It was still dark when I pushed away my plate at a small eatery near the pier in Real, Quezon. We had rolled into town close to eleven the night before, and now, at five in the morning, the first boats were already slipping out of the port. They were loaded with passengers and cargo, every one of them pointed at the same speck on the map — a low, green island more than seventy kilometers out, sitting alone with its back turned to the Pacific Ocean.
That island is Jomalig. For years it was the one corner of Quezon I kept missing. I have made more trips to mainland Luzon than I can count, but Jomalig always stayed just out of reach, mostly because getting there is not easy. You need a calm day and a free morning, and on this particular day the weather finally gave me both.
A long crossing
The boats that serve Jomalig are small and built from light materials, so they only carry so much. That makes the morning queue long. If you want a seat on the first trip, the locals will tell you the same thing they told me: be at the port by four. We were lucky to squeeze onto a boat just as it filled.
For the first two hours, the sea was kind. We slid past the bigger islands of Quezon — Polillo and Patnanungan among them — which dwarf little Jomalig and even have their own roll-on, roll-off ferries. Then the water changed. The swells rolled in, the boat began to pitch, and one of my companions groaned, “Bro, I’m dizzy.” The other passengers only shrugged. This, they said, was the gentlest the waves get this time of year.
From the point where the sea turned rough, we still had more than two hours to go. All told, the crossing took us the better part of the morning — over four hours of open water. But somewhere along the way, the complaints faded. Even from far off, you could see why people make this trip. The island shimmered ahead of us, low and green and ringed with pale sand.
A welcome at the edge of the country
We pulled into a harbor where local kids were swimming in the shallows, completely at ease. One thing I noticed right away: a deep channel had been carved into the seabed leading to the dock, so boats can land at any hour without waiting for the tide to rise.
Waiting for us on the pier was Ma’am Jessica from the Jomalig Tourism Office, who would be our guide for the next two days. Near the port, I spotted something I did not expect on so
remote an island — an airstrip. It is real and in use, Ma’am Jessica told me, mostly for small private planes. Landowners who want to visit, she said, simply rent a plane out of Bulacan.
Jomalig is bigger than I imagined, far too much to see in a single day, so we set the heavy exploring aside for the morning and rode by motorcycle to Tejada’s Beach Resort, where we would sleep. The island has plenty of these little resorts. You will not see many cars in the town center, but the main roads are surprisingly wide and well paved.
Our room was simple and comfortable — a sink, some storage, a bed for two, even air conditioning. The best part was at the back. “This is what we’ll see when we wake up,” I remember saying. Just
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Amazing Island