Category: Biking’s Better in Busuanga

Biking’s better in Busuanga now Tribal Adventures has hooked up with a new biking operator in Coron called Zero. The outfit has 20 e-bikes which we tap for our Busuanga biking tours. E-bikes give our pedallers choice. The bikes also allow stragglers to keep up — a great equalizer.

Biking’s also better as Tribal Adventures continues to plough proceeds of its trips into kids and their education in the remote northeastern area of Busuanga Island. The area had no high school at all until Tribal Adventures converted the 30-km jungle trail kids used to trek to their east coast high school. The programme was called Hike + Bike = Build a School. All income from the tour went to build the first Cheey High School. It’s opening over a decade ago meant students no longer had to take the arduous two-way weekly hike across the island.

With the school now built and much of the path overgrown as the children no longer have to walk it, we’ve shortened the route but have doubled down on the objective of making education ACCESSIBLE.

We offer the following itineraries:

1. The Sugod trail to Roger’s Farm at a 2/5 rating
2. The Sugod trail to Regie’s farm at a 3/5 rating
3.  The Amaha-Sinibayan-OcamOcam trail at a 4/5 rating (the higher rating indicative of a longer and hotter ride, especially between Sinibayan and to the entrance of the Ocam-Ocam single track at Buluang).
   

   

What we do for the children? For the 2023/24 school year we donated 15 mountain bikes to those children with the longest distances to trek to school.

For the 2024/25 school year there’s a lot of maintenance to do on the donated bikes. Hence funds and expertise are going to bike repairs for the kids. We’ve also engaged an Aussie biker mate with National Parks credentials to design a trail linking Regie’s farm to Lakdayan so we no longer have to double back from Minit as we do now. It will also help kids get to a new auxillary elementary school in Lakdayan.

The Sugod trails wend their way from Minit in Cheey west through farmland, bamboo woods and jungle, crossing creeks up to 20 times.

The network of single tracks and feeder roads to Minit cover more than 20 kms.

The Amaha-Sinibayan bike trail takes you through cogon grass farmland (grass used for thatched roofing of local houses), before transitioning to a single track of tropical rainforest with its impenetrable canopy.

At Sinibayan Waterfall, your guide offers a morning snack as you take a well-deserved relaxing dip in the cool rock pools fed by the small waterfall. The dip serves a refreshing purpose: the next stretch through a sprawling cattle ranch dotted with the occasional tree is hot. But after pushing through to Buluang, you get to one very pretty ride under trees through tiny hamlets connected by a narrow single track to Ocam-Ocam Beach.

There, we find a friend who cooks a mean pasta and noodles–a rewarding late-lunch before a swim, ahead of the drive back to SandCastles (or Coron town if that’s your end-point).