Sabang

The road to Sabang runs for about an hour west of Puerto Princesa, climbing into thick primary forest before dropping to a small village on a bay where the river meets the sea. There are a few guesthouses, a beach, monitor lizards the size of small dogs crossing the road without particular urgency. From here you board a small pump boat to cross the bay to the cave entrance — a ten-minute ride past mangroves where hornbills sit in the branches and the water turns brackish, smelling of salt and vegetation in equal measure. The UNESCO sign at the entrance to the Subterranean River National Park looks faintly administrative against the backdrop of a jungle that has been here, essentially unchanged, for a very long time.

The cave mouth is a wide, low opening in the karst face, the river flowing out from it dark and slow. You sit in a narrow paddle boat — two rows of plastic-chaired tourists, a guide in the bow with a torch and a rehearsed script — and you enter. The ceiling drops and then, dramatically, rises. The interior of the St. Paul’s Subterranean River is among the largest navigable underground rivers in the world: at twenty-four kilometers, most of which is inaccessible, the section open to tourists runs four kilometers into the karst. In the deeper chambers, the ceiling is forty meters above you and the torchlight cannot reach it. The guide names formations — the Curtain, the Cathedral, the Italian Organ Pipes — in the practiced voice of someone who has done this three thousand times but still means it.

The bats come in waves. The guide warns you to keep your mouth closed, which is both hygienic advice and an indication of the density of bat activity in some passages. The sound of them moving en masse — a rustling, papery sound quite different from what you expect — precedes the smell, which is mineral and biological and not unpleasant in small doses. At the deepest point the tourists reach, the river widens and the ceiling vaults up and there is a silence underneath the bat noise that feels very old. I am not a person given to mystical feelings in tourist attractions, but the Subterranean River produced in me something that I can only describe as geological awe: the sense of being present inside a process that has been running for millions of years and will continue running long after the pump boats have been replaced by whatever comes next.

The village of Sabang itself is worth a night rather than a day trip. A trail leads along the beach through the national park to a tree canopy walkway built into the jungle above the shore. You walk it in the late afternoon when the light filters green through the canopy and the sound of the sea below you mixes with the sound of birds. Palawan has hundreds of endemic bird species. On the walkway, I counted seven I had never seen before in forty-five minutes, including a pair of Palawan hornbills working a fig tree at eye level.

Eat dinner at the small open-air restaurant on the beach — the sinigang is clear and sour with sampalok, the fish is whatever came off the boat that afternoon, and the fireflies in the mangroves across the bay are visible from the table if you arrive before the generator cuts the lights at ten.

When to go: November through May. The underground river closes during strong weather, and Sabang’s road becomes difficult in the deep monsoon. March is excellent — the river is at its clearest, the jungle trails dry and navigable, and the crowds lighter than December or January. Combine with a night in the village for the canopy walk at dawn.