Palawan
— — limestone the colour of bone, water the colour of glass.
Not only on a wall.
“Palawan is a long ribbon of an island, almost five hundred kilometres of it, running southwest from the Philippine mainland toward Borneo. The northern end is the one most people picture: Bacuit Bay at El Nido, where karst towers rise straight out of pale shallow water. Further south, the Puerto Princesa Underground River runs eight kilometres beneath the limestone. The road thins as you go. Boats outnumber buses. Late afternoon, the bay turns the colour of weak tea, and the cliffs read almost black against it. from the studio
Palawan, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Palawan is the largest province in the Philippines by area, an archipelago of more than 1,700 islands strung out for roughly 450 kilometres between the South China Sea and the Sulu Sea. The capital, Puerto Princesa, sits midway down the main island; El Nido and Coron lie at the northern end. The Puerto Princesa Subterranean River, inscribed by UNESCO in 1999, threads beneath a karst mountain for about 8.2 kilometres before meeting the sea. Travel is mostly by banca, the outrigger boat that gives every harbour its silhouette.
The colour at Bacuit Bay comes from shallow carbonate sand and very clear water over a limestone shelf. Visibility regularly runs past twenty metres on a calm day. At Coron, ninety kilometres north, the wrecks of a dozen Japanese supply ships sunk in September 1944 lie in 10 to 40 metres of water and have become some of the most dived sites in Southeast Asia. Tides through the lagoons at El Nido are gentle, and the kayaks that thread the gaps between Miniloc and Matinloc move almost silently.
Palawan has two seasons, dry and wet, set by the monsoon. The dry stretch from late November through May is the standard window for boat travel out of El Nido and Coron, with the calmest seas typically in March and April. The southwest monsoon arrives in June and runs into October, with afternoon squalls and the occasional typhoon track grazing the northern islands. Sea temperatures stay near 28 to 30 degrees Celsius year-round, so the visit is shaped by wind and rain, not cold.