Domestic “Eco” 93comfortable and entertained. Private tours are highly structured navigations through
time and space that capture or direct much of tourist revenue as well as attention
(through transport to specific sites, arrangement of meals, suggestions of where and
when to purchase souvenirs, and even showing visitors how to capture themselves
with certain backdrops or animals to reproduce commonly composed photographic
images). So, while extensive economic activities center around Sabang, the “local”
experience of travelling to the Underground River is largely facilitated for domestic
tourists by external enterprises and their agents, few of whom are residents.
Guides also position the acts of ecotourism in which they and visitors
are participating within everyday political discourses about central Palawan
environments and economy. Ramon, for example, suggests in his speech about
the need of international tourists to support ecotourism as an alternative to
resource extraction that only 25 per cent of tourists to the Underground River
were domestic tourists, when actually in recent years domestic tourists have
comprised approximately 85 per cent of the total visitor numbers (see Table 6.1).
Of course, Filipino tourists are in no way passive recipients of these meanings.
Domestic tourists actively shape encounters of tourism and are co-participants in
the related social reproductions of valuing nature and nation. In my interviews and
conversations with domestic tourists on Palawan during the N7WN campaign,
well-versed and knowledgeable citizens thoughtfully articulated the national
significance and exceptional “nature” of the Underground River and made these
meaningful to their own lives and experiences. The ambiance and activities
described in the “day-tripping” account speak to the way these productions are
embedded within important Filipino socialities—and how aspirations for the
future are often discussed through shared, critical and, at times, self-deprecating
humours about the nation’s present and past.
Essentially, it is these important Filipino socialities and values that shape day-
trips to a wondrous nature. My day-tripping account is filled with the small, everyday
extensions of hospitality through which Filipino guides and guests work to produce
such social interactions (telling jokes, eating together, engaging a lone traveller in
conversation). Guides must be apt at monitoring and caring for their guests, and
many of the more recent ways of traversing space relate to notions of comfort, which
include avoiding the need for guests to walk extensive distances, providing snacks
and meals, and directing the activities of guests. Despite articulated aspirations for
international tourists, these features of tours largely cater to certain Filipino (often
middle-class) tastes. The emerging experience of day-tripping to the Underground
River is increasingly less appealing to many of the foreign “eco”-tourists identified
elsewhere in this chapter (see descriptions by Fletcher and the government official).
Transforming a wondrous nature
The revenue flows, aspirations, and consumption practices I have outlined have
not only shaped how domestic tourists visit the Underground River, the Park
and Sabang—They have also resulted in transformations of these spaces. As the
Underground River itself has travelled through images and more visitors than