Hello, readers! Diving back into travel mode today to begin recapping my recent two weeks in Palawan, a spectacular island in the Philippines.
This is my first trip to the Philippines, though really I can’t say I’ve been to “the Philippines” properly so much as just Palawan, since the entirety of my trip was there, and there are several hundred other islands that make up the entire nation.
I first heard about Palawan about a year ago in some travel article or another, and quickly realized what a cool place it seemed to be. When I came to Korea, I knew Palawan was at the top of my list for winter vacation destinations. It was touted in everything I read as one of the world’s “last frontiers,” an unspoilt tropical playground that has not (…yet) been blighted by massive chain hotels obliterating the beaches, or package tourists being dumped in en masse, or the kind of wild party atmosphere that has, so far, sort of turned me off of going to Thailand.
I roped three friends into doing a Palawan trip with me (show somebody a few pictures of the island, and it’s pretty easy to convince them to go), we booked our plane tickets in November, and on January 21, we headed off for a two-week jaunt around the island. First stop: the island’s capital and largest (…only) city, Puerto Princesa.
Puerto is where you fly in and out, unless you take a chartered puddle jumper to the more northerly town of El Nido, and we arrived at about 9 in the morning on Sunday after leaving Busan at 8:40pm on Saturday. This involved a cheerless 8-hour layover in the Manila airport from midnight to 8am, which was unpleasant. Anyway, we stepped off the plane into bright sunshine and gloriously warm air, grabbed a few tricycles (a ubiquitous mode of transportation on Palawan, combining a motorcycle with a sort of upgraded side car), and headed to our accommodation for the night, the Banwa Art House.
Riding a tricycle from the airport. You can tell we just arrived because I'm still wearing a long-sleeve shirt. This would be the last time for two weeks.
Banwa!
Entrance to Banwa Art House
Banwa was a pleasant surprise. It had mostly positive reviews from those who had been before us, with a few dissenting voices. For us, it was perfect. It is slightly out of the city center, though Puerto is small enough to render this practically irrelevant, and has a wonderfully laid back and calm atmosphere. When we arrived, it was a busy time for Puerto and for Palawan as a whole, with a flood of tourists coming in from other parts of Asia because of the Chinese New Year holiday (we saw English teachers from China, Taiwan, and Korea everywhere we went). Banwa was booked pretty solid, yet we slept like rocks. The place never felt wild or loud or out of hand, which we appreciated. Banwa also has the most comfortable beds, hands down, of any dorm or hostel guesthouse I’ve stayed in. Seriously, seriously comfortable. In addition to the dorm beds (for which we paid 350PHP per night each), there are I think two or three other private rooms available with double beds and a shared bathroom, though I’m not sure what the rates were for those when we stayed. The staff was cheerful and helpful, and the food in the restaurant was reasonably priced and very tasty (especially the fruit shakes!). We enjoyed Banwa so much that we booked dorm beds again for our last night of the trip, before our flight out. I really recommend Banwa Art House if you’re looking for a place to stay in Puerto Princesa.
Banwa reception
Banwa restaurant and common room
Some more seating in the Banwa common room/restaurant
Banwa dorm room. Eight dorm beds in this room, and another dorm room for women had some more beds (I didn't look in to see how many)
In a true “small world” moment, I met a friend-of-friends at Banwa for the first time. He’s a fellow English teacher in Busan, and while we’re Facebook friends, we’d never actually met in person before (despite having about 20 mutual friends in Busan). I noticed his name just above mine when I signed in on the guest register. Pretty wild.
After checking in, dropping our bags, making dinner reservations at a restaurant the Banwa staff recommended called Bilao at Palayok, and generally zoning out for a few minutes, we headed out to wander around the city and pick up a few supplies (sunblock, mosquito repellent, etc) for the rest of our trip. Puerto is a pleasant, small city. It’s as bustling as anything gets on Palawan, but compared to a megacity like Manila (or even a city like Busan), it’s tiny. Since we arrived on a Sunday, we saw, but did not tour, Puerto’s biggest church, the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, a very pretty blue and white cathedral fairly close to Banwa.
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception
Just across the street from the Cathedral is Plaza Cuartel, a gorgeous little public park that commemorates some very sad history.
Sign at Plaza Cuartel commemorating the ~140 American soldiers burned to death there by Japanese soldiers near the end of World War II
Inside Plaza Cuartel
We wandered around a bit more, poked around some shops, and got the supplies we wanted, but by this point we were ready to collapse from exhaustion and headed back to Banwa for a nap. I woke up a little earlier than the rest and chatted with a British backpacker named Will for a while in the common room. As we got near twilight, I was surprised to hear the azaan, the Islamic call to prayer, from a mosque that must have been close by. The Philippines is a predominately Catholic country, though it does have a small (~5-10%) Muslim population.
We invited Will to dinner with us and headed to Bilao, where we ate what would turn out to be, in my opinion, unquestionably the finest meal of the trip, and one of the better meals of my life. We didn’t start off particularly well. On arriving, we were given a pitcher of water and glasses of ice. You can’t drink the water on Palawan, so we waited until the waiter was out of sight (…we thought) and “sneakily” dumped our ice out. When the waiter came back by, we asked if the pitcher of water was filtered. “Yes,” he replied, then added somewhat drily, “and so is the ice.” Whoops.
Anyway, we ordered a family-style feast for the table. It said it would feed six, but being five Westerners, we assumed we’d have no problem putting away an extra person’s worth of food between the five of us. What a feast. We had an exceptional seafood soup with coconut milk (I don’t get excited about soup; I got excited about this), some really tasty lumpia (spring rolls), a grilled fish with some kind of sauce that I can’t remember the details of, crispy shrimp, clams on the half shell, a sweet and sour shrimp curry with vegetables, and – star of the show – crabs in a garlic butter sauce that were so delicious, I swear I almost swooned. By the end of the meal I was using balls of rice to mop up the remnants of the sauce from the platter, it was so tasty. I cannot stress highly enough that if you go to Puerto Princesa, and you want a good meal, go to Bilao. It’s not as famous as Kalui or Badjao, but we had our last meal of the trip at Badjao: Bilao, in my opinion, blew it out of the water. It was so, so, so good.
Food at Bilao at Palayok. Left to right: rice, lumpia (spring rolls), AMAZING seafood soup with coconut milk, more rice, and grilled fish with a sauce that I can't remember
More food from Bilao. Left to right again: the same grilled fish, a sort of sweet and sour shrimp curry, and my personal favorite, crabs in a ferociously addictive sauce.
After the meal, we headed back to Banwa and got some sleep. Bright and early the next morning, we checked out to catch our van north to El Nido.
One aspect of Palawan that makes a trip there somewhat interesting is transportation on the island. There are no trains, but there is a network of rickety old buses and jeepneys that get around most places, as well as boats that run between some towns. The longest slog on the island is the drive between Puerto Princesa and El Nido, which takes about 8-9 hours by bus, 7-8 hours by jeepney, and 5-6 hours by van. Now, most people who visit Palawan stick to four towns: Puerto Princesa, Sabang (which I’ll have a post on later), Port Barton (ditto), and El Nido (ditto ditto), and usually they go in that exact order: Puerto–>Sabang–>Port Barton–>El Nido. I decided to reverse the order, so that the longest journey of the trip happened right up front. That way, over the rest of the two weeks, we’d be slowly picking our way closer and closer to Puerto and our flight out.
Aside from jeepneys and buses, the third option to get to El Nido, an air conditioned shared van, promised slightly more comfortable seating than the jeepney (and certainly more comfortable than the bus), with the added bonus of air conditioning, which neither of the other two options had. We chose the van, being soft squishy Westerners coming from winter. It’s vacation, right? Spoil yourself a little! (you’re still talking less than $15 each for the trip, a premium I felt was worth it over the $6 bus or the $8 jeepney ride). Our resort in El Nido kindly made the reservation for us ahead of time, so we met the van at the transportation terminal outside of town at 7am.
We then proceeded to drive directly BACK into town (~15km) to swing around and pick other people up at their various hotels – an option that would have been available to us had we known, at the time we made the van reservation, where we would be staying in Puerto (which we didn’t). This process of picking people up took almost three hours. It was coming up on 9:45 before we finally hit the road north, at which point three idiots in the very back of the van got it into their heads that the aircon wasn’t working.
If they had just WAITED a few minutes, it would have filtered back their way, but with the doors open constantly letting people in and out all morning, it wasn’t that surprising that we couldn’t feel it yet. In any case, these morons in the back (who seemed very hung over) decided to open the windows in the back, thus obliterating any chance of the aircon – which continued to run for the rest of the trip – EVER cooling the van down. So much for cool, comfortable travel. To be fair, none of the rest of us in the van said anything. We should have, but we didn’t.
On top of this, the van company squeezed 14 passengers and two staff into a 12-person van. I wasn’t super surprised by this, of course. I mean, I’d seen the day before how many people could fit onto a single tricycle (I swear I saw families of 5 or 6 people on one tricycle), and I’d seen similar spectacles on motorbikes in Vietnam, so I expected a certain amount of crowding – I just wish we’d had aircon to smooth out some of the heat from all those bodies. When one of the Westerners who paid for a full seat complained about having one of the van company staff sitting on a makeshift bench seat next to her, he jumped out at the next stop and squeezed INTO THE DRIVER’S SEAT with his coworker. And off we went to El Nido.
Look at the driver's seat. See the two guys up there? Five hours they sat like that. Upshot: the red hat the guy is wearing? It's an Obama hat!
El Nido, here we come.
Tags: Banwa Art House, Bilao at Palayok, Palawan, Puerto Princesa, the Philippines
