Coron, Palawan - Shipwreck Diving

​We finally arrived in Coron, a small town on the island of Busuanga in Palawan. We had two main reasons for visiting the town, the Japanese ship wrecks sunk just off the coast that make for awesome diving and the beautiful Coron Island.

Coron is a wedge-shaped mountainous island with steep cliffs and beautiful Jurassic rock formations made of Permian limestone. The landscape is just incredible and looks like something out of a film set. We spent a day taking a tour of the various sites in and around the island which is part of the ancestral domain of the indigenous Tagbanwa people.

Our first stop was a Coral Garden, a beautiful coral reef teeming with life just a couple of metres under the surface. This was probably the best reef that we have snorkeled since the Maldives.

Then we went on to Kayangan lake. It is brackish water, with the top metre being salty and everything below that is fresh water. It absolutely poured down when we first arrived, but since we were going for a swim anyway it was actually great fun.

We also stopped at a couple of beaches and had a very tasty Filipino lunch,  some more coral reefs, a skeleton ship wreck and a lagoon that we had to swim through a tunnel to get to. All in all it was a great fun filled day for 1250 pesos each.

One evening we visited the nearby salt hot springs which is frequented by both locals and tourists, it was a lovely way to relax and has set us up with high expectations for the baths in Japan.

Ashley spent a day diving three Japanese ship wrecks that were sunk in WWll. It's pointless giving names as most seem to have more than one and some share the same name, it gets very confusing trying to figure out where your actually going.

It was a great experience, one of Ashley's favourite diving experiences so far despite the poor visibility.

He got to penetrate deep inside *insert snigger here* the wrecks, which is something you don't normally get to do without doing a specialist course first.

The wrecks were covered in marine life both inside and out which made for great diving, his only disappointment  was that our budget couldn't stretch to more dives.

From Coron we caught a 2Go ferry in a shared cabin with bunk beds and meals included. It was pretty straight sailing that took around 12 hours for us to reach our next destination of Puerto Princesa, also in Palawan and home to the PP Underground River (one of the new 7 wonders of nature).