Tarzan years in the Rustic Zone

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The remote area between El Nido and Coron is truly beautiful and pristine, speckled with 52 islands around Linapacan alone. Unfortunately, its remoteness means that it is less developed in terms of fancy resorts.

You will notice Coron underlined with yellow in the top right, with El Nido bottom left and Sibaltan, where our multiday tours start or end (include a one hour private van transfer to or from El Nido.

Dustan Lodging Inn San Miguel Linapacan 8 — Dastan, simple air-con hotel on Linapacan Island, the best the rustic zone can offer. Comes free with rooster sounds all night long.

The area in the green dashed line is the Rustic Zone, with accommodation only basic beach huts, tenting on deserted islands or beaches, or at best a simple aircon hotel, Dastan. The closest nice resorts outside of this rustic zone are Resort1 closer to El Nido and Two Seasons or Coco Beach closer to Coron. There are plenty of other nice resorts in the Coron area, and you can easily extend you multiday expedition to include many beautiful sites in that area as well.

Sunlight Ecotourism Island Resort near coron 8 — Sunlight Island Resort, one of the fancier island resorts in the Coron area.

If the options in the rustic zone do not suit your fancy, you can take the fast boat to whip through the area while visiting as many sites as possible along the way (such as the Sea Turtles), but if you do decide to stay at least one night in this zone, you should take our regular banca boat because the fast boat does not have any cooking facilities on it and the food available in that area is almost negligible.

Why the Tarzan years

A shirtless man carrying a bag strides through the dense, green vegetation of the jungle on an adventurous excursion near El Nido. — Yours truly.

In my quest to start a paradise beach resort, I stumbled onto this remote area and was fortunate to be granted free stay on a beach if I started developing it with the help of volunteers.

A rustic bamboo hut overlooking a serene beach with calm blue water. Inside, a simple chair and table are under a colorful fabric roof, with a green mosquito net hanging nearby. Two distant islands are visible under a bright sky. — View from the bamboo hut I built myself.

Near the end I had a solar panel on the roof, wind turbine to charge at night, when it was usually much windier, 12V fan to keep me cool at night, comfortable mattress and everything else I felt I needed for this type of existence. But in the beginning it was baking in the tent, midnight dips in the ocean to cool me off, swimming slowly against the current whenever I wanted to relieve myself.

The locals basically live the same way on these remote islands, and the beach huts offered to visitors passing through are of a similar calibre.