palawan, part two

After a whole day of island-hopping, we decided to have dinner at the famed Badjao Seafront Restaurant.  It's quite a distance from the main road, so we had to ride tricycles and arrange for them to pick us up after dinner.  The ambience was great, and we imagine it would be better in daytime when you could see the sea.  At the time we really couldn't be sure if the restaurant fronted the sea or not -- just that I was built on shallow water. But we took their word for it.

The food was also good -- the lemon chicken was so tasty we've already eaten it by the time we thought of taking pictures.  We would have come back for another meal, but there were still other places to try.  It was fortunate that we had our dinner then, because later we found that the Mutya Ng Pilipinas candidates had closed off the place on the following night.

The next day we got up early in hopes of  seeing the Underground River, which we failed to see the other day because of the beauty pageant contestants closing it off.  This time, we succeeded. Yey!

To get to the Underground River site, you'd either hike up the monkey trail (was it a 2-hour hike?), or ride a small boat fit for 4 passengers.  Even under normal conditions, the waves were pretty scary -- at times the boat seemed to be free-falling as it rode the waves.  I was happy to be in a life jacket.

When we got to the other side, it was a short walk through a forest to the mouth of the cave where the river poured out to the sea.  We were advised to keep a good grip on our belongings, especially the cameras, since the monkeys are notorious for snatching tourist's stuff.

Clad in life jackets (the river is 30 feet deep in some areas) and helmets (more for bat poop than for debris), we boarded a boat and a guide rowed for us through the 1.5 kilometer route inside the cave, cracking jokes at appropriate places in the cave, some of which were actually funny.  The cave's  actually much much deeper, but you'd have to get a special permit to explore it further. I wish we had good photographs of the inside of the cave, but we only had point-and-shoot cameras.  Looking at the photographs now, none of them does justice to the awesomeness that we witnessed in that half-an-hour tour.