Nine nights in Palawan, on our own boat

Arrive Manila

Met inside the terminal at Ninoy Aquino and driven to the hotel. Nothing is scheduled, on purpose: most flights from Europe and North America land in the small hours, and Manila traffic is the one thing on this journey nobody can schedule around.

If you land early enough to want something, the honest answer is the hotel pool rather than a first look at the city. Manila gets its afternoon on day nine, when you are acclimatised and going the other way.

Manila to El Nido

A morning flight north to the airstrip at Lio, a few minutes from the town, then straight to the hotel. We deliberately do not print flight times on this page: the Manila–Palawan schedules move between seasons and an operator quoting you a fixed departure in September for travel in March is quoting a guess.

The afternoon belongs to you. Most people swim, sleep and then walk into El Nido town at dusk, which takes about twenty minutes along the beach and is the best introduction to what this place is: a small, scruffy, working town with an extraordinary bay in front of it.

The Bacuit archipelago, backwards

A private boat for the whole day, leaving early and running the standard circuit in reverse. That single decision is worth more than any other on this itinerary: the Big Lagoon at eleven in the morning is a car park of outriggers, and at eight it is a flooded canyon with nobody in it.

Kayaks come aboard so the Small Lagoon can be entered properly rather than swum into behind a line of hulls. Lunch is grilled on a beach the day fleet has already left. Snorkelling in the afternoon over the corals off Miniloc and Matinloc, and back in before the light goes.

The northern beaches, or a second boat day

Two options and no wrong answer. By land: Nacpan and Duli on the north coast, a rough hour of road each way and a long open beach at the end of it, with a surf break at Duli in the northeast monsoon months.

By sea: the outer islands, which are further, emptier and worse in a swell. Your guide will tell you the night before which of the two the forecast favours, and we would rather move the plan than run a bad version of it.

A day off the water

The one land day, and the reason it exists is that six consecutive boat days flatten into one. Early start for the climb up Taraw, the limestone wall directly behind the town: it is short, it is steep, the rock is sharp enough to cut a palm, and it is done in a harness with a guide. Anyone who does not want that walks the Nagkalit-Kalit forest trail instead, which crosses a stream several times and ends at a waterfall.

The afternoon runs inland to the Dewil valley, where the rice and the limestone outcrops look nothing like the postcard, and finishes in the El Nido market before it closes. Palawan is farmed and fished long before it is visited, and this is the half-day where that is visible.

El Nido to Coron

The fast ferry north across the Linapacan strait in the morning. This is open water and the crossing is entirely at the mercy of the sea state; when the coastguard suspends sailings, the alternative is a flight back through Manila and a lost afternoon, which is precisely why day nine exists as a buffer.

Coron town is not pretty and does not try to be. What it has is a harbour twenty minutes from a bay full of ships that have been on the bottom since the Second World War, and limestone islands with lakes inside them.

The lakes and the wrecks

Kayangan Lake first, at opening, because the stair up and over the ridge is unpleasant in a crowd and the water below is the clearest on this journey. Barracuda Lake afterwards, where the thermocline is sharp enough to feel on your legs as you swim through it — cold, then abruptly warm.

The afternoon is a Japanese supply fleet sunk at anchor during the war. Several of the ships sit shallow enough that a snorkeller sees the deck plating and the masts; certified divers go inside them with a local dive operator, which we arrange as a supplement.

Coron, at your pace

Free, with two things we push. The stair above the town is a long concrete climb best done at five in the afternoon rather than at noon. The southern islands — Malcapuya, Banana — are a longer boat day and the sand is better than anything at El Nido.

One thing we will not book: the safari park on Busuanga, which is an old translocation of African animals onto a Philippine island. It is a zoo with a boat ride attached and it is not what anyone came to Palawan for.

Coron to Manila, and Intramuros

The morning flight south. The afternoon is the walled city: San Agustin, which survived the flattening of Manila in 1945, Fort Santiago, and a walk on the walls with a guide who will be blunt about three hundred years of Spain and forty-eight of the United States.

This is also the buffer. If the Coron flight slips a day, this is the day it eats, and your international departure is untouched. Between August and October we treat that as a working assumption rather than a precaution.

Depart Manila

Breakfast, then the transfer. Manila traffic decides how early that has to be, and we build the margin rather than hoping. Late departures get a day room instead of six hours in a terminal.