The Philippines – The Plan
In less than 5 days we will be leaving home again for our next project, and the first project from 2014. After a brief stop in Tokyo, Japan to visit a good friend, we’ll take a short flight across the North East Pacific to The Philippines, and the start of the adventure.
This trip is about taking a chance, about chasing a dream based on a few photos and crossing your fingers. We have no idea what we will find, we have no idea if our goals are realistic, but we know we will have an amazing time finding out. After all, the summit is only a stopping point; it’s the journey that is the adventure!
This trip is also about shining a light on the Philippines, and shouting to the world that even after the recent catastrophe, the Philippines are still there, you can still visit, have fun, and share your world with the Filipino community.
In a country with almost 1 million inhabitants, Filipino climbers are few and far between. When we first began to think about a trip here in the middle of 2013, we reached out through our friends around the world searching for information, and were lucky to fall on to Ina, a local Filipino climber who helped us enormously with logistics, planning and information.
Ina explained to us that in the whole of the Philippines there are less than 100 climbers – they are literally 1 in a million! However whilst tiny, the climbing scene is active and incredibly motivated, so when we sent out an open invitation for climbers to come to join us, we soon had plenty of response.
Above images from the blog of Tommy Schultz
Word spread through the international Internet grape vine, and things started to fall into place. We got in contact with Lee from LJLExpeditions who has been incredibly helpful with information about the Sea Kayak logistics, as well as general information on travelling in that area. As with all things in Asia, planning in advance is often much less effective than just talking with the people once you get there, but having said that, our plans are developing nicely, and we now have a (very) rough idea of how the trip will look.
We land in Manila on the 15th of February and will give a small slide show on our recent adventures, that evening in the local The North Face store. The following morning we will fly over to Palawan, landing around midday and traveling the rest f the day, over-land to El Nido. Between the 17th and the 27th we will base ourselves in and around El Nido, exploring the islands and cliffs of Bacuit Bay, traveling further each day as our arms, back and ass becomes more accustomed to the Kayak. The guys over at Goal Zero have helped us out with 2 solar charging kits, so we should be able to run our cameras and computers from right there in the field, and maybe even bring you some live dispatches whilst the “action” is happening. We’ll be taking a Switch 8 kit which should be able to handle our smaller devices like Smartphones and GoPro’s, as well as a bigger Sherpa 50 run from a Nomad 20 Solar Panel, which will look after things like DSLR batteries and our Laptops.
Once we are accustomed to the life at sea, we’ll head over the notoriously choppy stretch of ocean between Palawnan and Coron Island. I wanted to attempt this journey in a Kayak, but finding someone who can arrange to rent Kayaks from A to B, instead of A to A is proving difficult, not to mention our lack of open water navigation skills. In honesty this is probably a good thing, as crossing that stretch of open ocean might be a little above our ability level! Perhaps better just to hop on board one of the little ferries.
Coron is the home of the only existing climbing I know of, and even that is barely developed. The existing climbing seems to be in Coron Bay, which should make for calm paddling conditions and easy access to the cliffs. If time and energy allow, we can make a few longer journeys around Coron Island itself, and up into the labyrinth of tiny islands that make up the Culion-Coron Archipelago. We’ll be there from the 1st until the 8th March.
Coron will also be the place for Filipino climbers to come and join us. We’d like to arrange a mini festival – perhaps festival is the wrong word, more of a get together of like-minded people. This will probably be during the last week of our stay, and we’ll keep our website and FB updated with information. In its most simple terms, it’s an open invite for climbers to come and join us and explore. There will be no music, models, or flashing lights, we don’t really know where we will be or what we will be doing – in fact – that’s kind of the whole point.
The primary aim of the trip will be to discover and develop Deep Water Soloing, but we will also bring along a lightweight set of Trad gear from Wild Country, including some interesting new prototypes that really cut down on the total weight. Like DWS, Trad climbing is such a liberating style of climbing, allowing you to go almost anywhere and leave no trace. I hope with these two styles, we will be able to go wherever we want.
We want to make a trip that takes us back to our roots – I’m not talking about paddling in tropical oceans (that only applies to Caroline), but to doing something with no expectations, just for the chance to explore.
I can’t wait!
