Things to Do in Palawan in May

The Exclusive Super Ultimate tour strips away the group-tour compromises that dilute most Palawan island-hopping itineraries. Designed for just two passengers, this private tour threads through lagoons and sandbars at your own pace, with a boatman who knows which snorkeling walls catch the morning current and which beaches empty out by midday. Expect the crack of fresh coconuts split trailside, the salt-and-sunscreen taste of wind on the open bangka, and water so clear you can count sea urchin spines from the surface.

Puerto Princesa over three days and two nights, with guided touring and hotel included, is the right frame for travelers who want Palawan's capital region handled rather than improvised. The package threads together the Underground River, Honda Bay's island chain, and the city's own firefly river tour, the last conducted at dusk, when thousands of synchronous fireflies pulse along the mangrove banks of the Iwahig River and the humid air smells of brackish water and nipa palm. Between excursions, Puerto Princesa's food scene rewards exploration: try the crocodile sisig at a Rizal Avenue eatery, crisp and peppery, or the tamilok (woodworm) served raw in vinegar at the Bakers Hill complex, briny and slippery in a way that converts skeptics.

The El Nido to Coron expedition covers the strait that separates Palawan's two marquee destinations, three days and two nights of island camping, kayaking, and snorkeling across a route that most travelers only see as a dot-to-dot line on a ferry map. Nights are spent on remote islands where generator light dies at nine and the Milky Way ignites above black water. Mornings begin with the smell of charcoal-grilled bangus and garlic rice cooked on the beach. The passage itself crosses open sea, and on a calm May morning the water is glass-flat, the bangka engine a low diesel thrum, dolphins occasionally surfacing off the bow in pods of four or five.

The full-day Underground River tour from Puerto Princesa follows the Cabayugan road west through coconut plantations and limestone ridges, then puts you on a paddle boat inside a cathedral-scale cave system that runs more than eight kilometers beneath the St. Paul Mountain range. Inside, the air drops ten degrees and turns cave-damp, and the beam of the boatman's headlamp catches stalactites shaped like organ pipes, curtain formations, and a colony of swiftlets whose calls ricochet off the vaulted ceiling in overlapping echoes. The river itself is tidal. You taste the faint salt where seawater mixes with freshwater near the cave mouth, and the silence, once the boatman kills the chatter, is the deepest quiet most travelers encounter in Palawan.

El Nido's Tour D is the route that locals themselves prefer. It skips the overcrowded Big and Small Lagoon circuit and heads instead to Cadlao Island's western face, Helicopter Island's tapered limestone ridge, and the deep reef at Nat Nat Beach. A private booking means the bangka lingers where you want it: twenty extra minutes finning along the wall at Ipil Beach, where parrotfish the color of oxidized copper graze on coral, or a slow drift past the karst stacks north of Cadlao where the limestone is streaked black and orange with mineral deposits and the water below is a deep emerald. Lunch is cooked on the boat. Grilled squid, green mango, and rice wrapped in banana leaf, eaten with your feet over the gunwale and the taste of sea salt still on your lips.

Discover Scuba diving in El Nido puts first-timers underwater in Bacuit Bay without requiring certification, guided by an instructor who handles the technical management while you focus on breathing and looking. The descent starts in chest-deep water over a sandy bottom. The initial minutes are spent kneeling on sand, equalizing, learning to trust the regulator, before the instructor leads you along a sloping reef wall where giant clams gape in jewel-toned mantles of electric blue and iridescent green, and schools of anthias scatter like sparks when you fin past. The water temperature in Palawan's May hovers near 29°C, warm enough that even without a wetsuit the chill never arrives, and visibility on a good morning stretches beyond twenty meters, the reef edge dissolving into open blue.