The Island: Coron Holy Week Photo Diary

4 weeks in Manila. I was starting to get restless and antsy. This thing that people call wanderlust is a terrible feeling. 

Finally back to seeing new things--the same places, but in different ways.

Back to one of my most favorite places in the world, this time with Jonny (who wrote the rest of this entry).





"Imagine us, doing this?" Danny says in that intrinsically humorous Welsh brogue of his, as he stares philosophically into his champagne flute.  We’re standing on rocky outcropping watching sunset after a 45 minute deserted island hike.  We walk back in the dark. The trees make a tunnel.  Danny and the others go ahead and there’s one flashlight for three of us.  We stumble back down a steep, narrow, leave-strewn cliff-side path behind our shirtless French friend, who’s muttering imprecations in French punctuated by “allez’s!”
The pool of light dances around our feet as we go down, down, down the black tunnel.  I’m in a myth.



We gathered in Coron for Holy Week, men, women, and children.  13 of us, oddly.   We straggled in in ones and twos then travelled an hour out to the island racing the moonrise.  Time stopped once we got there.  13 of us around a table, every supper a Last one so we eat, drink, and be merry.


Trace the paths of how every single one of us got here.  Trace them all the way back to where the paths started and back forward to the accidents, coin-toss decisions, bursts of spontaneity, and moments of madness that led to them crossing and it’s hard to imagine us.  Doing this.  It’s fantastic.



Hannah and I arrived before everyone else so we could come to Coron for the first time. Not my first time, I’ve been before. She’s been before too, actually she came first and I chased her ghost around town the last time I came, back when everything was still a bet in our game. “Dive the wrecks” she said then, so I dove them. “Eat at the bar with the mermaids” she said, so I ate with them.


Coron feels like another world.  It feels like many worlds sitting next to each other.  Straight off the plane into that Busuanga central valley Serengeti, scrawny Brahmin cows grazing on the savanna.  Busuanga’s southwest coast is the wild west, dusty road crossing dried out riverbeds and passing a hilltop parish church of red mortared stone.  The river’s mouth opens out into the sea through a mangrove swamp and there’s the bayou.



And of course in Coron is the sea, and what’s in it, and what’s under it: the wrecks.  Silent sentinels in blue turned fantastic, turned romantic, hidden nooks to hold hands in and smile with the eyes through the bubbles.  Time and tides wiped away the blood of their beginnings.  We might be a little like that.




Most of us are a long way from home, in many more ways than miles.  But we got here, at the right place, at the right time, to a place with no walls and no clocks.  For a blink we got to a place where we wake to wind, sky, and sea, and sleep to same.  A place where we don’t have to imagine us, doing this.




Special thanks to La Natura Resort and Casa Fidelis for hosting us on our first few days in, we had such a beautiful stay :)

For those asking, the underwater shots were done with a 7d, inside a Dicapac. Yes, I risked it, and it was mighty difficult to operate, but it's better than not getting the shots, I guess?? 

Have a beautiful week :)

xoxo
Hannah