Most beautiful places in Philippines

Crystal clear waters like you’ve never seen before at Palawan.

KNOWN as “The Last Frontier” of the Philippines, Palawan, a 400km-long island north of Borneo is the stuff adventure is made of with vast swathes of jungle, long empty beaches and some of the most awesome geological phenomena on the planet.

A two-hour drive from the sleepy capital Puerto Princesa is the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River, a 8.2km-long underground canal and one of the New Seven Wonders of the World — areas of outstanding beauty as judged in a global voting campaign.

About half the length of the cave can be explored in guided canoe trips that depart from nearby Sabang Beach.

From Sabang continue north to Port Barton, a tranquil cove named after a British colonel who surveyed the area in the 1940s.

The sand is like powder and the water is transparent and still as a lagoon. There’s nothing much to do here but sunbake and swim.

A day’s drive from Port Barton on rickety, windy roads is El Nido — the Nest — the beachfront town where Alex Garland wrote the seminal Asian travel novel The Beach.

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El Nido is the jumping-off point for the Bacuit Archipelago, a series of interlinked coves and bays pockmarked with colossal rock formations called karsts that explode from the sea.

Yet the real treasure of Palawan is its people, a curious breed of religious greenies who are fluent in English and practically fall over one another to help travellers in need.

“They have a compassion for strangers that personally I find outstanding, ” says Puerto Princessa Mayor Edward Hagedorn.