Coron

The ferry from El Nido to Coron takes four hours through open water, and somewhere in the middle of it — when Busuanga Island begins to materialize on the northern horizon and the sea turns from bright aquamarine to deeper navy — I understood that I had arrived somewhere that operates by different rules. El Nido is famous. Coron is known by people who have been to El Nido and come back changed.

Coron town itself is a working fishing port with a lively market, a proper main street of hardware stores and sari-sari shops, and a pier where the ferries dock alongside fishing boats that have been out since before dawn. The tourist infrastructure is lighter here — fewer tour agencies crowding the pavements, fewer menus printed in nine languages. The island-hopping tours leave early in the morning on wooden bancas, and the destinations include things that El Nido, for all its beauty, cannot offer: a lake so clear you can count the fish at fifteen meters, and beneath the water of Coron Bay, an entire fleet of Japanese warships sunk in a single American air raid on September 24, 1944.

The wrecks are staggering. I dove the Okikawa Maru on my first morning, a massive oil tanker lying at about forty feet, its hull so thick with soft coral and sea fans that it resembles a garden more than a warship. Lionfish hover in the portholes. Batfish circle the mast in slow, deliberate spirals. The visibility runs to thirty meters on a calm day, and the scale of the thing — sitting in what was someone’s engine room, surrounded by the equipment of an ongoing war, overgrown now by seventy years of reef — produces a feeling that is not quite sadness and not quite awe but something between the two. There are twelve wrecks accessible from Coron. I dove six of them. I am still thinking about the Kogyo Maru.

Kayangan Lake is the other thing. You climb two hundred rough-cut steps to a viewpoint that is, frankly, one of the most photographed spots in the Philippines — the lake below, turquoise and perfectly still, framed by karsts on all sides — and then you descend to the water and swim in a lake that is somehow both salt and fresh water in alternating layers, visible as haloclines that shimmer like heat haze around your legs. Come before eight in the morning. The afternoon crowds transform it.

The food in Coron deserves attention that most travelers miss because they are too focused on dive planning. Lolo Nonoy’s on the main street does a sinigang na hipon — sour tamarind soup with fresh prawns — that I came back to on my last night. The covered market near the pier sells purple yam ice cream in the afternoon. Eat it standing up by the dock watching the pump boats come in.

When to go: November through May is reliable. January through March offers the best diving visibility — calm seas, minimal wind. The wrecks are diveable year-round in theory, but the monsoon season (June through October) brings rough water and reduced vis. Go in the dry season and spend at least four days to do the wrecks proper justice.