Siargao is a teardrop island off the northeastern tip of Mindanao, in Surigao del Norte in the Philippines, under coconut plantations from coast to coast, with the largest mangrove forest in the country on its western shore and the Cloud 9 surf break on its eastern one, watched from a boardwalk over the reef. The seabed east of the island does not shelve gently but drops into the Philippine Trench, so the Pacific swell arrives at full size onto a shallow coral shelf a short paddle out from the town of General Luna, where Cloud 9 breaks as a hollow right-hander, at full power from September to November when the groundswell of distant typhoons lines up on the reef and the contest season runs, and often too small to ride from March to May, when the sea goes glassy and the outrigger boats run daily to the islets; three of them, Guyam, Daku and Naked Island, lie within a short ride of the town. Long before the first surfboard the island lived on coconuts, and the copra is still dried on the roadsides.
The west coast is the other island. The mangrove forest begins at the pier of Del Carmen, 27 kilometres of tidal channels where the water goes glassy at first light and the roots close in overhead, paddled for the herons, egrets and kingfishers and the migratory shorebirds wintering on the mudflats, and the forest is the island's storm wall, soaking up the surge before it reaches the town; a twenty-minute boat ride through the channels opens into Sugba lagoon, jade-green water walled by limestone and forest with a diving board on a platform. On the east coast at Magpupungko the sea pulls back off a rock shelf at low tide and leaves deep, clear pools that are jumped into from the ledge. Typhoon Odette flattened the island in 2021, and it was rebuilt within a year. Siargao is an island with a wave on one side and a forest on the other, and the coconuts are in between.