DIVE HAPPY

Coron Bay in the Philippines has some of the most spectacular World War II shipwreck diving in the Asia-Pacific region

Following on from my post about Donsol in the Philippines, another place I've been looking at diving in the same country is Coron Bay, on the island of Palawan in the north of the Philippines. In this area, there are numerous World War II wrecks that make for spectacular diving. There's a whole website dedicated to the wrecks and their maritime history at CoronWrecks.com - an excellent piece of research. I found some general info about Palawan at Wikipedia and Palawan.com, and a good overview of all the dive sites around the town of El Nido at the Dive Philippines site. From what I can work out, El Nido is the biggest town on this long, thin island and where everything happens. Given the island's closeness to Luxon, which is where the capital Manila is located, it should only be a few hours journey from Manila to El Nido.

Besides the wrecks and the beautiful photos of Coron Bay that you can see on Palawan.com, Palawan is also interesting because it extends out from the Philippines archipelago towards Malaysian Borneo into the Sulu Sea, which means there must be some more amazing diving at the other end of the island closest to Borneo. I need to find out more about this. If anyone's got any first hand info about diving around Palawan, I'd love to hear from them. I am currently planning a dive trip to the Philippines in March/April that will hopefully stop off at several different locations. As such, this is all part of my research and I'm just going by what I can find online, so treat this post as speculative rather than confirmed fact.