Having to play catch up a bit now as we’ve been so busy I’ve had very little down time to write.

El Nido was spoken quite highly by quite a few people we’ve met on our travels so far. But having now been there and other places, I would say it’s on its way to being too touristy. The town is very small, the main centre consists of two parallel streets and one perpendicular one. Even whilst we were there we saw so many construction sites as they build more accommodation to meet demand (book in advance if you’re going in peak season as it does book up very quickly). There is not much of an actual beach to relax on in El Nido, the beach there is mainly used as a mooring site for island hopping boats and not that pleasant for relaxing on. The town itself is probably 99% tourist driven. Most buildings here fell into one of the following: restaurant, bar, travel agency or accommodation. Although traditional Filipino cuisine is not really all that memorable (in my humble opinion), it doesn’t justify the copious amounts of Italian and Mexican restaurants in the centre. As with my rant about Thailand being too touristy, I think El Nido is definitely heading towards that direction.

The island tours are good, we did A and C (out of A to D) and thought A was the better one with the lagoons we went to and the option to hire kayaks to explore these with. The lunch on these tours were definitely a highlight. A simple grilled lunch of pork, fish, seafood (squid, mussels or shrimp), rice and fruit prepared by the crew on board. I’m salivating at the memory. The Philippines are beautiful and the boat tours only provided more evidence of this by showing you white beaches with intense blue skies and sunshine as well as turquoise lagoons that are bordered by sharp, jagged grey stone rising impressively out of the water. With over 7,000 islands, you are not short of stunning scenery here.

In terms of price, El Nido was much more expensive compared with Thailand. That’s not to say it was expensive, you could have a decent meal out for about 300 pisos (about £4) but obviously when you compare with Thailand where accommodation and street food are much more in abundance it is definitely a marked difference.

One place that we really enjoyed going to was Nacpan beach. It’s a gorgeous long white sand beach that lies 16km up the coast from El Nido. You can get shuttles up there 350php one way or 600php return. We stayed up there for one night and would definitely recommend it. It’s currently 5km of a quiet beach but in future will definitely be developed into a tourist hotspot.

We enjoyed our stay in El Nido but definitely looking forward to Coron.