Sci-fi and wreck diving

---

After a short stay in Bohol I took a plane to Manila (from Cebu) and then to Coron. This was my last destination in the Philippines and the main thing I wanted to do there was wreck diving. I didn't know what to expect about the town itself, but nevertheless made up my mind to just stay there for the 5 or 6 days before I had to leave the country. Coron is in Busuanga Island, part of a group of Islands called "Calamian", which in turn are part of Palawan.



I arrived at night and started to look for places to stay. People had recommended to me a hostel called "Crystal Lodge", but when I got there, it was fully booked. I then went to a dive shop that a French woman that I had traveled with a few days before (Stephanie) had recommended: DiveCal. I booked three dives for the next day (three wreck dives) and asked about places to stay. I ended up in a hostel which was quite cheap (500 PHP/day); Coron Backpackers Guesthouse. It was clean in general and had good staff. On the downside, as a lot of places in Coron, it was built over wooden ramps on top of swamps, which in turn are filthy and at times during the day, the stench is pretty bad. Also, the guests staying there had little respect for keeping the noise levels down and the TV was on the whole day.



In the morning I went to the dive shop and we were only two divers; myself and a Belgian girl who was a very inexperienced diver. We were supposed to have two guides that day, but one of them showed up in the shop, apologized he couldn't go because he had drank too much last night and left. This dive shop in general was very disorganized (worst one I've come across while traveling), but it was the cheapest and with very few customers. The amount of customers usually does it for me when choosing a dive shop. Most instructors and guides were well over 55 or 60 years old, as was the owner of the shop, so my guess is that he was employing friends, casually. I really wanted to go diving, so I decided to go anyway.



All the ships sunk in the Calamian Islands were Japanese cargo ships and gunboats. They were sunk by American bombers in September of 1944. All the ships have been stripped of everything valuable, so in many cases they haven't been able to be properly identified. It's believed that up to 24 ships are sunk in the area. I found a good website with the history of the attack and characteristics of the ships: (http://www.coronwrecks.com/history.htm).

That day we did the first dive on a frighter called "Olimpia Maru". It's about 122 meters long and sits at around 30 meters. Because of the Belgian girl, we were restricted in depth and the visibility was pretty bad, so I couldn't really go too far from them. Still I enjoyed the dive. The thing that pissed me off though was cutting my dives short because she ran low on air pretty fast. As much it annoyed me, I had made the decision to go diving despite knowing this could happen.

The second dive was in a ship called"Morazon Maru", another freighter of about 110 meters that sits at around 22 meters. This ship is laying on its starboard side. Visibility again wasn't too good.

The third dive was a shallow one in a gunboat: the "Tirukazu Maru", a submarine hunter/mine sweeper. Visibility in this dive was a lot better and I was able to penetrate it easily.

Even though I usually enjoy diving in any conditions (for me "a dive is a dive"), at the end of the day I wasn't particularly happy with having had my dives limited.



During my stay in Coron I can't say that I met people worth hanging around with, so I was pretty much by myself those days. every night for dinner I went to the same place (can't remember the name), but the food was good and I took the time to read.



The second day in Coron I didn't do much. I went out for a few hours and climbed a hill at sunset. It takes about 20 minutes to get to the top and there's a good view of Coron. On top of the hill there's a massive metal cross.



Coron as a town isn't very appealing. It's dirty and noisy in general and doesn't have any beaches nearby. I heard there were a few beaches on the island, but didn't get to see them. The good beaches are in the islands nearby and people usually take tours or boats to get there. Coron is just about having a spot to sleep and go diving from. There are other resorts in the nearby islands, but of course because they're so isolated, they're a lot more expensive.



The third day I went to do an island hopping tour around Coron. We were 5 customers: myself, a Czech couple and a Frenchman with his Thai girlfriend. The first stop was a place called "7 Pecados", which is a group of 7 islands; good for diving and snorkeling. We spent about an hour snorkeling there and then we went to one of the most incredible places I saw in the Philippines: Barracuda Lake. We also spent time snorkeling there. It's a lake surrounded by limestone walls. It has very little marine life, but it's a surreal landscape. I also dived in this lake the next day, so I'll describe it in more detail then.

We spent a few hours there and then we went to our final destination. It was a very desolated island with a few basic facilities. We got off the boat and had lunch there, typical Philippine food (rice, fish, pork, vegetables, etc. and bananas). The island was beautiful and there was also the possibility to snorkel there. I chose to get in a hammock and sleep. There was also a village included in the tour, but the Czechs, who had done this trip previously said it wasn't really worth going there and suggested to stay longer in the beach, to which we all agreed.



The next day I went diving again. With the same shop. My second experience with them was totally different. We had two guides that day, Ron, an Aussie guy (about 70 years old) and a local guide, Ronaldo. The other divers that day were 5 Belgians, all over 50 or so and experienced divers.

The first dive that we did was in Barracuda Lake. I was really looking forwards to diving here. As Ron called it: "The Sci-Fi Dive".

It's nothing like I've dived in before. To get to the lake, we had to climb over a few rocks (there are wooden steps). The area surrounding the lake is beautiful. The water is crystal clear and there are limestone walls all around. The lake is pretty deep and has a temperature of about 28ºC. There's a thermocline at around 14 meters that gets to about 38ºC to 40ºC. You can see the different layers of water. Diving in the thermocline is like diving in gasoline (just refering to the visual effect). The bottom of the lake is very murky and silty and you can't really see anything. The rest of the lake has 30-50 meters visibility. It's like diving in a different planet. There are very few fish; a couple of resident barracudas, a few types of small fish, cleaner shrimp and I got to see a puffer fish.



The second and third dives of the day were in 2 different wrecks (both over 35 meters), so we had dives of only 40-45 minutes. we did both dives as deco dives, so we spent a lot of time doing deco and safety stops. The deepest dive we did at around 42 meters. We penetrated both wrecks and the visibility was much better than the previous days. Really good day for diving and the Belgians were very friendly.



During my last day in Coron, I didn't do much at all, just chilled and read a lot. I managed to finish the last book I was reading - "World without end" (1200+ pages) in just over a week and traded it for "Confessions of a Yakuza" and a book about snipers: "One shot, one kill".



The morning of the 19th of April I went to the airport to fly back to Manila, at 10am. I had a connecting flight to Singapore, but at 9pm that same day. Luckily both flights were very spaced out, because my flight was delayed 3 hours (Zest Air, very unreliable as I later found out). In Manila I was supposed to meet with my friend, May Gallardo. By luck/chance we managed to find each other at around 2pm. I needed and wanted to get good trekking shoes, mainly because the ones I had had been falling apart for months and I had looked at good quality, cheap (or cheaper than in other places) trekking shoes when I was in Manila a few weeks before.

The previous shoes I had, I had taken them on different trips and they had somewhat of a sentimental value, so I had May take a photo while I was dumping them in a shopping mall in Manila.



We had lunch together and then May finally dropped me off in the airport from where I had the start of a 3 flight itinerary to get to Nepal.

---

Comments

[Andres]

saludos de Lonquen
Hola Dani, veo que sigues buceando donde puedes. Por acá todos bien. Estamos en plena vendimia hasta la próxima semana tipo miércoles o jueves. El fin de semana pasado estuvo la mamo y papo, casi viene Valentina y Jose Manuel peo tuvieron inconvenientes de ultima hora. Te mando un gran abrazo Andres