While in El Nido, June 2008 … I took a motor bike ride up through Tiniguiban Mountain, 86km (big mistake) and will post more on that in the near future … never-the-less on return the next day I had to go see the town doctor for a rather severe burn to my leg … as I approached his office which happens to be his house … there were several ladies sitting around a table cleaning what I later found out to be the infamous El Nido Birds Nest (white gold) … he invited me in from some additional viewing and allowed me to take the photographs in this post …
The birds nest is “sticky” to the touch and rather dense … the ladies would sit at the table and “groom” the nest with a brush, tweezers, knife and water, throughly cleaning it of all other (non) birds nest debris, the finished product is pictured above … the high quality birds nest will fetch 200,000.00 Peso per Kilo ($4,500.00 USD) … pictured above is roughly that amount … thus the name (white gold) … the amount of “ready for export” birds nest in the doctors house was in excess of 15 to 20 Kilos … near all of it is exported back to China …
Stories abound of the guys that climb these cliffs to gather the white gold nest … one of these stories told to me by the good doctor himself; “the men that gather these nest scale these vertical cliffs (true) and to get to the nest, they must enter these very narrow crevices and then continue to traverse upwards where they will then exit through another small crevice to get at the birds nest (cannot be verified, though I saw the crevices and one would have to be extremely slim to get through them) … they would stop and eat lunch / dinner … and being the crevices were so narrow, the mere weight they would gain from eating lunch / dinner would prevent them from being able to re-enter the crevice for the traverse back down … they would need to, at times, spend the night on the cliff and come back down the next morning” …
A bit of history on the El Nido Birds Nest … Conquered by towering limestone cliffs that are homes to a number of tropical birds, El Nido is the source of one of the most delicious (jury still out on this one) soups found in Chinese restaurants “the Nido Soup”. This soup consists mainly of the bird nests that abound in the area. Edible-nest Swiftlets (Collocalia fuciphaga) abound in El Nido. The nests of these birds are found in the crevices of the limestone cliffs and are the main ingredient of the health enhancing bird’s nest or nido soup. It is these nests that gave the place its Spanish name, El Nido …
Enjoy!
