Domestic “Eco” 89throughout the country and overseas travelled to visit a place of nature they
considered part of their own Filipino heritage. A Puerto Princesa government
official who worked extensively in the National Park describes how visitor numbers
increased dramatically, “especially during the times when the Park was inscribed
as a UNESCO World Heritage site and as finalist to the New 7 Wonders of Nature”
(see also Table 6.1). He explains how the subsequent changes to visitor dynamics
resulted in extensive transformations of visitor experiences of the National Park:
During the start of the management of the Park when it was still with the
DENR^6 more tourists are foreign tourists—before. But now more tourists
are Filipinos. Of course the number before is very, very minimal but now the
numbers of tourists are high. And the time they spend in the Park—before,
they spend long times. One foreign tourist before will spend about three to
four days in the Park, just reading books, watching birds, writing. But now
most of the tourists, the visitors going in, just want to see the Underground
River. Before they want to see the whole Park area. So of course we have to
shorten the time of travel inside the Park because of the many tourists
(Puerto Princesa City, August 2011)As this account indicates, the surge in visitors associated with the N7WN
campaign has dramatically transformed what it means to visit the Underground
River. While in the 1980s more registered visitors to the Park were foreigners,
by the early 1990s domestic tourists were the majority of visitors. This majority
has increased as total visitor numbers have dramatically risen, first as a result of
the 1999 inscription of the Park as a UNESCO World Heritage site but especially
during the recent PPUR-N7WN campaign.
Ways of traversing space that were once key to the experience of “seeing” the
Underground River, like hiking to the entrance, have been largely eliminated from
most tourists’ experiences of visiting the Park (see, for example, Sablan 2003)^7.
While there are other niche activities on the local tourism circuit (a mangrove
paddleboat tour, spelunking, trekking, and bird watching), the majority of tourists
spend a very minimal part of their “day” trip to the Park actually inside it. A recent
zipline attraction makes a particular perspective of Palawan’s iconic forest visible
to visitors who need not spend extensive time walking around inside the forested
Park to “see” it. While more tourists once stopped at local institutions like the
Ethnographic Museum adjacent to the central barangay park office while they
collected their park permits locally, now vans pass directly by (having already
secured park permits in downtown Puerto Princesa). These permits are increasingly
in demand as the surge in visitor numbers has resulted in new limitations on
accessing the Underground River. By March 2012, the Park management board
issued a travel advisory to notify potential visitors that the carrying capacity of the
Park (900 visitors per day) was to be strictly enforced through a “No Permit, No
Entry” policy (PAMB Resolution No. 06–2012). To accommodate this number of
visitors, tourists were allocated specifically timed trips to visit the Underground
River. As a result, it has become difficult for visitors to visit the Underground River