90 Sarah Webb
without prior planning and booking or travelling via a private tour company. These
private day tours have recently emerged as the dominant mode for tourists to visit
the Park.^8 In order to consider how practices of visiting and making nature have
become influenced by these trends, I give the following ethnographic account of
such private day tours to the PPUR during 2010.
Day-tripping to the Underground River
The journey begins early in the morning. An air-conditioned mini-van collects
visitors from their accommodations in pension houses surrounding Puerto
Princesa City. Guests are told where to sit as they enter the van by our tour
guide—an important consideration, as all the seats in the van have been allocated
via the booking agency. Once the driver has collected all the passengers, the tour
guide introduces herself (Teri) and the driver (Jose).^9 She jokes that all the guests
will need to remember her, because once we reach Sabang, all of the vans look
the same. She tells the guests if they cannot remember her name, not to worry,
just to call her “Beautiful” and her colleague “Handsome”. Her jokes, spoken in
a mixture of English and Tagalog, initiate the comfortable congeniality essential
to the enjoyment of such a trip for many of her guests. Although many middle-
class Filipinos visiting Palawan travel in multi-generational family groups large
enough to book their own transport or tour, the style of today’s tour allows those
travelling in smaller groups to join together with unknown travelers to share
the expense of transport, guides, and food. As such, tourists pay an inclusive,
per-person rate that includes these costs as well as their Park permit. Aside from
myself, today’s tour is composed of Filipino tourists: three single female friends
in their early twenties, a woman in her sixties accompanied by her daughter,
and two professional husband-wife couples in their late twenties.^10 Teri hands
around a snack to each passenger—a sandwich of Lady’s Choice (a nationally
iconic sandwich spread of sweet mayonnaise and small pieces of meat) and two
keychains (a wooden mask with “Palawan” carved into the forehead and a dream-
catcher). She tells all the guests that now they have their souvenir, they need not
spend their money buying souvenirs in Sabang—and besides, if anyone would
like to purchase pasalubong (a gift for family, friends, or colleagues) we will be
stopping at a specific tiangge (grouping of covered stalls) on the return journey.
The three friends travelling together and I discuss their trip to Palawan so far,
particularly their island-hopping tour of the previous day. We look through the
photographs from the excursion on one of the women’s small digital camera.
Few of the photographs show landscape shots; the majority of images are of the
women posing in their beachwear holding starfish (transported to the shallows on
islands for precisely such photographs). Many of the photos foreground staged
iconic beach holiday items: an empty San Miguel beer bottle or a white conch
shell. Such objects are often carried on tours by staff who include them as props
when they take similarly composed photographs for their guests. The direct drive
to Sabang takes less than 2 hours, but today our journey is lengthened by making
short stops along the way. These include visiting one of the “view-decks” that