Close your eyes and escape the world. Allow these winds and words so flutter gently in your ears. Picture the palm trees and the white sand. Find your beach paradise. Feel yourself be transported to the Philippines, where paradise exists just how you may want it. Your Kated Travel Podcast host Stephen Bailey leads you there. Join 2000+ podcast subscribers listening to the show.

Maybe Your Kind Of Paradise

Close your eyes. Relax. Feel the winds go gently past your ears. Can you picture the palm trees? Can you picture the white sand? Can you imagine beach paradise? I’m your host Stephen Bailey, and today I want to take you to a country of innumerable islands, a country where the definition of paradise is often very easy to find. Now, of course, paradise is subjective. It can be found in a variety of forms dictated by personal preference and circumstance. Maybe for you it’s a quaint Parisian cafe, a jungle island without roads, a private island retreat.

Maybe something cultural, historical, or maybe just a clean hotel room after a gruelling journey. But often the images that first spring to mind when that word “paradise” comes up, are the images that can be found in the Philippines. Now the Philippines is a huge country, more than 4,000 islands stretching far across Southeast Asia to the South China Sea. It’s where islands are fringed by white sands, just as you may imagine, when you close your eyes. Where tiny islets offer coral excursions and marine adventures. It’s where the friendly fun-loving locals provide the welcome. Their smiles are a constant to every journey.

There Is So Much There

It’s also where you find wildlife dappled throughout the rainforest and the atholls. There really is so much here. Like volcanoes, swimming with male whale sharks, epic scuba diving like what are your fine on Apo Islands. There are also cities. There’s also a less than salubrious side to the culture as well. As much as you can go island hopping by sea plane, there is a very different side — perhaps unpleasant side — to Filipino tourism. And that can sometimes make the country off-putting. Because before I visited the Philippines I had an impression that it was a country that was very rough, very rural, very difficult to get around.

A country where a lot of it would be dominated by sex tourism. A country that I really didn’t know much about. And what I discovered was something completely else. The great thing about travel is, every time you travel, it is completely different to how you expect. And that really was my experience in the Philippines. And I’ve visited twice now. And I can tell you now about my two favorite islands.

Palawan Is A Massive Island Ripe For Adventure

The first is called Palawan. It’s a very large island in the northwest of the archipelago. An island bigger than most European countries, with rough jungle roads, spectacular coastlines, and these strange rock formations and islets stretch out from the main island of Palawan.

It’s a place where you can get a yacht charter overnight and — or a speedboat charter — and go camp on an uninhabited island. Or perhaps just go there for a picnic. It’s an island where there is superb diving, especially in the north. It’s also an island where one of the world’s Seven Natural Wonders — the new Seven Wonders — is located. And that’s important to note, because the actual caves, the new Seven World Wonder, are a massive disappointment — but it was actually part of the Philippines’ government strategy to attract tourism to the Island of Palawan.

Palawan has such potential, yet people didn’t know about it and they do now because there’s a World Seven Wonder. So as I speak, Palawan is changing. Just like many destinations, it is going more towards that — every day, starting to become kind of a mass tourism destination. But the great thing about Palawan is its size. Because you can fly into Puerto Princesa, you can fly in, you can see the cave, you can go to a beautiful beach. You can do that in two days and you can follow the standard trail. But if you travel further, you’ll find that this is a massive island and so much remains completely untouched, completely ripe for adventure.

And as you go further north, you get to El Nido. Then you can go even further towards Coron Island — beautiful wreck diving to find there. And you will see that it is not just about this cave. In fact, I’d avoid the cave completely.

Discovering Somewhere New

The second island I want to recommend is entirely different. It’s called Siargao. It is an island where tourism is really in its infancy. An island that’s got a great surf break, which attracts some people — and it’s now got a few little businesses. But an island that’s really — there’s the excitement of everybody being there, being like, “wow, I found somewhere new”.

That’s in pretty much the far south of the archipelago. So Palawan and Siargao are pretty difficult to combine on a single itinerary. And they are just two of 4,000 islands. And going back to the Philippines, I realized that it is possible to find the classic definition of paradise, the sands, the palm trees, the images you can also find in Zanzibar — if you didn’t listen to yesterday’s show, we had an interview with a real travel expert on Zanzibar, who really helped to show that the Zanzibar is more than an island. There is more than just the image of paradise.

And that for me is the Philippines as well. Because Manila is fascinating, as much as it’s crowded and chaotic. There’s incredible food to try, like French-Filipino cuisine, wine and jamon tasting. You can go on a hot air balloon flight. You can go to a yoga retreat. You can do a historical tour of Coron and Culion Islands. You can helicopter over Chocolate Hills, go see the Banaue Rice Terraces. You can go spelunking in Sagada Caves, and then also see the hanging coffins. There are some great places to stay. You can go skydiving and you can go canyoning and you can trek on a volcano.

You can go kayaking and hiking and do motorbike riding. You can stay on a private kitesurfing island. You can go white water kayaking, rock climbing, climb peaks at sunrise — or in a four-wheel drive. You can even go hang gliding. You’ll find there is a lot more than just yacht charters and hopping around the islands. You’ll find that this is a place of a lot more than beaches and marine encounters. What to do in the Philippines is not just beach bliss. And I want to go back there because after being there twice, I know I’ve only visited five out of 4,000 islands. And the great thing is, I know within that four thousand, there are thousands of unknown gems, gems that I don’t know about.

And I can only discover, if I get the opportunity to meet with a local — a travel designer who can tell me, look, this is the next place. This is the new place where you can travel different in the Philippines.