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Dugong Moments
A travel article about the excellent outdoor activities, pristine beaches, and fantastic nature of Palawan in the south of the Philippines.
A dugong is strange and amiable and gigantic. Its face is flabby and rumpled, its eyes are morose and pensive, and it totally ignored me as I snorkelled nearby, watching it devour sea-grasses like a vacuum cleaner. It looks cumbersome, but it surprised me with its graceful speed: a couple of strokes of its tail propelled it like a torpedo. Then it was gone, like an enigmatic dark star, and I began to understand why early mariners thought that dugongs are mermaids. At last, after my second visit, I had had a close encounter with the dark star of Palawan in the south of the Philippines.
Three weeks earlier, my trip had started in Puerto Princesa, capital of Palawan province, which consists of a main island (50km wide by 400km long) and more than 1,500 isles scattered offshore. The province is known in tourist hype as the Philippines 'last frontier', a reputation that rings true given the erratic electricity, sometimes-failing tap water, patchy telephone coverage, intact forests, empty beaches, dense fringes of mangrove forests, and sparse tourism infrastructure. Only Puerto Princesa has a whiff of sophistication in its funky bars, ATMs that can take credit cards, and a high proportion of young people who move to the capital in search of brighter lights and university education. But it’s bereft of tourist sights and it has no beaches; it’s merely a jump-off point.
For me it was the jump-off point to El Nido, Palawan’s prime beach resort. El Nido, which means ‘the nest’ in reference to the swallows that nest on the karst cliffs and whose nests fetch high prices in Chinese classic ‘bird’s nest soup’, is the base for the Bacuit Archipelago, a scatter of 22 isles scattered offshore. I found a cheery place where the sounds are of children frolicking on the beach and the purr of tricycles, the local rustic taxis. Two of the isles are home to upscale resorts, but I didn’t want to be marooned in just one island, so I stayed in the best resort in town, which has comfy aircon bungalows in trim and manicured grounds.
From my base in El Nido, every day I chartered a fisherman’s outrigger (called banca) and set off to explore the isles. These isles rise dramatically out of the sea in domes or pinnacles of karst forest, the highest ones poking the clouds. All of them hold beaches nestling in creases in the folds of the land, small and clean and mostly deserted patches of powdery white sand. I could claim the beaches as mine for a few hours, sitting indolently in the sand, like a wanderer on a journey of geographical discovery and spiritual revelations. The snorkelling was more rewarding still: thanks to the designation of El Nido as a marine national park, the coral reefs are in an excellent condition. I swam with green turtles and reef sharks, but I didn’t encounter any of the dugongs that make the Bacuit Archipelago home.
Then in the evenings I ate in good seafood restaurants in El Nido, sometimes mingling with the small and happy expat crowd and other times checking out the artistic discourse in Balay Tubay, a rustic restaurant that doubles as the hangout of local artists, including a band that pump out memorable Filipino songs on some evenings. It felt like being among new-found friends; the low tourist traffic means that if you’re in town for longer than a few days, you get noticed, and you start to become privy to insider info.
I picked up a lot of chatter about the development of sustainable tourism in El Nido, which had been designated by the government as a special ecotourism zone. A master plan had been drawn up to steer development towards healthy tourism that would not impinge on the social or natural fabric. The same had been done for Taytay and Calamian Islands, other regions of Palawan province.
Later I made it to the Calamian Islands, a cluster of 163 islands north of Palawan island proper, and I found Coron Town – the capital and hub of the Calamians – a small quaint town that induces you to slow down. I lingered in town for a few days, alternatively dining in Kawayanan Grill Station – a rustic Filipino-style grill and restaurant whose seafood dishes are hearty and fresh – and Coron Bistro, the best restaurant in the north of Palawan, serving French food and some Filipino specialities, such as kilawin, a salad of raw tuna in coconut milk and chilli and lemon. The bistro doubles as the hangout of the local expats, mostly diving instructors, and it's run by chef and proprietor Bruno, a French ex-anthropologist whose persona, defined by blunt talk and no nonsense swagger, is part of the atmosphere.
Yet the Calamians, despite the quaintness and intact forests, are in the grip of a tourism boom so sudden that sometimes it’s impossible to find a room (a handful of new hotels, including some upscale hotels set behind a new yacht marina, were planned at the time of my visit). "It's the new airport that made all the difference," told me Al Lingsan, the president of the Calamians Tourism Association. He's talking about the enlargement of the airport and the concreting of the runways to facilitate large planes to land at the end of 2008. "Once the new airlines started operating," Al explained, "flight fares drastically came down and seat capacity increased, and this led to a boom: we got 7,000 tourists in the first three months of 2009, and hence we expect the total volume for 2009 to be double that of 2008.”
One afternoon I trudged up to Mount Tapyas, a peak that towers over Coron Town, where many young Filipinos congregate every afternoon to catch the famed sunset. There were young girls striking killer poses for pictures, which combined with the sweeping and romantic vista to make the atmosphere more intoxicating. But my attention was riveted by Coron Island a couple of kilometres offshore. It rises from the sea in a girdle of densely forested karst cliffs, its interior characterised with dome-shaped mountains in an entire shape that’s reminiscent of a crown.
There’s something enchanting and bewitching about the whole island, and it’s indeed the crown of Coron’s tourism. The island is owned by the Tagbanua, a tribe of coastal people scattered in the Calamians, who managed to secure self-rule of the island in 2003 on the basis that it’s their ancestral domain. They live in two villages on the island, making a living from the collection of bird's nests and now also from charging tourists who visit the island.
Only two lakes and a scatter of beaches are open to tourists, and I joined a beach-hopping tour of the island. It was another exhilarating day. The lakes are spectacular sinkholes cut into dramatic bowls of karst cliffs; the lagoons have jade-coloured water so clear you can see a coin that drops to the bottom; the beaches are brilliant white splashes set among dark cliffs; and the forests seem like magic, with a plethora of trees sprouting out of the rock that was once formed by volcanoes.
No wonder the island has become something of a tourist pilgrimage site. The Filipino tourists, which account for the bulk of tourist traffic (only a trickle of foreigners visit the Calamians), stay for three or four days, spending one day snorkelling and swimming among offshore isles, another day tourist Coron Island, and third day in Coron Town – almost invariably in that order But my personal pilgrimage would take me further, taking me north to Maricaban Bay and the northeast coast of Basuanga, where the dugongs live.
It’s a region that’s still undeveloped and largely off the tourist radar. There are only two resorts in the region, and I stayed in the best one of them – Club Paradise, an upscale resort set on a private isle in Maricaban Bay. The resort and the isle are a destination in their own right, and the resort goes the extra mile to protect and enhance its environment. At the time of my visit, the resort was building a series of natural ponds that would serve to treat sewage using the reed system, or a natural system. The efforts are paying off: the resort’s grounds boast monitor lizards sunning themselves on the paths, rufous night herons skulking at the lagoon, golden orioles flitting in the trees among the bungalows, Asian glossy starlings that fill the air with a repertoire of melodious trills, fruit bats shrieking at dusk, and barking deers venturing among the bungalows at night. Yet the best lies underwater, off the beach, where the coral reefs are home to an impressive array of marine life, including resident green turtles, giant clams, reef sharks, and shoals of jackfish so thick they block the sun. It was my best snorkelling ever, seeing more species in one day than I had done in 10 years of travels in Southeast Asia.
The dugongs, which I had come to see, are scattered in Maricaban Bay, where the Dugong Dive Centre, the diving outfit that operates out of Club Paradise, is doing an excellent job in guarding the sea, collaborating closely with the coast guard to apprehend fishermen engaged in illegal fishing. The dugongs in the area might even be increasing, according to Rolf Winkelahausen, the German co-owner of the diving centre. “We’re seeing more dugong females with calves, so that gives us cautious optimism that the dugongs are slowly increasing,” he told me.
That’s good news for the endangered dugongs, the only herbivorous sea mammal in the world, gentle creatures that grow to a weight of about 400kgs and spend much of the day devouring sea grasses at a depth of 3-9 metres. Elsewhere, dugong populations have plunged; in Southeast Asia the numbers of dugongs are estimated to have decreased by ninety percent, mostly due to deliberate killing by fishermen (their meat tastes like pork) and accidental entanglement and eventual suffocation in fishing nets.
"What we have found in our area," said Rolf, "is that the local fishermen don't kill dugongs for meat. We visit fishermen villages and they tell us they have dugongs foraging just off the beaches where the fishermen live, and that sometimes the dugongs surface near the fishing boats in a playful or curious manner."
We were talking as we set off on the dugong-watching tour, chugging towards the open sea. We were the only tourists in the sea for as far as our eyes could see, and we passed miles of gloriously desolate coastline: empty beaches, mangrove forests, slopes of dense forest and, to our seaboard, a string of isles rising out of the glistening metallic water. Some isles have small fishermen settlements, and virtually all isles have white powdery beaches fronted by azure stretches of water – for me, the surprise was that all of this exists and yet it remains undeveloped. Few tropical places in the world hold such promise, in terms of beaches and sea, and yet remain so untouched. I could only hope that when development does come, and it’s a matter of time – the Banyan Tree started building a resort on one of the isles during my visit – it would be sensitive, limited, and tightly controlled.
We chugged along, stopping off at some beaches for swimming and snorkelling, and occasionally a whoop went up in the boat whenever someone spotted the grey back of a dugong breaking the surface of the water to breathe. Eventually we anchored at an isle where a few resident dugongs feed off the beach; the beach itself had a scatter of fishermen's huts. The fishermen were foraging for octopuses in outrigger canoes, and we bought an octopus and lobster to complement our packed lunch, paying a mere one US dollar for a whole lobster and a large octopus.
To track dugongs you have to see where they surface to breathe – which they do every five minutes – and then swim to that spot. I had a few misses before I spotted one directly underneath me through my goggles: it was feeding, tearing out the seagrasses in a hoovering action. Then it saw me, and rose towards me, giving me a brief pensive glance with its small opaque eyes and went to feed again. I followed its progress for a few minutes, and then it flapped its tail in a strong graceful stroke and it was gone, disappearing into the distance. That was all I needed: I had fulfilled my pilgrimage and it was at that point that I had distinct sense that my trip to Palawan had run its complete course.
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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