ENTRANCE to the Sohoton National Park in Basey

“THE hour of your redemption is here,” brags the American general, Douglas McArthur, at the Liberation Monument in the town of Palo, Leyte. Stressed-out, city-weary but buoyed by those words, we set out on quick one-week sampling of the charms of the “twin” islands of Leyte and Samar during the last Holy Week.

Most visitors to the region arrive via Tacloban City, the regional center of commerce. From Tacloban, the easiest way to cross to Samar is through the San Juanico Bridge, controversial, scenic and, as we soon found out, fabled. In the van from Tacloban’s new Abucan station to Samar, a fellow passenger recounted how a former first lady started to grow scales on her legs during the bridge’s construction when workmen accidentally destroyed the abode of a mermaid. The scales disappeared only when animal sacrifices were made to appease the slighted sea denizen.

Nature’s playground

THE island of Samar, the third-biggest in the Philippine archipelago, is described in 19th-century accounts as being thickly forested, with just a few towns strung along its coast. Happily, we discovered that to this day, Samar’s core remains largely green and most of the old towns still boast vestiges of their colonial past.

Borongan, the capital of Eastern Samar province (one of three that have since divided the island), is no exception. One enters and leaves the town by crossing wide, green rivers and driving past rice fields and verdant coconut groves. The sea is omnipresent, peeking tantalizingly through the rows of slender coconut trunks every so often.

Off Borongan is the island of Divinubo, with an American-era lighthouse and a new (“only a year old,” they proclaimed) marine sanctuary, situated off a beautiful cove of white sand and crushed coral. There are basic huts on the beach but overnight accommodation is available in the barangay captain’s residence a few minutes’ walk inland for about P800 a night. The island is a short 15-minute banca ride from Borongan and, according to our boatman, one may walk—wade, actually—from the mainland at low tide.

Samar hosts some remarkable, historic towns on its southern edge. Balangiga, we missed because we fell asleep in the van. We, however, made up for this with visits to Basey and Guiuan.  Basey, unpretentious and unprepossessing, is replete with attractions, from its hilltop coral-stone colonial-era church to its mat-weaving. It is also home to the Sohoton National Park, a gem of nature reserve, reached via a leisurely ride up the Golden River.

The banca ride provides half the fun and education to be derived from the entire excursion to the park. From the Basey poblacion, one may rent a motorcycle to barangay Guirang, where one clambers onto a boat for the trip upstream to the park entrance. Along the banks of the river, life—that one imagines remains little changed since the pre-Spanish days—persists. Fishing, bathing, playing and transporting produce—all proceed at a carefree, languid pace.

Guiuan, another jewel of a town, boasts kilometers of deserted beaches, resplendent seascapes and one of the most well-preserved fortress-churches in the Visayas. Guiuan also hosts a Pag-asa station and a forgotten runway built by the US Navy in World War II. Perched on a hill, the Pag-asa station is nearing obsolescence but affords great views of the Pacific and the surrounding islands. The runway, on the other hand, has found adaptive reuse as a drying bed for corn and other grains. 

On its western side, Samar Island is an adventurer’s playground, with its caves and underground rivers. We visited two caves off Jiabong town and discovered, to our dismay, that caving was not a walk in the park. Our guides were competent and equipped with caving gear but we were not quite prepared to rappel inside the caves and trudge trough water-logged caverns in our slippers.

The best part of the whole experience was swimming through a stretch of underground river to the exit and finally coming out into the sunlight, straight to a freshwater pool where we washed off the sticky mud from the earth’s bowels. Pardon the cliché, but as our guide described it, the caves of Samar are “world-class”—proof of which are the regular visits made to Samar by French and European spelunkers who have documented the extensive cave systems in the area.

Cebuano-speaking Leyte

WHILE Tacloban sits on the Waray side of Leyte, as one journeys westward to the side of the island facing the Camotes Sea, speech inflections start to change. Cebuano is the main language along this scenic stretch of coast featuring a string of sleepy towns that grew around coral-stone churches.

One of these towns, Baybay, is starting to wake up from its slumber. Baybay now boasts of a spanking new Jollibee, a colorful concrete structure competing for the community’s allegiance against the solid coral-stone church a stone’s throw away. Quiet Baybay is also host to the leafy main campus of the Leyte State University, evoking comparisons to that other quaint Visayan university town of Dumaguete.

Further inland from the university campus rises Mount Pangasugan, all 1,150 meters of it, covered in virgin rain forest populated with tarsiers and flying lemurs. In a bid to boost the town’s tourism profile, Baybay’s tourist office is in the midst of establishing a tarsier sanctuary within the state university’s campus.

From the town of Inopacan, south of Baybay, one can take a “pumpboat” across to the Cuatro Islas, perhaps the serendipitous discovery of this trip. The four islands—Apid, Digyo, Mahaba and Himokilan, the largest—do not show up in conventional maps and were only a whispered tip from our caving guide. Indeed, the islands are as beautiful as any this vast archipelago can whip up, boasting immaculate white-sand beaches and marine sanctuaries. One island, Digyo, is a nesting site for marine turtles, while the offshore reefs are said to contain close to 300 species of corals.

The theme of renewal and redemption was to echo throughout our sojourn through Leyte and Samar, with nature providing a lush backdrop to the rituals of Lent. Through long stretches of scenic coastlines, clean rivers, historic towns and Spanish-period churches, these twin islands offer a fascinating trail peppered with potent doses of history and nature that stressed-out city souls are well-advised to follow.

Redemption and Renewal on the Twin Islands

“THE hour of your redemption is here,” brags the American general, Douglas McArthur, at the Liberation Monument in the town of Palo, Leyte. Stressed-out, city-weary but buoyed by those words, we set out on quick one-week sampling of the charms of the “twin” islands of Leyte and Samar during the last Holy Week.

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