Island Hopping in El Nido

What makes El Nido special is the combination of ~45 karst islets and islands nearby, all surrounded by crystal clear waters.  El Nido's premier attraction of Island Hopping, involves taking a boat to visit those different islands, beaches, and lagoons, while doing some snorkelling and kayaking activities along the way. 

The local tourism authorities define the 4 standard island hopping tours that can be offered by operators (creatively named Tours A through D).  It doesn't matter which tour operator you go with - if you do "Tour A", the price and island locations will be the same for all of the operators.  That being said, some of the standard locations may be modified due to poor conditions such as strong winds and waves.  On a daily basis, the local coastguard decides which tours are cancelled, modified, or allowed, based on the upcoming day's conditions.

Tours A and C are the most popular.  While we were there, Tour C had been cancelled every day for several weeks (since Christmas).  The other tours had also been intermittently cancelled, so there was a backlog of people waiting to go island hopping.  We tentatively signed up for “Tour A or C” and our tour operator used WhatsApp to let us know (at 6am) which tours were allowed/cancelled for the day. 
 
Tour C
We lucked out and managed to go on a modified version of tour C - we kayaked in Cadlao Lagoon, snorkelled at the Helicopter Island beach, ate lunch on a beach on Mantinloc Island, and snorkelled at Palilo Beach and Hidden Beach.  We were really looking forward to visiting the "Secret Beach", which requires you to swim through a small hole in the karst to get to it (kayaks are too big), unfortunately, this stop was removed due to strong wind and waves.  The next day, Tour C was fully cancelled again.

Here's what the main beach looked like when we were gathering to start our first tour. Not sure if this is the usual scene, or if it was particularly packed with people that day because the weather was finally better (all tours had been cancelled the previous days). 



Tour A
We were really pleased with our Tour C experience, so 2 days later, we did Tour A.  Here we explored Secret Lagoon on Miniloc Island and snorkelled elsewhere on the same island.  It was really windy that day (56km gusts), so instead of eating (a lot of sand) on the beach, we ate on the boat shielded by the karsts of Inatula island.  
We were then supposed to kayak in the Big Lagoon, but someone messed up the Blue Lagoon permit paperwork, so they would not allow us to enter.  We ended up doing Cadlao Lagoon for a second time, instead, and then finished by visiting 7 Commandos Beach.  We still had a great time, but we were a bit sad about missing Blue Lagoon as it was the highlight of this tour. 

Here is a short video of our experiences on tour A and C


Hidden Beach
Hidden beach is hidden by a big karst wall.  At the opening near the wall the water gets shallow, so boats are not supposed to go in.  Since there was a strong current and big waves, we had a pretty tricky swim to go from our boat to the calm lagoon area.  Jen got to practice her lifeguard skills, towing one of the other tourists back to our boat because he couldn't swim.  Once we arrived at the Hidden Beach, we spotted some cute little black-fin sharks swimming through the crystal clear water. 


Cadlao Lagoon
This was a really nice lagoon with clear water at the beginning and then silty blue water at the end. On our first tour we kayaked here for about 1 hour. On our second tour, we decided to snorkel and saw a group of clown fish. 


Helicopter Beach
It was just a beach, but it was nice.  There was supposed to be good snorkelling here, but the seas were choppy when we went so the visibility was too poor to see anything. 


Secret Lagoon
Off to the side of one of the beaches, there is a hole in one of the karst walls.  Once you go through, you end up in a small lagoon that is entirely surrounded by natural walls.  We luckily arrived early so there weren't that many people, but as we were leaving, there was a big line starting to form.  Later that evening, we overheard other tourists saying they waited an hour in line to get into the Secret Lagoon. 


Snorkelling
We stopped at a few different snorkelling spots during our 2 tours.  Since conditions weren't great, we didn't see very many fish, but we did see a purple clam, a few clown fish, some blue star fishes, a couple of parrot fish, and some other random small fish/sea creatures that we don't know the names of 😂. 


Lunch
The lunch on our first tour was quite spectacular.  While we visited the various tour stops, the boat chefs prepped the meal.  At around 13:00, we arrived at a small beach and the crew floated a table and the dishes over to the beach, in a kayak.  We had a wonderful feast!
On our second tour, because of the high wind, we ended up eating on the boat sheltered by an island. It was still nice, but less spectacular. 




Boat's Personal Space
In El Nido, it seems that the boats don’t have any personal space. Even if the area is crowded, they go in as close as possible to their destination and then when it’s time to leave, the crew have to figure out how to untangle the pontoons.  The pictures show the crew struggling to free one side of the boat, while the other side is completely deadlocked 🤷‍♂️


We were amazed at how affordable the island hopping tours were (~1400php, $35cad / person) for the full day.  It's worth noting that there were a couple of additional expenses that we didn't find out about after we were on the boat: 
  • Kayak rental at each lagoon - 300-400 PHP (~$7-8 cad/kayak/hour) 
  • Water shoes - 100 PHP / person  - The water shoes were optional but we highly recommend taking them.  There were several areas where people were hit by strong waves or slipped on the uneven surfaces and badly scraped their feet/legs on the jagged coral and rocks.