Palawan

So after seeing everybody in Manila, we went on to the island of Palawan. Palawan, with its high limestone mountains, beautiful beaches, karst topography, steamy jungles and small villages is often called the Philippines last frontier. There is a website where people can vote on the new seven wonders of the natural world, http://www.new7wonders.com/, and out of the 300 or so places that are listed, 2 of them are on Palawan. One is the Sabang Underground River, a river that goes through on fo the limestone mountains and is the longest navagible underground river in the world at 8.3km long. We'll be going there later. The other is Tubbataha Reef. An isolated pair of atols in the Sulu Sea that has been completely untouched and has over a thousand species of reef dwellers. Out of all 300 places, both of these are in the top 7. We were unable to make it to Tubbataha, but we're already planning our trip to go dive there. We spent a few days in Puerto Princessa making our plans for the days that we have on Palawan and then we headed up to El Nido.







This is a picture of El Nido. It is a small town on the northern end of the island. It only has power for about half the day and no places to stay that have either hot water or AC, but it is the best place to be to see the Bacuit Archipeigo and some of the best snorkling and diving in the Philippines. Every day we would rent a boat and guide to take us to different places around the archipeligo to snorkel and swim and explore the islands and caves that are all around. This was by far the best snokeling on our trip. We saw so many new things; sting rays, tube worms whose feeders were about 6 inches across, others that looked like 2 inch high christmas trees that were all different colors, soft corals that were 5 feet across, hard corals that looked like giant mushrooms that were a good 6 feet across and 4 feet high, lobsters, a baby squid that was about 6 inches long, 7 foot long sea cucumbers, and a baby white tipped reef shark that was probably 4 or 5 feet long. We didn't get a very good look at the shark because he was afraid of us and didn't stick around.






This is the view we had every morning from our room. Well, its the view we would've every morning if it hadn't been raining most of the days we were there. The rain wasn't that big of a deal because it was still warm, and the ocean was even warmer. We spent hours snorking in the ocean while it was raining and never got cold.

This is Secret Beach. Those spiky limestone cliffs almost completely surround the beach, with only a small inlet form the ocean to the lagoon. Actually its probably one of many beaches named Secret or Hidden. For some reason, there are many beaches, lagoons and caves that are surrounded by huge cliffs except for one small inlet, or are only accessable through a hole or cave through the cliffs. I saw my first ray close up here while we were snokeling, it was bright lime green with blue spots.

Plants grow everywhere here.

There were so many beaches like this. We had lunch here one day. Our guides grilled us up some fresh tuna that was caught that morning. It was really good.