only to find that the electricity was out. My phone battery was low and there was no WiFi or data reception. I headed out onto the veranda to cool down and the gales instantly swept sheets of rainwater over me. Shivering in the night air, I retreated into my sauna.

And thusly I spent the next two days with no-one for company but a middle-aged Norwegian businessman and his ‘holiday girlfriend’ (a young, attractive Filipina accompanying him for the duration of his stay). This is, unfortunately, an arrangement that’s quite common across the Philippines.

Eventually, just as the cabin fever reached its peak, my hosts managed to get a generator working. As soon as the WiFi reappeared, I booked myself a hostel in the city centre, going off of a recommendation from Palawan’s self-proclaimed most famous competitive dog trainer. 100% Café Moto turned out to be everything my previous hostel wasn’t, and I quickly made friends over good food with (relative) civilisation just a stone’s throw from my comfy bunk.

A tofu version of kare-kare - a Filipino speciality

Continuing my countdown of Palawan’s most popular tourist attractions, I decided to tick #2 off of my list and pay a visit to the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park. A slight misnomer, the river is actually located around 75km outside of Puerto Princesa, but it is an underground river, so 5/10 on accurate naming.

A sprawling karst limestone system, the underground river flows for 8km before emerging directly into the sea. The mouth of the river is accessible only by boat, so we hopped on a motorised bangka to ride across the bay before transferring into a smaller hand-powered boat with which to explore the river system.

Getting ready to explore the underground river

The Filipino approach to tourism is a thing to behold in itself. We were all handed headsets through which to listen to the audio guide as our pilot used his flashlight to point out landmarks in the cave system, comically out of time with the audio. Almost immediately the country’s Catholic influence made itself known, with each rock formation being identified as the Virgin Mary, the Twelve Apostles or even Christ himself and each one, of course, utterly unintelligible from that which it supposedly resembles.

Unnecessary Catholic propaganda aside, the underground river is awesome. It contains vast dome-shaped caverns and towering stalagmite pillars that have been formed over millions of years, each one growing a fraction of a millimetre a year. Perhaps more excitingly, it contains minerals that have been found nowhere else on Earth, as well as species of bat that inhabit this cave system alone – and there were a lot of bats, either roosting on the ceiling or swooping over our heads.

Entering the mouth of the Underground River

So, would I recommend the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River tour? Here’s where Filipino tourism kind of gets in the way of itself. The whole excursion was billed as a full-day tour but the majority of that consisted of travelling, waiting around for boats, and eating at an unnecessarily extravagant buffet. We were on the river for all of 45 minutes and information was relatively thin on (or indeed under) the ground – there’s very much a culture of getting the tourist in, taking their photo, and shipping the next person in, something that I noticed time and again throughout the Philippines, and which I’m going to dub ‘fast tourism’.

I had been excited to do some hiking within the national park, as I had read that there were some stunning trails, and it was a great place to see waterfalls as well as an abundance of wildlife including long-tailed macaques, bearded pigs and monitor lizards. Unfortunately, none of this was even offered as part of the tour, so if you’re going to visit, I’d suggest basing yourself in nearby Sabang and taking the time to explore the park independently.

Come back for part two where things make a marked improvement and I spend considerably less time moaning!