El Nido sits at the northern tip of Palawan, the gateway to Bacuit Bay
and its scatter of 45 limestone islands. Highest of them is Cadlao, rising 640 m
straight from the sea, while the jagged spire of Taraw Cliff (~230 m) looms over
the town itself. Hidden among the islands are the sheer-walled lagoons of Miniloc -
the Big and Small Lagoons - reached through cracks in the cliffs by kayak.
The Permian-to-Paleogene limestone here is the same drowned karst as Ha Long Bay in
Vietnam, Guilin in China and Krabi in Thailand - all riding the Sunda Plate. El Nido takes
its name from the Spanish for "the nest": the edible swiftlet nests once gathered from these
cliffs. Marine reserve since 1991, the 90,000-hectare El Nido–Taytay Managed Resource
Protected Area (1998) is on UNESCO's World Heritage Tentative List.
Dive below the surface. Orbit the camera down through the water. No open
bathymetric service covers the bay at this resolution, so the underwater relief is modeled
from distance-to-shore: pale turquoise sand in the shallows around each island, deepening
into the channels. In life the fringing reefs of Bacuit ring the karst and then plunge
steeply into the Sulu Sea.