The Philippines is not a country that you would expect anyone to recommend for a self-drive holiday. As most articles about hiring cars in Southeast Asia warn, driving in the Philippines can be very stressful, or even dangerous, for anyone who hasn’t had a great deal of driving experience in similar countries.

However, there is one province in the Philippines where you can arrive at the airport and hit the road in a rental car without getting stressed out or endangering your personal wellbeing. That’s the province of Palawan which has good roads (by Philippine standards), some lovely scenery and great, uncrowded beaches.

Palawan frequently appears at the top of travel magazines’ listings of the best tropical islands in Asia; and El Nido – a small town near its most northerly tip – is often rated as one of the best locations in the world for island hoping. This large island province bordering the South China Sea is a popular backpacker destination – especially for those into scuba diving – but does it have much to offer older travellers?

The answer to that question is a definite yes because Palawan is one of the least environmentally degraded provinces of the Philippines, and it is the location of the UNESCO World Heritage listed Underground River in the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park which, whilst somewhat touristy, is definitely worth a visit.

I’ve been to Palawan several times, using tourist vans to get between places, but hadn’t previously visited Port Barton and San Vincente which friends had been urging me to visit. So this time I decided to rent a car at Puerto Princesa and explore the northern half of Palawan at a more leisurely pace.

For this 7-day itinerary, I pre-booked mid-range accommodation (with breakfast where possible) through either the establishment’s own website, Airbnb, or a hotel booking site. Most places were listed on several sites, and where there was not much difference in price, I booked through the site that offered the most flexible cancellation policies (in case there were any last-minute changes to our plans).

DAY 1

Arrive in Puerto Princesa. Visit Tala Bay. Enjoy a seafood dinner. Overnight in the city.

We hired a Toyota Vios from Plong Car Rental (also known as Palawan Self Drive Car Rental) for 1,600 pesos per day. A 5,000 pesos refundable security deposit was required (normal practice in the Philippines) and a 10 percent deposit was paid online to secure the booking. The balance was paid in cash on arrival.

If you arrive early enough during the day, as we did, you may wish to take a drive over to Tala Bay on the west coast. It’s the nearest ‘good’ beach to Puerto Princesa aside from the beaches on some of the islands in Honda Bay. It takes only a little over an hour each way and it’s a lovely scenic drive on a concrete road.

On the way we stopped at Viet Ville for lunch which is probably the best Vietnamese restaurant in Palawan. It’s located at the old Vietnamese village on the right of the main highway about a kilometre north of the turnoff to the Honda Bay wharf. The village was founded in 1995 when about 2,000 refugees from Vietnam were resettled in Palawan. The village is something of a ghost town now, but the restaurant continues to do good business.

Tala Bay is never busy during weekdays, but it does get busy with local visitors from Puerto Princesa at weekends and on public holidays. There are a couple of resorts on the beach where you can buy drinks and snacks, and plenty of shady trees under which you can relax. However, strong currents and stinging jellyfish do close the beach to swimming at some times of the year, so check local conditions on arrival if you’d like to swim in the ocean.

We also stopped at Nagtabon Beach on the way, which is a smaller but quite picturesque bay, but there are no parking spaces for motor vehicles at this beach, so this one is only an option to visit if you are on motorcycles, or if you have a driver who can come back and pick you up later.

For dinner we went to the Badjao Seafront which is one of the best-known seafood restaurants in Puerto Princesa. It’s located at the end of a boardwalk in a mangrove forest from which we enjoyed a beautiful sunset. The food didn’t disappoint but their margaritas are made with calamansi juice and not lime juice so tasted very strange.

We stayed at a bed & breakfast place on BM Road called Summer Days. It was close to the Robinsons shopping mall on the main north road, so we stocked up on water and snacks there for the week on the road. The room at Summer Days was spacious and the location was quiet. The breakfast was adequate, and the accommodation was good value at $42 for the night.

DAY 2

Drive to the Underground River. Have lunch there after visiting. Then drive to Port Barton.

It’s a 90 mins drive to Sabang Beach, which is the hop-off point for the Underground River, and then another 3 hrs 30 mins on to Port Barton which includes doubling back to the main north road along the east coast (because there is no road along the west coast directly between the Underground River and Port Barton, even though the distance is less than 40 km as the crow flies).

The drive to Sabang Beach provides some nice views out over Honda Bay after leaving the city, and then through rural countryside until reaching the village of Buenavista on picturesque Ulugan Bay on the west coast. The last part of the drive is very scenic through forested hills and past limestone karst cliffs.

Upon arrival at Sabang Beach we bought tickets for the Underground River and transferred to a banka boat for a 15-20 mins trip on the open sea to a beach near the entrance to the underground river. From there it’s a short walk through a shady forest of native trees and pandanus palms to where we boarded another boat to take us into the underground river.

There are two options to see the underground river. You can either pay for a private boat or take one of the normal tourist boats. I highly recommend the private boat because split between three or four people, the price per person is not much higher than taking a normal tourist boat.

You’ll get a banka boat to yourself for the trip over to the underground river (the normal banka boats carry 10-12 passengers) and a boat to yourself for the underground tour (which normally carry 8-10 passengers) so you won’t have anyone sitting in front of you if you want to take photos or video.

Upon entering the undergound river, you’ll be asked to remain silent because any noise may disturb the fauna inside the caves (and you’ll be asked to keep your mouth shut when looking up to ensure that you don’t accidentally consume any bat poop). You’ll be given an audio device and earphones to provide you with a commentary as you glide silently through the underground river.

The tour of the underground river takes about 45 minutes. As your audio commentary talks about certain features of the cave system, the boatman will be pointing them out with a lower-powered laser light (which apparently doesn’t disturb the fauna inside the caves). It’s an informative and interesting boat trip.

After we got back to Sabang Beach we had lunch at one of the food stalls next to the car park. It wasn’t particularly appetising and there wasn’t much choice of food places there, so another option might be to bring a packed lunch if you are not into eating local food. There are no coffee shops or cafes serving western food at Sabang Beach.

The drive to Port Barton was uneventful on good roads (but narrow in places once off the main highway) with light traffic. The rainforest on the craggy hills on the way was still showing the considerable damage inflicted by Typhoon Rai (which was known in the Philippines as Typhoon Odette) in 2021 which was one of the most powerful super typhoons to hit the Philippines in recent years.

We arrived at Port Barton in time to watch the sunset and then checked in at the Parrots Boutique Resort which was down a dirt road not far off the southern end of the beach. There was only one parking space outside of the resort, but fortunately other guests had arrived by van or on motorbikes, so we were able to utilise the parking space.

DAY 3

Relaxation day in Port Barton.

There’s not a lot to do at Port Barton except swim, snorkel, dive, or island hop – but that’s what most backpackers go there for. Port Barton Bay is very picturesque, and as it’s well off the beaten track, this may be a better location for older travellers who want to do some island hopping. It’s much less crowded than El Nido further north.

However, dining options at Port Barton are limited. Whilst there are several dozen restaurants and cafés in the village, we weren’t impressed with the quality of the food at the couple we tried. It’s backpacker quality at best and we couldn’t find anywhere that served good coffee (although the iced coffee at the Besaga Café at the northern end of the beach was okay).

We had a passable meal in the Kusinero de Barrio on the second night after an awful meal in the NFH Resto Bar on the first night. The waitress at the NFH Resto Bar was smoking whilst serving customers and the place was full of dogs – a common problem it seems in many of Port Barton’s restaurants.

At $75 a night, our accommodation at Parrots was clean, comfortable, and reasonable value, but breakfast wasn’t great. I ordered porridge as that was the only non-fried option on the menu, and it arrived in a glass jar mixed with peanut butter! I expected something better for a so-called ‘boutique resort’.

DAY 4

Drive to San Vicente. Visit some of Palawan’s best beaches. Enjoy a great Italian meal.

San Vicente is only about 20km further up the coast from Port Barton town, but to drive there it’s necessary to return to the main north road on the east coast, travel up through the town of Roxas, and then take a rural road back to the west coast – a distance of about 70km and which takes a little under two hours to drive.

We learned after reaching San Vicente that there is a rough road along the west coast between Port Barton and San Vicente (which is only marked part of the way on Google Maps) but it can only be negotiated by off-road motorbikes or high wheelbase four-wheel drives.

We were going to stop for coffee in the town of Roxas at a place called U-turn Coffee (because it had good reviews on Google Maps) but it was closed when we arrived mid-morning, so we pressed straight on to San Vicente arriving there before lunch. We stopped at the Sunset Beach Resort for coffee and lunch – which was the first place we saw upon arriving in San Vicente – only to be told that they don’t serve people who aren’t staying with them.

We did eventually find a place that served ‘walk-ins’ and that was the La Bella Swiss Inn close to Long Beach. It’s not a big place but they have an extensive menu and at the time we were there was the only place with an espresso machine. Both the food and coffee were good and very reasonably priced.

After lunch we checked in at the Marina 4Rooms down near the San Vicente public market. As the name suggests, it only has four rooms and they are not large ($20 a night), but we stayed there because I’d previously met the Italian chef and co-owner of Marina 4Rooms and had read excellent reviews for their food.

The chef was in Italy at the time of our visit, but his partner produced absolutely the best and most authentic Italian food that we’d eaten in a long time and recommended a bottle of Italian wine that we thoroughly enjoyed. The meal wasn’t cheap, but it was worth every peso spent.

During the afternoon we visited Long Beach on the northern side of the town which many describe as what Boracay looked like 50 years ago. And they are right. It’s a beautiful long white sand beach lined with coconut palms and almost deserted. As we parked just off the beach in the late afternoon, we were delighted to see colourful olive-backed sunbirds darting around our car and preening themselves in the wing mirrors.

We also drove down to Skye Beach, a smaller beach on the southern side of town. It’s there that a Philippine real estate developer, Megaworld, is building a new resort called Paragua Coastown, but there’s nothing much there yet except a big sign and an entry building under construction. But it’s a sign of things to come for San Vicente

DAY 5

Drive to El Nido stopping off at Taytay to visit the historic Fort Santa Isabel.

We set off early from San Vicente on our fifth day because we wanted to spend some time in Taytay on the way to El Nido. It’s just as well that we did because when we got to a hill about 2km from the main north road we discovered that washaways on the road were getting too deep and soft for our rental vehicle. Google Maps had taken us out through the northern access road through the village of Alimanguan because it was slightly shorter than the southern access road that we’d come in on.

There were no signs anywhere on the northern access road to show that it was impassable for conventional vehicles and both Google Maps and Apple Maps had suggested that shorter route. It would have been passable for four-wheel drives and motorbikes. So we had to double back and take the southern access road out which added about an hour to our travel time.

After leaving San Vicente town for the second time, we reached Taytay in about an hour and half. We headed for the historic Fort Santa Isabel located on the coast which was built in 1738 replacing a wooden palisade that dated back to 1667. These fairly well-preserved coral limestone fortifications were used by Spanish soldiers to repel invading Muslim warriors. Some of the old cannons are still there.

After visiting the Fort Santa Isabel, we headed up the hill overlooking the fort to the Casa Rosa Seaview Restaurant for lunch. It was a tricky drive up a narrow, concreted laneway behind the Taytay Municipal Office, and there were only two parking spaces at the top, but it was worth the effort because the view over Taytay Bay with the fort in the foreground was impressive.

We enjoyed a relaxing lunch with cool sea breezes and then carefully negotiated our way back down into the town and headed for El Nido on the main north road. This part of the highway passes through some scenic hills and past rice fields and mango plantations. It’s a good road and it took us only a little over an hour to reach the outskirts of El Nido.

There is a more scenic route that goes up the east coast past Mesecoy Bay and loops back down into El Nido on the west coast. That takes about two hours to drive. We had time to take that route but a couple we had met in San Vicente told us that road along the east coast was subject to landslides in the rainy season. As the rainy season was only just finishing, and given our experience on the northern access road out of San Vicente, we decided to stay on the main north road.

Upon reaching El Nido we were greeted with large signs announcing that a McDonalds had just opened in the town, and congested traffic. That quickly confirmed what I had been told about El Nido – that it was no longer an off-the-beaten-track backpacker town but was heading towards becoming a mass tourism destination. It was apparent that El Nido had undergone massive changes since I last visited.

We checked in at the S Resort, an uninspiring looking five-storey hotel in the middle of town (I didn’t recall seeing any buildings above two storeys last time I was there). The hotel description said there was free parking, but there was not. The doorman directed us to park around the corner in front of a shop that was undergoing renovations, under a sign that read “No Parking”. Upon checking in we were given a list of house rules to read and were requested that we sign them to state that we agreed to abide by the rules.

One of the rules was that no food or drinks could be brought into the hotel. This was the first time in more than 50 years of travelling that I had come across a hotel with such a rule. Upon querying whether that meant we couldn’t bring water into the hotel, the receptionist said that we didn’t currently have to comply with that rule because their restaurant was undergoing renovations. So I assume that once those renovations have been completed, guests will have to comply with the restriction on bringing food and drinks into the hotel.

For the two nights that we were there, the reception staff would urge us to try their buffet on the fifth floor (in their restaurant under renovation) but why anyone would want to eat a hotel buffet when there were so many good seafood restaurants within easy walking distance of the hotel is beyond me.

The rooms were okay but definitely didn’t deserve the ‘luxury’ tag that the hotel uses on its website. At over $150 a night they were way overpriced compared to everywhere else we stayed in Palawan, but probably reflected the fact that El Nido is an expensive destination now – and that the accommodation bargains that existed during its backpacker days no longer exist.

DAY 6

Explore El Nido. Eat fresh seafood. Do the Via Ferrata Canopy Walk. Visit Nacpan Beach.

We had two excellent seafood dinners in El Nido, including the local crayfish, and they were reasonably priced, but the streets just back from the bay on which the town is situated is crowded with tourists at night. We had lunch the day after we arrived at Lio Beach near the El Nido airport, and that was much quieter. We were going to try Corong Beach on the southern side of town as well but couldn’t find a parking spot.

For me, El Nido was a disappointment because I was comparing it to my time there during its backpacker days, but for anyone who has not been to El Nido before, it’s still worth visiting once. The location of the town below high limestone cliffs is very photogenic, and you can enjoy spectacular views from the top of those cliffs by taking a walk on the Via Ferrata Canopy Walk.

It's one of the best places in Palawan for island hopping, but you can also do that in Port Barton where prices are much lower. The one thing we did enjoy was a trip up to Nacpan Beach, about 20km further up the coast. It’s a gorgeous beach with a couple of very good restaurants there. If I do ever go back to El Nido, I will choose to stay there rather than in El Nido town.

Of course, if you are into scuba diving, snorkelling, kayaking or deep-sea fishing, then you may regard El Nido as paradise on earth for you. There are plenty of tours available incorporating all of those activities, and at night you’ll have plenty of good eating and drinking options back on dry land, albeit at prices a little higher than the rest of Palawan.

DAY 7

Drive back to Puerto Princesa.

It’s a five-hour 270km drive back to Puerto Princesa on the main north road. If you are flying out the same day, it’s best to allow an extra 30 minutes in case of any holdups because of roadworks, but there’s rarely much traffic on the main north road. For us, we didn’t want to hurry so we stayed the night in the Canvas Boutique Hotel near the entrance to airport and flew out the following morning.

That was only $75 a night and was better than the S Resort in El Nido – and without all the petty restrictions on food and drinks. The room was spacious and well-equipped, and the staff were very friendly and professional. We returned the car at the airport the next morning without any issues, got our deposit back in cash, and flew back to Manila.

Most people fly into Palawan via Puerto Princesa from either Manila or Cebu as airfares are much cheaper on that route than flying into El Nido. That’s because the Puerto Princesa route uses Airbus A320 jets rather than the much smaller ATR prop-jets that are operated by Air Swift into the shorter airstrip at El Nido.

Getting seats on the Air Swift flights to El Nido can also be a problem at peak periods unless you are staying either at the Lio Tourism Estate or at one of the resorts on the islands of Miniloc, Pangulaisian, Lagen or Apulit. That’s because the airline, the airport (also known as Lio Airport) and all of those resorts are owned by subsidiaries of Ayala Corporation, and many of the seats are blocked for tourists on a package trip to an Ayala resort that includes the airfare.

When seats are available on the Air Swift flights, they are usually around $120 each way compared to an A320 flight from Manila which costs about $50 on the budget airlines and $70 on Philippine Airlines.

Whilst our itinerary started and finished at Puerto Princesa, it is possible to do the same itinerary in reverse using El Nido as the starting and finishing point, but you will likely pay more to hire a car from El Nido compared to Puerto Princesa. And if you want to join a small group tour rather than drive yourself, you’ll find many more tour options available from Puerto Princesa.

All images: © David Astley