Sabang - or, This Is My Happy Place.

The beach at Sabang drowns at high tide, the water sweeping greedily right up to the line of sentinel coconut palms that lean sleepily over the sand. At low tide, the beach is a wide graceful crescent of white sand, the flotsam raked away by the diligent staff of each little guesthouse or resort, the heavy thump and swish of the waves a slow, hypnotic beat. 









This is where, despite my better efforts and my previous protests (those of you who followed me through South America will remember my outrage here and here), I became a morning person. The electricity - and more specifically, the fan - only ran from 6 pm until 10:30 pm, so by 6:30 am each morning, at the latest, we both woke up in a hot sweat, desperate for a cold shower or a dip in the waves.



 




 We stayed for five nights in a little bamboo cottage on the beach, swimming (well, more fighting with the waves), drinking two-dollar-a-twixer sugarcane rum, reading, and playing cards. 

We had a single touristy day during which we trekked through the jungle for two hours to see the region's most famed attraction: a massive subterranean river, recently voted in as one of the world's new natural wonders of the world.

Although it’s a two hour drive from the Puerto Princesa City, tour companies in the city sign people up for one-day tours to Sabang to see the river, rather than encouraging tourism in Sabang itself. Sad for Sabang's potential for a tourist boom, amazing for that gloriously quiet beach.


The river was interesting. The guides use paddles rather than motors to take you through the
prescribed route, one-and-a-half kilometres down the river and back (the full river is just over eight kilometres long, so the only sound is the echo of the paddle slapping against water. The stalactites and stalagmites the guides pointed out to us were inevitably interpreted as either food items ('the mushroom,' 'the garlic') or as religious symbols ('the cathedral,' 'the face of Jesus'). It's a deliciously cool break from a sweltering afternoon. 

But better, really, was our week spent enjoying the slow life of Sabang, whiling away the days until out flight to Vietnam, where everything was about to get a lot more hectic.


S.