El Nido

The town of El Nido is a nice little tourist trap towards the north of Palawan island/state. The main draw here is the Bacuit archipelago, which is an amazing series of limstone islands that shoot up straight out of the ocean. White sand beaches are too numerous to count and the snorkelling was great.

The town iteself is quite small and located right at the base of some towering limestone cliffs. The place was fairly catered to tourists with nice cafés and many places to stay, most a little overpriced.

Island hopping combined with snorkelling is the main thing to do. Well, that and diving but I didn't end up getting my act together for that and now regret it slightly. But nevertheless I had a great time. Some of the places we were brought to on the island hopping tour were just mind blowingly beautiful. A place called 'Small Lagoon' just looks like a little inlet that ends but as you swim up to the limestone wall and small passage is revealed and once you pass through it you find yourself in Small Lagoon, which is actually fairly big with towering limestone cliffs on all sides of you and turquoise water below. The only downfall of this tour was the amount of tourists. Part of you feels like you've discovered this secret hideaway but then reality hits when you realize that so have thousands of other people. But beautiful is beautiful and I suppose it is nice that many people get to experience it... much to the chagrin of the local coral and sea life I'm sure.

The other main highlight of El Nido for me was climbing one o the limestone cliffs directly behind the town. I had an afternoon with nothing planned and figured I wanted to do something. One of the local tour companies offered cliff climbing and I thought I'd try it out. I had to pay a little more because no one else had signed up but it ended up being well worth it. My guide was this tiny Filipina named Grace. She was maybe 5 feet tall but probably not even. When I first saw her I was a little taken aback. Every guide or boat driver or anything we have had in the Philippines has been a man. Generally women just don't end up doing that sort of thing in this country. Her appearance was certainly misleading as she turned out to be a crazy adventurous girl. The climb itself was no walk in the park. It was well more of a climb than a hike, and all over extremely sharp rock. No ropes or anything involved and even a small wrong move would give you bloody scrapes and cuts, a bigger one would kill you. But Grace did the whole thing in flip flops because her shoes had been 'retired' and she couldn't afford new ones yet. She told me about how once a month she would swim across the bay to the nearest island (aprox. 2.5 km one way) by herself and how the last time she had done it a large shark, much bigger than she was, was swimming around her until she said she 'shooed' it away. I think I would have just passed out and been eaten. The climb was a ton of fun and offered the finest view I've seen yet. It felt like I was just sitting up in the sky looking straight down on the town below and the bay beyong it. It was hard to decide to climb back down.