Trifter

My visit to Palawan’s underground river, officially known as Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park, was probably the most exciting of all the trips I’ve ever experienced in my life. Being a contender in the third phase of the contest for the New Seven Wonders of Nature campaign was what made my trip to the site exciting. Aside from the fascinating and admirable natural scenery of Palawan’s landscape that I saw on my way to the “underground river”, I was predominantly engrossed by the kind of life there is inside the river cave.

Going in to the river for the first time was anxiously intriguing. The fact that the underground river was encased in a vast mountain with a compact forest above it, one could just normally imagine the kind of wildlife would live in such a cool and exuberant environment. However, from the complacent faces of those tourists I met along the way in the banca from the inside, I have surmised that those creepy creatures may have been trained to behave when the curious human beings would disrupt their peace in a pitch-black cave, day in and day out.

Although I have read a lot of amazing stories that described the grandeur of the interior cave, what I saw through the light of a battery operated search light was beyond illustration. I was fortunate enough to have captured in my camera some peculiar scenery underground that I weren’t able to find published anywhere on the web (or I may have just missed something), like the insects that the swiftlets (a nocturnal bird) and probably the bats  feed into;

 Or the bats hanging unto the cave wall;

A picture that resembles a dead turkey;

And the couple of swiftlets in exhibition near the river’s exit;

Inside the cave, our team saw snakes clinging in the wall cleavage, different rock formations that looked like mushrooms, or beanstalks, and other vegetable and fruit formations created by the stalactites that may have been shaped for centuries. Going further through the river, an adventurer could create a story based on the structures of the stalactites and stalagmites formed, mostly of religious nature.

Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel at the conclusion of our 45-minute trip, a cryptic question still remained in my mind: What makes the “underground river” so majestic and mysterious?