Philippines: Palawan, Bohol and 7,000 islands

They say there are around seven thousand six hundred islands in the Philippines, and I gave up trying to picture that number somewhere over the Sulu Sea, my forehead against the plane window, watching scraps of green and reef-fringed turquoise scroll past below like something spilled across a map. You don't visit the Philippines so much as you pick a thread and pull. I pulled two: Palawan in the west, Bohol in the centre. Two islands out of thousands, and even that felt greedy and incomplete, the way a good country always does.

What I hadn't braced for was the colour of the water. I'd seen the photos and assumed they were enhanced — turned up past believable, the way travel pictures always are. They weren't. Off El Nido the sea goes a green-blue that I genuinely don't have the right word for, somewhere between glass and gemstone, and the limestone cliffs rise straight out of it, dark and crumpled, draped in stubborn green. The first time the boat rounded a headland into a hidden lagoon I heard myself laugh, alone, at nothing.

El Nido, and the boat that takes you in

El Nido sits at the northern tip of Palawan, and the whole town runs on the rhythm of the bangka — the slim wooden outrigger boat with bamboo arms reaching out either side, the workhorse of these waters. Every morning they line the beach, engines coughing awake, and by mid-morning the fleet has scattered across Bacuit Bay to the lagoons: the Big Lagoon you paddle into through a gap in the cliffs, the Small Lagoon you almost have to swim to reach, the hidden beaches you'd never find without a boatman who's done it a thousand times.

I did the island-hopping the ordinary way, on a shared boat with a dozen strangers, a cooler of mango and grilled fish, and a captain who knew exactly when to cut the engine. We anchored off a sandbar that vanishes at high tide, snorkelled over coral while the boat waited, ate lunch with our feet in the shallows. Nobody checked a phone, because there was nothing to check — and somewhere between the second and third lagoon I realised that was the whole point, and stopped reaching for my pocket.

« The moment we cleared the bay the bars on my phone gave up one by one, and honestly, so did I. »

This is where I should be straight with you about staying connected, because out here it shapes the day more than you'd think. In the towns — Puerto Princesa, El Nido itself, the main strip of Coron — the signal is fine; you can map, message, check the weather and book the next boat without much drama. But the second you leave the harbour, it thins fast, and out on the water and the small islands it drops to nothing. Island-hopping is, by its nature, going dark for the day. I learned to do my booking and weather-checking the night before, screenshot the plan, and let the sea have me uninterrupted until the boat brought me back into range.

The river inside the mountain, and the wrecks of Coron

An hour or so out of Puerto Princesa there's an underground river that runs straight through a karst mountain to the sea — a UNESCO site, and one of the strangest hours I've spent anywhere. You climb into a small paddle boat, the daylight shrinks to a coin behind you, and then it's just the drip of water, the boatman's torch swinging across cathedral-sized caverns, bats stitching the dark overhead. It is quiet in a way that feels older than quiet, and you come back out blinking, half-convinced you imagined it.

North of Palawan, Coron is the other face of these islands — less about lagoons, more about what lies beneath them. A small fleet of Japanese ships went down here in the Second World War, and they rest in clear, divable water, slowly turning into reef. I'm a snorkeller more than a diver, but even from the surface, drifting over the shadow of a hull with fish pouring through the gaps, you feel the weight of the place. Above the waterline the water in Coron is somehow even more luminous than El Nido, if that's possible — I stopped trying to decide which was better and just let both be true.

Bohol: chocolate hills, tiny ghosts, and a quieter shore

Bohol, over in the central Visayas, slowed me down in a different way. The Chocolate Hills are a genuine oddity — more than a thousand near-identical grassy mounds rolling to the horizon, green in the wet season and browning to cocoa in the dry, which is where the name comes from. From the viewpoint they look almost designed, too regular to be natural, and the explanation involves ancient coral and a lot of geological patience.

Then there are the tarsiers, which I'd half-expected to find disappointing and instead found unforgettable: a primate that fits in your palm, with eyes far too big for its face, clinging to a branch in the forest gloom. They're fragile and easily stressed, so the place you see them matters — a proper sanctuary keeps its distance, bans flash, keeps voices down. I'd gently say the same goes for a lot of animal encounters out here: the whale sharks down at Oslob on nearby Cebu draw big crowds and bigger debate, because the feeding that guarantees the sighting also changes the animals' behaviour. I'm not here to lecture — only to say it's worth reading up and choosing with open eyes. On Panglao, the little island tacked onto Bohol by a bridge, Alona Beach gave me the easy end of the trip: white sand, warm shallows, a sunset that took its time.

What I take away

I came to the Philippines expecting a beach holiday and left with something closer to a recalibration. The islands don't ask you to be reachable; the lagoon doesn't pause for a notification; the underground river was dark and silent long before anyone thought to film it. Two islands out of seven thousand, and I barely scratched it — but I carried home the green I can't name, the rattle of a bangka engine starting up at dawn, and the small, surprising relief of a day spent entirely off the grid, with only the tide keeping time.

— Yann, salt in my hair, somewhere between two lagoons.