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We're coming in low out of the rising sun. About a mile up we'll turn on the music.

"Music?"

"Yeah. I use Wagner. Scares the hell out of the slopes."

So starts the seminal "Charlie don't surf" sequence from Apocalypse Now, adopted by The Clash as a song-title and culminating with Robert Duvall sniffing victory in the chemical aftermath of a napalm attack, while an acid-dazed Lance, "a famous surfer from the beaches south of LA", rides the waves below a fleet of helicopter gunships spraying havoc across a Vietcong village to the operatic strains of Ride of the Valkyries.

These classic scenes were shot in Baler, the capital of Aurora Province, an isolated strip of wild forested coast on the eastern side of North Luzon, about eight hours drive from Manila. It was here that Francis Ford Coppola lost his helicopters mid-shot, when they were suddenly called away to fight a real war against the rebels. The locals still remember the time when Hollywood moved into town, haemorrhaging money by flying their ice in from Manila and building entire villages which were razed to the ground in seconds.

While suffering the spectacle of a cockfight on my first day in Manila, watching the flurry of blood-soaked feathers being scattered across the sand-pit arena, as two prize beasts, armed with scimitar-sharp spurs, reduced each other to a crumpled heap of decimated plumage, I could not help thinking about Marlon Brando turning deep into Conrad's Heart of Darkness at the end of Apocalypse Now, a film which gave Martin Sheen a heart-attack, left Coppola re-mortgaging his home in Hollywood and Dennis Hopper tearing around on an acid-crazed drugs bender. Reading Alex Garland's The Tesseract, or Timothy Mo's Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard, is more than enough to evoke visions of some primeval darkside in the Philippines, some sort of twisted deviance lurking in the jungle interior of several thousands islands, bordered by palm-fringed white sand beaches.

Someone once said that the Philippines spent four hundred years in a convent and fifty years in a brothel. The opening chapter of Timothy Mo's book is a graphic indication of how depraved the more extreme end of a prolific sex industry can become, while the endemic use of shabu, a particularly vicious form of speed, keeps Manila pumping through the night like no other city in Asia. A sense of this brooding pagan darkness seemed to linger in the ritualised air of the cockfight. Spectators made frantic bets, using a sort of intricate sign language reminiscent of traders in the stock exchange, while two majestic looking birds tried to lacerate each other to death. The all-male audience exhibited the sort of Latino machismo associated with bull-fighting, an almost sullen, shifty disinterest which, when combined with ubiquitous signs banning firearms from public buildings, creates an unsettling atmosphere. However, from speaking to ex-patriates in Manila, this fear is largely unfounded. Most of them feel more vulnerable when walking through Notting Hill.

As I settled in for the bum-numbing, ball-breaking bus ride to Baler, climbing through the spectacular Sierra Madre mountains, it was easy to picture Colonel Kurtz cut loose in the surrounding jungle, slipping into the horror of his moral decline in a habitat where traditional head-hunting was practised by indigenous tribes until the 1960's. However, these visions faded as we wound our way further into vast swathes of impenetrable green forest, much of which survived the mass deforestation of the Marcos years, before passing through Aurora Memorial Park, a vast ecological sanctuary of clear crystal streams, waterfalls and one of the few remaining habitats for the endangered Philippine eagle, then dropping into a fertile basin of iridescent paddy fields, bordered by fragrant frangipani and the drooping tendrils of flowering red hibiscus.

Like Kuta, Legian and other South-East Asian beaches, Baler was first discovered by enterprising Aussie surfers back in the seventies. Unlike the former, Baler has remained untainted by tourism, attracting small numbers of surfers to Sabang beach, now synonymous with the sport in the Philippines. Situated in a wide sweeping bay with a black sand beach, Baler is a sleepy little town where traditional wooden verandahs mingle with modern concrete houses. None of the buildings stretch to three storeys and every clock and watch in town gives wildly conflicting estimates of the time - an indication of how casually the pace of life slips by.

Historically, the area around Baler has been of strategic importance since the Spanish conquest of the sixteenth century. The last Spanish garrison of four officers and fifty men were held under siege in Baler church for eleven months in 1899, before surrendering to American troops. Quite what they were eating during that time remains a mystery. Local rumours maintain that caves along the coast are still stuffed with gold left by retreating Japanese soldiers at the end of World War II. Aurora is now under the jurisdiction of the hugely popular Governor Eddie Ong, whose name is emblazoned across children's T-shirts like a local pop star.

Although the choice of accommodation in Baler is limited and basic, the rooms are clean and very cheap. The local night-life revolves around two beach bars, the Maharajah and the Coco-Hut, both of which boast pumping sound systems and surprisingly hot live bands from Manila. For those in search of true seclusion, a walk round the southern end of the bay, past gushing mountain streams and thick green jungle, brings you to Dela Torre, a collection of wooden huts covered in palm frond thatch beside a swimming pool surrounded by cashew trees. This peaceful spot overlooks a small island of volcanic black rock, which provides excellent snorkelling and scuba.

Food in the Philippines can come as a surprise. Tripe and other intestinal scraps are widespread, reminding me of padang, a traditional Indonesian cuisine which features stomach-churning delights like boiled lung. Similar to padang, many dishes are eaten cold and seem to swim in a film of saturated fat. When confronted with cold greasy fried eggs at breakfast, draped over mounds of sticky wet rice and pieces of fish stuffed with minced pork, it can be hard to work up an appetite. However, Baler boasts a lively fishing industry and local lobster, crab and squid are all available upon request, along with milk-fish, snapper and lapu-lapu. The bizarrely named R & F restaurant serves excellent siomai, pork dumplings, and mami, a noodle soup with chicken and egg, while restaurants offering khayam serve some of the more palatable elements of the local fare on a traditional banana leaf.

Travelling to the north of the province is best done by boat and for those in pursuit of perfect white sand, untouched coral and uninhabited beaches, the area around Casiguran should prove immensely rewarding. At the end of Ampere beach, near Dipacalao, is the Okotan Cave, traditionally used for weather-forecasting. The degree of explosive sound, caused by waves breaking in from the Pacific, is used by fishermen to gauge the incoming weather and warn about the danger of typhoons. Extreme weather conditions are quite common during the monsoon; the whole of Baler was destroyed by a tidal wave in 1735 and three fishermen were frazzled by lightning the night that I arrived.

The mountains above Dipacalao are home to the indigenous tribes of the area; the head-hunting Ilongot and sea-faring Dumagat. For those with a genuine anthropological interest, the Ilongot, like other indigenous tribes on the islands, will give you a warm welcome. However, those in search of exotic photographs of semi-naked natives are actively discouraged from making the trek. Napoleon Calderon, the officer in charge of the Commission for Indigenous Peoples in Baler, will consider requests.

The new road over the mountains, from Cabanatuan to Baler, will be finished in a couple of years. Despite local resistance to the sort of indiscriminate development seen in places like Boracay, this new line of communication will inevitably bring many changes. In the interim, Aurora offers the thrills of a province untouched by the ravages of mass tourism; a non-polluted coastline, well-preserved natural habitats and charmingly uncorrupted people. For those prepared to trade the pampered comfort of luxury hotels for true isolation, craving the purity of a natural environment, as thousands converge on Kuta and Goa , then Baler may be just the place - the sun's out, the rains have passed, the San Miguel is cold and the surf's up.

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