El Nido is forty-five limestone towers standing in jade water at the northern tip of Palawan, in the western Philippines. The way you meet them is by handing the day over to a boat. The boat is a bangka, a wooden outrigger with bamboo arms, and it works its way between lagoons, caves and coves and nobody aboard much minds which one comes next. The rock it threads through is old sea floor. This was coral limestone more than 250 million years ago, lifted clear of the water and then eaten into cliffs and hollows by rain. Surveys have counted 54 sinkholes and 65 cave mouths across the archipelago. Where one has opened to the sea, a lagoon sits inside the island like a room. Engines are not allowed into the Big Lagoon, so you go in by kayak, and in a sheet of green water walled by cliffs the loudest thing is the drip off your blade. A crack in the rock at the back, barely wider than the kayak, lets you through to the Small Lagoon, where the walls lean in and the sand shows the whole way down.
Elsewhere the boat simply anchors and you go over the side. Parrotfish and clownfish work the coral in the shallows, and off Shimizu and Cadlao green turtles graze the seagrass without moving away. Lunch is grilled on a beach chosen that morning. The town itself was called Bacuit until 1954, when it took the Spanish name for the nest. Swiftlets glue cup-shaped nests of hardened saliva high inside these cliffs, and the families with the right to climb for them sold them to China as a luxury. From March the wind drops and the water clears from a few metres to twenty or thirty. Late in the day every bangka in the bay converges on the long town beach, and they come up onto the sand one after another while the towers offshore go black against the sunset.