Coron Travel Guide: Kayangan Lake, Island Hopping and Where to Stay
Coron Travel Guide
Hello!
The travellers we met in El Nido kept telling us “El Nido is nice, but Coron is something else, different, more beautiful”, so we went to Coron with huge expectations and bingo! People really do know a thing or two, especially free-spirited backpackers!
In our memories, Coron is now a paradise island of hidden islets, untouched coves you can’t reach by land, surreal settings that make you feel like Robinson Crusoe, and a thousand shades of turquoise.
What with the famous Kayangan Lake, the Japanese shipwrecks, the lagoons and white sand beaches, we spent four packed days in Coron. No offence to El Nido, but if someone asked us right now “El Nido or Coron?”, we’d say Coron!
Getting to Coron
There are two options for getting to Coron from El Nido: the fast ferry, which takes about 4 hours, and the slow ferry, which takes about 7. We bought our tickets at the last minute, so there were no seats left on the fast ferry and we had to take the slow “ferry”. The “thing” we expected to be a ferry turned out to be a wooden boat open on both sides, so of course spending 7 hours on the open sea in that “thing” was not fun at all!
Ferry tickets go on sale exactly one day before departure. If you want to be sure, you can pay any tour agency in El Nido in advance to book for you. When the time comes they buy the ferry ticket for you, and you pick it up from the agency during the day. (Today you can also book some ferries online in advance, so check before you go.)
The fast ferry left at 6:00 am and the slow ferry at 8:00 am when we travelled; check current schedules.
Coron (Busuanga) also has a small airport. In fact, it’s the most laid-back airport we’ve ever seen…! Imagine: even the X-ray machine didn’t work, and if all the passengers have arrived, the plane just takes off early. On our flight from Coron to Cebu, the plane left 40 minutes early! We won’t even mention the propellers. We hope there aren’t many nervous flyers reading this. 🙂
As usual, getting around Coron is by tricycle. But the tricycle drivers here are much savvier than in El Nido, so always negotiate.
Where to Stay in Coron
Coron is quite small, so if you choose any hotel close to the centre, Coron Town, you can walk everywhere. If you want a resort-style place with a pool, there are resorts a bit outside the centre, but you’ll probably need a tricycle to get into town.
We reached Coron two days earlier than planned and had to find a hotel for two nights at the last minute. Without much research, we dived into the first place we found, Lan Bless Pension Hotel. Its Booking.com rating was close to 8.0, so we hoped it would be fine. But the room wasn’t clean and there was no hot water. By now you can probably guess there were no towels, shampoo or soap either. We only went back to sleep, so we managed for two days, and on the third day we moved to Coron Villa, which we had booked in advance.
After the hotel we’d been so wary of in El Nido (bugs), a night in a tent and two nights in a hotel we didn’t like, moving to Coron Villa was a huge relief! A room with no bugs, hot water and working air con: now that’s luxury…(!) If you’re interested, you can check the hotel here. We paid 35 USD per room per night (breakfast not included).
Things to Do in Coron Town
Coron Town itself isn’t especially charming. Like El Nido, Coron is really all about the spots you reach on boat tours. Still, if you set aside a day to rest, you can see the main sights.
Mount Tapyas is a hill you can reach with a 20-minute climb (700-800 steps) from the centre, and the sunset there is beautiful. We took a beer up and watched the sunset. It was lovely.
Maquinit Hot Spring: Besides its nature and beaches, Coron is also known for this saltwater hot spring. Or so we hear, because we were in Coron over Christmas, it was closed, and we didn’t get another chance to go. Then again, maybe we only miss it because it was closed; we’re not sure we’d have wanted to get into a hot pool in 35-degree heat..! 🙂 If you want to go, you can arrange with a tricycle driver to take you there for about 500 pesos, wait while you’re inside and bring you back. Maquinit is outside town, so if you don’t arrange it in advance, there won’t be tricycles at the entrance. Alternatively, if you can ride a motorbike, you can rent one; the prices we were quoted were around 400-500 pesos a day. That way you can explore without depending on anyone. Something to consider 🙂
We asked whether there were any beaches we could reach by tricycle or motorbike without joining a boat tour, but the beaches near Coron Town weren’t really recommended.
Coron Island Hopping Tours
Having come all the way to Coron, we had to see everything beautiful, so we went for the most comprehensive boat tour with the most stops…!
Boat tours in Coron are also grouped, but three stops are almost always included: Kayangan Lake, Twin Lagoon and CYC Beach. Other popular spots are Coral Garden, Green Lagoon, Skeleton Wreck and Barracuda Lake.
We took the Coron Ultimate Tour, which stops at seven spots during the day, and paid 1,400 pesos (28 USD) per person. Honestly, one or two stops were unnecessary, and they tricked us by saying kayaking was included, because unlike El Nido there’s nowhere to kayak on this tour. We condemn that agency and have prepared a few choice words for them! Anyway… You can take any tour that includes Kayangan Lake, Twin Lagoon and Barracuda Lake; you can skip the other places, these are where it’s at.. 🙂 If you’re into reefs, choose a tour that includes CYC Beach too.
In El Nido and Coron, lunch is included on the tours and it’s always the same. Is it good? So-so. The first boat tour lunch tasted great to us, probably because it was new. Then we did boat tours for about four more days and the menu never changed: rice, mango, fish, prawns, eggplant salad and bananas. We haven’t eaten any of those five (except bananas) since we got back, and probably won’t for a while…!
Anyway, where were we? Ah yes, the boat tour.
Barracuda Lake and Kayangan Lake were the last two stops of our tour, and it was also our last boat tour in the Philippines. Since the last places would stay in our minds, we really wanted these two lakes to look like they did in the photos. You may have noticed by now that we don’t like exaggerating or writing flashy sentences. And Kayangan Lake was “that” beautiful…! It looked a lot like other amazing lakes we’d seen before, and nothing like them at the same time. It was so calm, so beautiful, somehow so special. We spent two more days in Coron after Kayangan, but for us, this is Coron. We won’t say more; go and see it with your own eyes.
Coron Escapade Tour
Even though we’d done the seven-stop tour the day before, we couldn’t resist: we had to see Coron’s famous white beaches, so we joined the Coron Escapade Tour. On this tour you spend the day visiting Malcapuya Island, Banana Island and Bulog Dos Island, known as Coron’s white beaches. Picture a beach lined with coconut palms leaning towards the sea: that’s it!
Maybe because we’d reached “scenery saturation” the day before, or maybe because you only get about an hour on each beach and there’s only so much you can do in an hour, we didn’t really love this beach-hopping. Going to one island and spending the whole day there reading 500 pages each might have been nicer. If you have extra days in Coron you could consider this tour, but in our opinion the priority should definitely be the tour we did the day before.
By the way, many of these tour boats look more like dugouts than boats, so don’t be surprised if you get one. On our way back, we saw a boat broken down and just sitting in the middle of the sea, and our captain calmly tied it to our boat with a rope and carried on. No surprise, no reaction at all! 🙂 So apparently passenger boats stopping in the middle of the sea is perfectly normal, and someone will always come and rescue them, or so they think; we couldn’t work it out. We still wouldn’t want to have been in that boat!
We paid 1,400 pesos (28 USD) per person for this tour.
Diving in Coron
If you love the life under the sea even more than above it, you’ll love Coron. If you have a scuba licence, you can dive the shipwrecks from World War II. The Japanese wrecks, some of them over 100 metres long, are very, very famous.
Thinking about it again as we write, we really loved Coron. Maybe because, despite being such a touristy town, it has stayed simple and as it is, rather than catering to the “white man’s” tastes. We hope it never turns into a noisy, crowded town that smells of fried food..
Where to Eat and Drink in Coron
Like El Nido, Coron has started getting lots of tourists in recent years, and many new places aimed purely at tourists have opened. Most are run by Europeans. You’ll never see locals in them, and they feel a bit artificial. You see a café selling a coffee for 6 USD, while a metre outside its door people work for 1 USD a day… Let’s not go too deep into this, but it was what we liked least about Coron. If you’re a very particular vegetarian, that’s a different story, but if you have ordinary tastes like us, you can eat easily at local places. We just didn’t like this foreign-owner mindset in Coron!
Altrove Coron: The “I must go to the number one restaurant on TripAdvisor” craze from El Nido was in Coron too, and you wouldn’t believe the queue in front of this place even if you saw it with your own eyes. On top of that, a 12-13 USD pasta in a town where people earn around 40 USD a month seemed absurd to us. We don’t know much about fine dining anyway, but this place really annoyed us, and we had to get it off our chest. We skipped it after seeing the crowd and the menu.
Island Boy Grill, on the other hand, we stumbled into by chance and went back the next night and the night after; it became our favourite place in Coron. Good food, fair prices and a lovely atmosphere. We had our dinners here.
Buzz Express is also aimed entirely at tourists, but it’s a place where you can get good coffee. The food is very expensive by Coron standards, but we were so tired of Asian food that one night we gave in and had burgers here. We paid 36 USD in total for two burgers, two fries and two beers.
Epic Cafe is similar, a third-wave coffee shop that had just opened in Coron. Did we like it? Meh…
As you can see, we got a bit hung up on this “foreign owners and rip-offs” thing in Coron, so we didn’t take risks in the evenings and kept going to Island Boy Grill. Coron isn’t exactly a “foodie town” anyway, so we don’t think we missed much.
After four days in Coron, it was time to hit the road again, and we set off for Cebu!
For our Philippines preparation guide, click here.
For our Puerto Princesa travel guide, click here.
For our El Nido travel guide, click here.
And our next stop: the Cebu travel guide.
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Lots of love!