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ALONE IN PARADISE ???????? EL NIDO (PHILIPPINES)

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A married couple find El Nido’s limestone cliffs and lagoons completely empty of tourists.

Chris and Carol, the husband-and-wife duo behind the channel Jumping Places, landed in El Nido on Palawan island expecting the usual crush of day-trip boats and packed viewpoints. Instead, with the Philippines still working through lockdown restrictions, they found the Bacuit Archipelago’s karst cliffs, hidden lagoons and turquoise coves essentially theirs alone. Their video, “ALONE IN PARADISE 🇵🇭 EL NIDO (PHILIPPINES),” documents that rare stretch of time when one of Southeast Asia’s most photographed destinations sat quiet.

• Chris (Manchester, England) and Carol (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) quit careers in the oil and gas industry and spent two years saving before launching Jumping Places as full-time travel vloggers.
• The couple explored El Nido’s karst limestone cliffs, clear waters and coastal landscapes of the Bacuit Archipelago without the area’s typical tourist crowds.
• Chris handles the filming and editing for the channel, while the two document budget details, travel logistics and local culture together on camera.

From Oil Rigs to Island Hopping

Before Jumping Places existed, Chris and Carol were both working in oil and gas, a career they left behind after two years of deliberate saving toward a different kind of life. That background matters to how they film: their channel leans heavily on real numbers — what a boat costs, what a room costs, what a meal costs — rather than glossy montage travel content. El Nido, a town built almost entirely around tourism, became a natural setting for that approach once the usual visitor traffic disappeared.

The Bacuit Archipelago Without the Crowds

El Nido’s main draw is the Bacuit Archipelago, a cluster of limestone islands ringed by lagoons, secret beaches and coral reef just offshore. Normally the archipelago’s most famous stops — the kind featured on postcards and, notably, in the video “PALAWAN VOTED BEST ISLAND IN THE WORLD,” which explains why the region draws so many visitors in the first place — are worked over by dozens of tour boats a day. Chris and Carol’s footage instead shows still lagoons and empty cliff faces, the water glass-flat with no wake from passing bangkas.

Alone in paradise — no boats, no crowds, just the two of them and the archipelago.

Budget Travel as the Backbone of the Channel

Jumping Places doesn’t just show pretty water; it breaks down what getting there and staying there actually costs, a format consistent with other budget-minded travel content, including the earlier GoPro-shot trip captured in “PARADISE – PHILIPPINES TRAVEL – GOPRO TRIP.” That transparency around logistics and pricing is the channel’s calling card, distinguishing Chris and Carol’s approach from more polished, sponsorship-driven travel production.

The pair’s decision to keep filming through the disruption of 2020 gave them a version of El Nido that won’t exist again anytime soon once flights and ferries into Palawan return to normal volume. For a town that usually turns away boats at capacity during peak season, having the Bacuit Archipelago to themselves for even a few days was the kind of footage no amount of scheduling could normally buy.