Island Hopping South Of Coron

The day starts far too early again. Montezuma’s fist is playing pinochle with my intestines. Today we are going on a tour to the islands of Malcapuya, Banana Island and Bolog Island, 25 kilometres south of Coron. The ten-metre bangka takes 1.5 hours to get there. Only one young Phlippine couple is travelling with us.

The remnants of the night wind now give us a metre swell. Enough to throw the spray in fountains over the entire deck. Everything gets wet. We are travelling in the relative protection of the islands of the archipelago. Perhaps it’s just as well that we don’t get a bangka 160 kilometres to El Nido after all. The internet is full of horror stories about two-and-a-half metre waves, lost luggage, 30-hour trips and accidents.

We arrive on Bolog Island in the late morning. Two rocks with trees on them, 20 by five metres of sandy beach in between. A luxury resort is being built on the neighbouring island. Unfortunately, the wind is now only crawling across the sea at 10 knots. Not enough for kitesurfing. My board is lying pissed off on the beach and something of a bloody revolution is taking place in the kite bag. The wind direction isn’t right anyway, coming from the east, and there are just five metres of sandy beach between the sharp rocks and trees. Our Bangka has engine trouble. The guides manage to fix it within an hour.

After a short crossing to Banana Island, my circulation collapses. Montezuma hurls me into the realm of dreams. Uli is enchanted by the hundreds of thousands of colourful fish right on the beach. White sand, blue sky, green palm trees, colourful fish. Our guides serve lunch. Crabs, seaweed salad, a giant omelette of a fish and salted pineapple.

The Phlippine couple give us some interesting information. The average income here is just 150 euros a month. The money from tourism goes to the few rich people who have invested in boats, for example. There is no social system, only the family. The guides receive practically nothing. The cost of living, on the other hand, is damn high compared to Germany. For example, a litre of petrol costs one euro. Only iPhones are slightly cheaper at around 300 euros. Thank you, Steve!

The beach on Banana Island would be suitable for kiting – provided the wind came from a direction between north-east and west. Or at all. In practically every place in the world south of Spitsbergen, the sun is the motor of the wind. In other words, the wind picks up around midday and is much lighter in the morning and evening. Here on Coron, the wind has been the other way round for days: the wind picks up in the evening, storms during the night, and the wind dies down again in the morning. At lunchtime, I’m sitting on the paradisiacal beach of Banana Island and shouting at the shallow sea in front of me.

We drive on to Malcapuya Island. The beach faces south and would also be big enough for kitesurfing. Every island here has an entrance fee, which is quite hefty by Philippine standards. But €3.50 also buys you beaches that are so spic and span that they would be worthy of a five-star resort. Sand raked, palm trees framed by giant shells, seats and loungers, hammocks and coconuts. Hammock! Get in! And sleep on. You could call it a waste. I call it my first relaxed day’s holiday after an intense journey.

We make our way back an hour and a half before sunset. The sky is glowing, even though it’s quite cloudy. The swell only becomes bearable again in the lee of the Coron cliffs, which rise almost vertically up to 300 metres. I have to admit to myself that it was a completely stupid idea to come here to kite. 99% of the coastline of the entire Coron archipelago is forest on rock right down to the sea. Of this, around 50% is vertical rather than horizontal. The remaining 1% of sandy beach is usually quite small, often lies in the wind cover of high rocks or even an entire island – and usually belongs to a resort.