Philippine Travel Blog – The Travelers Guide to Philippine Destinations

This week-end, we went to Puerto Princesa, Palawan to check out most of common tourist destination in the island. Among the first stops we made was at the Crocodile Farm which is being managed by the DENR in Puerto Princesa.

The farm is found near the city center of Puerto Princesa, about 20 to 30 minutes by land (usually minicabs or tricycle) down south. It is being maintained by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources as a holding facility so a lot of animals here are also released into the wild or forest after they are rescued.

This skeleton of a huge crocodile is the largest ever that was captured in the 90’s. It has a length of about 5 meters from the nose to the tip of the tail and was discovered to have eaten half a body of a human. It later died in captivity.

The farm has hundreds of baby crocodiles bred in captivity and placed in batches inside a huge tub and fed twice a week. They are then transferred into a bigger pool when they grow up to a mature size.

There are two types of crocodiles in Palawan. The first kind is the freshwater crocodile and the second is the saltwater crocodile. About 80% of the swamps and rivers in Palawan are still infested with crocodiles so people needs to be very careful before going into these areas.

There’s a short tour inside the farm with a small fee of Php25 per person when visiting the place. Visitors are also allowed to have their pictures taken with a baby crocodile (about 1 meter long) with its mouth tied up.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Palawan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.