[ ITINERARY · THE DISPATCH ]

5 Days in Palawan: El Nido Lagoons, Hidden Beaches, and the World's Best Coast

A five-day Palawan itinerary down the world's most-voted-best island: El Nido's lagoons, the Coron wrecks or Port Barton's quiet coves, and the beaches that explain all the hype.

It keeps winning the polls. Year after year, some travel magazine or other crowns Palawan the best island in the world, and you roll your eyes a bit, because how can anywhere live up to that. Then you paddle a kayak through a crack in a limestone wall into a lagoon so green and so still it doesn’t look real, and you stop rolling your eyes. A proper Palawan 5 day itinerary is really just a guided tour of why those polls keep landing on this one strip of jagged, impossible coast.

Five days lets you do the famous bit (El Nido) and the quieter, arguably-better bit (Coron up north), without sprinting. Here’s how I’d carve it up.

El Nido town itself is a scruffy, traffic-clogged little place, and the first time I rolled in I thought I’d been sold a lie. But you don’t come for the town. You come for what’s offshore, and the boat tours, labelled A, B, C and D, are how you reach it.

Do Tour A first. It’s the headliner: the Big Lagoon, where you glide between sheer cliffs into a vast emerald pool (rent the kayak, the boats can’t go all the way in), the Small Lagoon you swim into through a gap, and a couple of beaches and snorkel stops. Yes it’s busy. Go anyway, get there early, it earns the crowds.

Day two, do Tour C. This is my favourite, the Hidden Beach tucked behind a rock wall, the Secret Beach you swim into through a crevice (it apparently inspired the book “The Beach”), and Matinloc Shrine, a slightly eerie abandoned chapel you climb behind for a knockout viewpoint. Fewer people make it round the whole loop.

Boat days are knackering, more than people expect, all that sun and salt and clambering. So day three, get off the water. Nacpan Beach is a four-kilometre arc of golden sand about 45 minutes north of town by tricycle or scooter, and it’s everything El Nido town is not: spacious, calm, lined with a few low-key beach bars. Order a buko (young coconut), find some shade, do nothing.

If you’d rather stay close, Las Cabanas Beach is a short hop from town with a sunset zipline and good sundowner spots. Either way, this is your reset day. You’ll thank yourself when the diving starts.

Now the upgrade. Catch the ferry from El Nido to Coron (around 3.5-4 hours, book ahead, it can sell out and it can get rough, take a seasickness tablet if you’re prone). Coron is, for my money, the prettier half of Palawan, and far fewer people bother to make the jump.

The water here is famous for two things. First, wreck diving: a dozen Japanese WWII ships sunk in 1944 sit in clear, accessible water, some shallow enough to snorkel. Diving the Irako or the Akitsushima with light coming through the hull is haunting and gorgeous in equal measure. Even non-divers should snorkel a wreck or two.

Second, Kayangan Lake. You climb a short steep path to a viewpoint (the most photographed view in the Philippines, and rightly so), then descend to a lake of impossibly clear brackish water ringed by karst. Swim in it. It’s part fresh, part salt, oddly buoyant, and so clear you can see the rocks far below. Nearby Twin Lagoon, where you duck under a rock at low tide between two basins, and Barracuda Lake for divers, round out a perfect last day.

Eat well in Coron town, the seafood is cheap and fresh, and the calamansi muffins are a daft local obsession you should indulge.

In El Nido, stay in town for the tour boats or out at Lio/Corong-Corong for quiet and sunsets. In Coron, base in the town for ferry and dive access. Both have everything from hostels to nice resorts; book ahead in dry season (roughly Nov-May) because Palawan fills up.

Fly into El Nido’s small airport (limited, pricier flights) or, more cheaply, into Puerto Princesa and take the 5-6 hour van north, or fly straight into Busuanga for Coron and run this itinerary in reverse. Five days is the sweet spot: long enough for both ends, short enough that you leave still a little in love.

The polls aren’t lying for once. Kayak into that first lagoon, and you’ll forgive Palawan every crowd and every bumpy boat ride it throws at you.

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