The Sunny Side of Palawan
El Nido Tour C
The second tour that we scheduled for El Nido happens to be the most popular tour in town, and for good reason. We weren’t sure if we wanted to spend the money on a second tour until we stumbled into a tour office while we were asking around for the ferry service to Coron, and they straight-up offered us the tour at a discount. It was too good to pass up so we signed up. It’s a good thing we decided to do it, because our Tour C experience turned out to be a lot better than our previous Tour A experience [add link] both in terms of weather and island destinations.
Tour C began with a stop at Helicopter Island. We don’t know why the island is named as such, but it had a beach with two roped-off swimming areas. The first was a shallow reef and we saw some fish as well as a few jellyfish. The beach is also pretty nice, with pretty sand and plenty of space for everyone.
There’s something microscopic in the water that sort of stings the skin, giving a feeling like being shocked briefly by static electricity. It comes and goes through the water and is mildly uncomfortable. It feels like you’re being constantly zapped all over your body as you swim, and the only way to get away is to swim elsewhere or to leave the water.
Stop #2 was Hidden Beach, which had a cool entrance. There’s a shallow area to wade through between limestone rock formations, as well as a small cove with a beach. We walked through a tunnel in the rocks that also connects to the back of the beach. It looked a lot like paradise. To think that there could be tons of places like this within the 4,000 islands that make up the Philippines is daunting. If we could have a hidden beach like this to ourselves on any day, the day would be a really good day.
What is possibly better than Hidden Beach is Secret Lagoon. We swam through a small hole in the limestone (which becomes submerged at high tide) to enter the small lagoon, which had shallow warm water and yet another beach. Secret Lagoon is much smaller than the lagoon at Hidden Beach, but the entranceway makes it much more unique.
As with all other tours in El Nido, we stopped for lunch on a beach. The food wasn’t as good as that on the previous Tour A, but still filling enough. Yuki was dying to eat the grilled squid she saw being cooked on the BBQ since we left the first harbour. It’s a good thing she jumped into the crowd to get some food because it was gone pretty quickly.
I got some good photos of Yuki on the beach, including the paradise-like photo at the beginning of this post.
The last stop was also the longest and the most fun. The boat took us to an offshore reef for an excellent round of snorkeling. I noticed that there aren’t as many fish here as what we saw in Curacao or Bonaire (in the Caribbean Netherlands) but the coral reef look more abundant and healthier. You can see a lot of this in the video below.
We’re glad we got the chance to do the tour and we both enjoyed it, especially in fair weather, but at the same time I just wanted to finish the tour while I was still in the middle of it. Yuki and I are used to doing things on our own at our own pace, so it’s hard for us to feel at ease on a scheduled tour. Sometimes it feels like we’re only participating in the standardized tours to say that we went, rather than because we really wanted to go. It’s also a shame to only get 45 minutes at each destination. Whether it’s good or bad, all you’re getting is a quick intro and you don’t have a long time to enjoy it.
Here is the video of our tour:
