Meeting The Tagbanua At Camp Carabao
Meeting The Tagbanua At Camp Carabao
After a morning of cave hikes and paddle boarding in Coron while we created awesome content during The Travel Continuously Summit it was time for our crew of bloggers and vloggers to visit Camp Carabao.
This was an isolated white sand beach at the far edge of the Calamianes Islands, and Camp Carabao is the home of a local Tagbanua community. We were going to meet the real locals of Coron, the indigenous Tagbanua.
The Tagbanua Of Coron
The Tagbanua are a local group of indigenous people who have lived in Coron and Palawan for thousands of years. The communities live on remote islands and isolated beaches, but they are the descendants of some of the original human inhabitants who first settled the Philippines.
However, in today’s Coron it’s very rare to find any information on their culture or history. Coron is their ancestral domain, but even so, they are in danger of missing out on the tourism boom and the money that is starting to flood into these islands.
Red Carabao, a local tour company, took Travel Continuously out to a remote island – to Camp Carabao – to meet the local Tagbanua.
Red Carabao are trying to help the locals to get involved with tourism in a sustainable manner, so they can benefit economically, and so that visitors like us can actually find out more about these almost unknown people.
The Tagbanua showed our group of bloggers their island home, where they live by the beach, go spearfishing on the coral and travel from island to island in small canoes and on wooden rafts.
Their homes are structured to withstand typhoons and the raging storm seasons that rock Coron, and although it looks idyllic, living here can of course be a struggle, although a struggle that their ancestors have excelled at through the centuries. They gave us a demonstration of their culture, their traditions and their customs, a rare look at an ordinarily hidden people that few tourists even know live here.
It was a fascinating insight into an old culture that has somehow weathered the changes of the Philippines in these remote lands, but a culture that now has to face the challenges of modern tourism.
The Tagbanua In Pictures: The Locals Of Coron
Richard Collett
Disclaimer: SUP Central Tours and Red Carabao provided Travel Continuously with a complimentary island hopping trip, however all opinions are that of the author.
