Where water is as clear as vodka, and everyone is drunk on its beauty
By Brian Johnston
Busuanga Island in Coron, Philippines. Credit: iStock
I don't realise how ordinary and muted the world is until I sail into the port of Coron on Busuanga Island. Coron is a marching band to the world's polite piano tinkle. It is wild Impressionism contrasted to the beige-and-grey Old Master landscapes of other places.
When the gods of creation got around to Coron, they must have been bored with the tedium of standard decor on a planetary scale. They just picked up buckets of blue and green and sloshed colour everywhere, like kindergarten kids on too much sugar.
Sailing into the bay at Coron on Silver Spirit envelopes me in loveliness. As I patrol the ship's elegant deck, I'm surrounded by a wide ring of islands, lush with green vegetation rising to arid summits. Rocky outcrops are thin and stretched upwards like a Dr Seuss illustration.
This is the much-anticipated highlight on a Silversea cruise between Hong Kong and Bangkok.Credit: iStock
The ship is soon surrounded by a buzzing flotilla of wooden outrigger boats with purple awnings and green sides and red seating. The water is an absurd distillation of peacock-feather colours that makes me want to leap overboard.
Best not. Instead I tarry on the ship until it docks, before hurrying down the gangplank, onto a battered concrete jetty and into a jaunty local boat for a day out in a world turned vivid and vibrant.
I'm on a Silversea cruise between Hong Kong and Bangkok, and this is the much-anticipated highlight. Big cruise ships sometimes call in a Puerto Princesa on Palawan Island further south, but Silver Spirit is dainty enough to escape to smaller islands hunkered in the Sulu Sea.
It's just us and grinning local lads, steering us into adventure. As we lurch across the bay, the rock outcrops of Siete Pecados Marine Park pop from electric-blue water, crowned with punk-green mohawks of hardy trees.
I could have been happy right there with my shore excursion, pootling around such loveliness, but when I slide off the anchored boat and into the water I find an even more outrageous landscape.
It's as if I've fallen upwards into the sky. Angelfish drift past. Butterflyfish are a wonder of yellow and black stripes. I seem to be hovering above a cliff edge that descends to dark blue.
The cliff is actually a shelf of coral, stiff with huge fans and bony fingers. This reef is perhaps the best I've seen, packed with a forest of corals and adrift in shoals of vivid blue chromis fish and yellow Moorish idols.
I float in astonishment, paddling from one wonder to another, reef colours changing like a kaleidoscope from purple to green, orange to blue. Returning to the boat is like being wakened from an over-the-top dream about flying.
The boat slips through an opening in the cliffs, into a bay shimmering with a thesaurus of blues. We climb steps upwards and down again to Kayangan Lake, cupped in sheer rock. Is the water blue or green? Hard to tell, but it would win a prize for the boldness of its colour.
No fish here except for slivers of silver darting above sunken limestone gnarled as abstract sculptures. The water is clear as vodka, and everyone is drunk on its beauty.
Our day finishes on Banol Beach, a scallop of golden sand backed by lush cliffs and fronted by ridiculous waters. If you painted sea this colour it would look like artistic license. Men in white might even haul you away, declaring you'd lost your grip on reality.
From your straitjacket you would yell that it's all true: there is a corner of the planet this colour. But nobody from the ordinary, muted world would ever believe you.
THE DETAILS
CRUISE
Silversea has several Asian cruises that visit Coron each year. Among them is a 30-day Yokohama to Bangkok cruise departing on October 11, 2023 aboard the very chic Silver Whisper. The cruise also visits Romblon Island, Puerto Princesa and Manila in the Philippines, as well as numerous other destinations. From $15,200 door-to-door including airport transfers, airfares, shore excursions and butler service. Phone 1300 306 872. See silversea.com
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Brian Johnston travelled as a guest of Silversea.
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