Coron’s Lagoons and Lakes
This day, on reflection, was one of my highlight for the entirety of the Philippines. Getting the opportunity to explore Coron’s lagoons and lakes was once in a lifetime. No other Philippines island does it quite like Coron.
We paid around 1,200PSP (£20) each for the tour and got to handpick the locations we wanted to visit the most.
The boat included lunch for the day, beer for the journey home & rental of snorkelling equipment.
We could have hired a boat for ourselves, however, it worked out slightly more expensive to do it this way. It would have meant we could spend as much time as we wanted in each spot.
But, looking back, the organised tour allowed for lots of time. The only downside was that it was a set route, which a lot of other boats and tours followed at the same time too.
So a little pre-warning before you get to these spots: Life Jackets are kind of mandatory – the assumption is people can’t swim. As the tour goes on, and the more we kept taking them off and disregarding their warnings, they lessoned and let us get on with swimming unaccompanied from buoyancy aids. Thankfully.
Barracuda Lake
The first natural wonder on our tour of Coron’s Lagoons and Lakes. Docked alongside other boats on the wooden boardwalk that’s attached to the mountains beside you, you walk over the decking paving the way above the crystal blue water.
Once on the small beach, you begin to climb up through the gap in the rocks via the wooden staircase.
This is all done in your lifejackets, its a ball ache and it gets very hot and sweaty. You reach a middle point and the lake presents itself on the other side of this cliff.
Alongside being out of breath, you do have to take a moment to take in the view. A huge Cove of water that horseshoes out, surrounded and enclosed by Volcanic looking mountains.
Then you look down and see all of the bobbing orange blobs of people floating in the water. It kind of ruins the aesthetic and reminded me of a happier, sunnier and hotter titanic scene. Minus the mass death.
As a group, we aren’t the best behaved when it comes to listening to our tour guide, Sorry Johnny! (He loved us by the end of the day). Sacking off the orange life vests, we abandoned them on the rocks with everyone else’s belongings and dove into the lake.
The consensus was if we could swim past the life jacket dependent tourists and make it to the edge of the safety rope, we could pretend we had the lake to ourselves.
Here we found the rocks in the photo below where we could dive, climb and jump into the Sapphire lake.
Also if you fancy breaking some more of Coron’s Lagoons and Lakes rules, swim under/over the border rope for some incredible views outside of the cove. Just make sure your back in time before your boat leaves and your tour guide has a heart attack thinking he’s lost you.
Kayangan Lake
My favourite out of the two lakes! Docking in the shallow water, you can jump out into the sea and swim closer to the small beach. Again, water shoes are advisable.
Otherwise, you need to become creative in how to get closer to shore without shredding your feet on the dead coral below. Try the crouch shuffle – even those of you with the shittest of knees (myself included) can make it work. It’s that or army crawling / floating to the beach.
Up you go to the wooden jetty and through an even smaller break in the grey very sharp rocks. Then up and down some more stairs, you are presented with an even bluer blue that has no name blue water.
Here, in this lake, you can cliff dive if you can climb up (water shoes, please!) the horrifically sharp-looking rocks to about a 10m jump spot.
Having visions of the boys impaling themselves on the rocks, I watched the lunatic’s swan dive and flip their way into the water. Again, much to Johnny’s disapproval. Sorry, not sorry. After all, we are only in this incredible setting once.
The water is this colour FYI! There is no filter on the below picture.
Snorkelling and Snacks
Next stop we chose on our Coron’s Lagoon and Lakes tour was a WW2 Sunken boat. Here we could do some snorkelling, which was followed by lunch.
We were allowed to sit outside of the Banca boat for our journey to this next spot, which allowed for perfect tan top up time. Looking down at the water you could see the amazing variety of fishes flocking to the boat.
The water surrounding the wreck was really cloudy and quite deep. Free-diving was probably better for seeing the boat. But, I wasn’t that fussed after experiencing wrecks whilst scuba diving the day before.
After lunch, we sailed for around 45 minutes to a tiny island beach in the middle of the sea. We opted to stay on the roof of the boat with a speaker for this stop.
Only because the side of the tiny island we anchored near was in the shade. However, the entrepreneurial locals on rafts and canoes provided up with plenty of purchasable beers & snacks. Cue the red horse roulette.
*Redhorse is the Filipino local beer. A risky choice, as you might get a beer that’s 3% or 15% as its unregulated. So who knows what state you would be in after a few.
Twin Lagoon
For some reason, we were late for our last stop of the day. It was a blessing because it resulted in us having the entirety of the Twin lagoons to ourselves, completely tourist-free. About an hour from sunset, we were the only boat in this part of the waters.
Twin lagoons is a swim. If you are not a strong swimmer or used to swimming distances – use the life jacket.
Swimming in this lagoon, you feel tiny. It was a beautiful place, swimming with excitement and eagerness to reach the rock that divides the two lagoons first.
You have two options, swim underneath the mountain, through a sort of tunnel/crack. (you can swim with your head under the rocks with access to air the whole way, so don’t panic).
Or, you can climb the stairs. Make sure to get the Instagram worthy picture like above, by stopping on the steps. Hence the name, twin lagoon.
Swimming back was a little rushed to try and beat the sunset. But, we had timed it better than we could have hoped / the tour had planned for. We got to see a beautiful sunset whilst sitting on top of the boat roof, eating homemade Filipino Bicho Bicho (doughnuts).
Coron Island Lagoons and Lakes tour was my favourite day in the Philippines and one of my travelling highlights. It makes you realise how incredible this planet it and all it has to offer.
