It’s easy to invent a new filter from which one can then tick off results. It’s much better if someone else does it, or in this case 500M others! The New Seven Wonders of Nature foundation, appropriately based in Zürich polled this number of people to create such a list. And we are about to do the second on the list this holiday!
In fact, we have visited this UNESCO World Heritage site before which is why we have wanted to repeat it. The Sabang Cave, formerly known as PPUR for Puerto Princesa Underground Cave is an extraordinary 8.3km subterranean river, of which half is navigable.
Getting here is tough. We’re in mini-busses because anything bigger isn’t going to work. Each bus is just for six people. After 90 minutes of twisting and turning, battling with crazy traffic, trucks, scooters and the crazy tricycle contraptions much loved by Filipinos our guide turns to us and says it’s going to get bouncy now! Another 40 minutes and we arrive at Sabang Beach.
We queue up under shade whilst our allocated boat arrives, which takes quite a while. We enjoy getting to know our fellow travellers, an Aussie couple our age, and a delightful older couple who are genuine Ten Pound Pommes. We have fabulous conversation with Sheila and John about their life and adventures, now in their eighties. They even re-did the entire journey a few years ago on Noordam, spending several thousand times as much on their second transport!
Our first boat journey takes us the 5km from the beach to the mouth of the cave, where again we wait for ages – was it like this seventeen years ago when we did the same adventure? Plenty of hard-hat photo-ops so no worries.
Finally we’re in our canoe and our driver (paddler) takes us silently into the gloom. This is one of the longest underground rivers but we’re only going about 2.2km in, which is ample to see the spectacular might formed over 22M years of time.
We see many formations that look like Titanic, cucumbers, T-Rex, Jesus, mushrooms, in fact you name it there’s a stalagmite, stalactite or column which resembles it. I’m not being grumpy, but sometimes it’s nice to just enjoy without a dialogue needed.
We reverse our journey back to the van and thence on to lunch at a nearby restaurant for buffet food yet again! The return to Puerto Princesa is just as long but eventually we make it back an hour later than expected.
The evening rushes towards us but we have no turn tonight so it means we can be a little more relaxed and still get to Pinnacle, which tonight reverts to Tamarind for the remainder of our cruise.
There are some irritating customers tonight – in the bar someone is FaceTimeing without using headphones. This drives me mad I don’t understand why people are so selfish to think that the rest of the people nearby want to hear a tinny, squeaky yet unintelligible noise. In the Pinnacle another man is doing the same at the table – what is the world coming to? To finish off my grievances there is a bawdy woman in the next room who has a voice like a foghorn and doesn’t stop for the entire evening. At least 15 yards away but domineering the entire restaurant, she gets away with sharing her story with everyone.
Meanwhile our dinner is excellent, we enjoy scallops and wan ton soup, lamb ribs and then cherry pie and sorbets.
