The island of Palawan is known as the last frontier in the Philippines.  As a whole, it is still relatively undiscovered and undeveloped.  Puerto Princesa served as our gateway to Palawan.  We booked a room in a beautiful (and super cheap) hotel called The Royal Oberoi and basically just ate mangoes and went swimming.

The main draw of Puerto Princesa is that it’s the only place where you can buy tickets for the Natural Wonder of the World: The Underground river.  To preserve the landscape, only a few hundred tickets are issued each day, so we showed up at the ticket office an hour before it opened at 8am.  We were dismayed to see that there were already almost 50 people in line ahead of us!  When the office finally opened it nine it was an absolute madhouse.  Laminated numbers were given out but they were largely ignored.  Eventually Amanda made her way to the counter only to be told that tickets were sold out until the end of April, nearly a month away!  Not to be deterred, we inched our way through the crowd, to the next attendant, who told us that tickets were available this week, but not for several more days.  Finally, we made out way to the last attendent who wasn’t really talking to anyone but shuffling a stack of entrance application papers (which we had turned in to the first attendant).  Several people, were yelling trying to get her attention, but she saw me and heard me yell “Brill”.  She shuffled through the stack, found our application, and issued us two of the last tickets for the following day!

Lesson learned: persistance pays off in the Philippines!