D-Day @ Sabang Underground River

At 7 o’clock in the morning, we travel south along the east coast of Palawan on the Bangka for a good 2 hours. Our destination is the Sabang Underground River, the longest navigable underground river in the world. The swell is heavy at over two metres, as is the shorebreak on the beach. The captain plays D-Day: full throttle onto the beach, almost sinking the enemy Bangka, flattening any helpers that come running, landing flaps down and “GO! GO! GO!”

I expect heavy fire, but all I see are loads of tourists taking photos. World heritage, again. Life jackets on, helmets on, Fraggles song in the queue, off by boat into the underground. 1.5 km by paddle boat through stalactite caves up to 65 metres high and full of bats. Outside, monitor lizards and monkeys await.

The shorebreak is now even more intense. Our captain has not yet had enough of Operation D-Day. He makes another attempt to sink an enemy. He catches a big wave with the ten-metre Bangka and surfs it onto a collision course. The three of us successfully fend off the attack in the surf. The Bangka knocks me over, I end up with all my clothes in the waves and, after two more attempts, they end up all over the deck and my luggage. Apparently my kite bag is waterproof.

The captain is in a hurry to get away from the beach. Lots of enemies here. A storm seems to be raging somewhere far out at sea, these waves are not normal. We drive over to Sabang City. There, the third attempt to sink the enemy also fails. We carry all our luggage over 30 metres of coral rock to the jetty. A Swedish woman travelling with us cuts her foot badly in the process.

Sabang is small and beautiful! A one kilometre long, approx. 30 m wide sandy beach, fully exposed to the north. Sabang is framed by high karst mountains to the east and west, which should create a nice jet effect – if only there was some wind. The flags are flapping along at three knots. A few palm trees, cheap accommodation and hundreds of vans with day trippers from the capital of Palawan. The water is empty, the red flag is hoisted. We look for a hut and plunge into the waves, which are now up to 2.5 metres high. The background noise is reminiscent of distant cannon salvos. The current on D-Day is fierce.

We sleep briefly. Suddenly all the day tourists are gone. Sabang is deserted. Dead silence. The village youths play basketball. We eat and decide to continue our journey tomorrow. We haven’t chosen anything yet because there has been no internet on the islands for the last five days. I connect to the net on my mobile phone. It’s morsting at 0.1 kB/s. We move to the neighbouring resort with rooms costing over 400 euros. The WiFi dribbles at 1.2 kB/s at the surreal price of €2.50 per hour.

I’m really pissed off. Uli is leaving in three days. I have to prepare the homepages I have to work on afterwards. Even in Fiji, I had a much better connection four years ago. Internet in the Philippines has so far been a slow-motion horror. I am writing this entire article while checking 918.4 kB of emails. Then I wait another half an hour and give up when I reach 50 kB.

That’s not stupid, it’s just like taking all the threads from a tailor. I could puke!