Palawan Vacation, Part II, Underground River

Me and my beautiful wife, Mexica, at the entrance to the park

The main reason we stayed at the hotel we did was that it is close to the entrance to the Underground River. Visiting the river was the highlight of our vacation.

First we took a small boat from a dock near the hotel to an inlet on the coast near the mouth of the river. As you can see in this picture, the island of Palawan has very rugged features, the cliffs in the background were typical of the whole area near the river.

These limestone cliffs are typical of formations all over the island 

From the beach, it was a short walk to the entrance to the cave. There was, however, another highlight of this area, monkeys! To be precise, Long-Tailed Macaques, the primary monkey of the Philippines. I had never seen a monkey in the wild before, and that was exciting in it's own right. There will be a separate blog on wildlife.

At the cave entrance we waited a while for our turn to enter. Entrance is strictly regulated to protect the delicate environment. Only 800 people per day can go in, and the only conveyance is a small boat powered by oar. No motors allowed. Each boat holds 8 tourists plus a guide/paddler.

The entrance to the underground river. 

As far as measured to date, this is the longest underground river in the world, about 8 km, and it is navigable for much of that distance, but the tour we took only goes in about 1 km. It was a very impressive 1 km. The limestone of the cave contains many wonderful and strange formations. From time to time, you could see an offshoot of the cave, going into the distance. Like most large caves, this one has never been fully explored. The darkness was so complete, I couldn't sense the closeness of the walls except when the spotlight was on them. In some places, the river was wide and the roof  was high above. In the highest point, our guide said the roof was 65 m above us.

I say it looks like the root of a giant, if discolored, tooth.

Of course, there were bats, many bats. Neither Mexica nor I got any good pictures of them, though. They were small, brown bats, hanging high in the ceiling of the cave, and the darkness and the distance made good pictures impossible for us. The guide warned us to keep our mouths shut when we looked up. The river, he said, was rich with bat guano. Luckily, the only drips on me were water falling from the ceiling.

We weren't the first ones here, but tourism has increased a lot with the river being named one of the "7 Wonders of the Natural World", so we are sure not to be the last.

3/18/37--Before my time

It was nice to see the sun again