Puerto Princesa Underground Caves

Mar 21, 2025

Today was a ‘will we or won’t we’ kind of a day. On the itinerary was a trip through the Puerto Princesa underground caves, but for the last two days they have been closed because of rough seas and bad weather. We wouldn’t know until this morning whether it was happening, and so there was a flurry of messages and phone calls about 6am to let us know whether we were going. Rather important actually, as if we weren’t, we could stay in bed till 7 o’clock. Our room has a red bat phone complete with flashing light and push button to answer. I was very tempted to answer “Yes, commissioner”, but I didn’t think they would get the joke.

Even though it was raining, the underground caves were declared open, so after a very early breakfast we piled into the buses and were on our way. It’s an hour and a half drive in the bus to the wharf, where you wade into the sea and climb aboard a double outrigger canoe with about a dozen other people, and after a 20 minute ride through the surf on a noisy diesel boat, wade ashore again at the other end.

We then donned a hard hat and waded into the river to climb into our canoe. A circus by the time we had a lifejacket, a hard hat, a backpack, and a wet bag for your camera all strung around your neck while battling the surf. Mandy seemed to be the only one who ended up having a drink. Anybody surprised?

The caves, not surprisingly, were billed as the seventh natural wonder of the world. So here’s a question. Can anybody name what the sixth natural wonder of the world is, or the sixth modern wonder of the world for that matter? We’ve seen so many supposed seventh wonders, but never a sixth.

We were then loaded into canoes of about a dozen people, and rowed into the darkness of the tunnel for about 1 km with our boatman pointing his torch at various formations in the cave, complete with their assigned names. We were earnestly entreated not to spend too much time looking up in case the bat droppings hit their target, and especially if we did to make sure we kept our mouths shut. Harder for some than others.

Quite an interesting experience. The caves weren’t as old as some in Australia and other places we’ve visited, but most of those are dry caves rather than river caves. They say that the river cave system extends over 4 km but we only did the first section.

Upon our return, not surprisingly, after wading to shore and taking off our hardhats, we waded into the ocean back to our outrigger canoe, and chugged our way back to the wharf where we rinsed off and headed back to the bus.

We were ferried to a nearby restaurant for a typical Filipino lunch (again). Unfortunately it was only 10:30 by that stage, so we weren’t really starving.

However, that meant we were back at the hotel right on lunchtime for a free afternoon. Everybody headed down to the nearby mall to stock up on goodies for the next couple of days which are going to be long bus trips. Lots of confused older guys from Queensland wandering around trying to work out what was written on the supermarket packets. I was served at the pharmacy by a lady who sang “I Did It My Way” whilst bagging my purchase.

Filipino sign of the day was seen outside a primary school. The sign read “Welcome to a child friendly school”. We kind of hope that they all are, really.

Emerged from the supermarket to the wonderful experience of an open mic shopping centre karaoke competition. The real shame was that I had to head back to the hotel, though my optimism was misplaced. Tonight the hotel had a special treat – the resident filipina crooner was singing the Beatles hits.