Birthday Trip

It was a birthday trip like no other. It was concocted two weeks before, with my friend Nadine and I celebrating our birthdays, five days apart. We were planning to go to Biliran, a small island off the coast of Leyte. So, in one of my most impromptu trips, we packed our bags and headed to Eastern Visayas. Nadine, fresh from a business trip to Bangkok and I, fresh from my not so normal birthday celebration, where I worked the whole day and enjoyed a quiet Indian-themed dinner with Shing.

The trip started in a usual Saturday 7am call time, which I managed to beat by a few minutes in the corner of Rufino and Valero. Even in the cab, I had the nagging feeling that I forgot something.

While waiting for our turn to check in, we saw a guy fighting with the airline personnel, after he missed his flight. Then we “met” Mr. Francisco Mendoza, the passenger to a Naga flight, whose name has been called numerous times.   

Our flight was uneventful ‘til Nadine banged her leg on the plane window while she takes one of her famous naps.

The original plan was to go Biliran but then we saw a brochure in the airport, to Caluwayan in Samar. Then we started thinking why not change the plan? Something, I haven’t done before, throw out the itinerary and decided to wing it. So we decided to have a coin toss to decide our destination, which allowed us to go to Marabut, an hour away from Tacloban. Going to Marabut allowed us to pass by San Juanico bridge, something which I couldn’t have seen if we went to Biliran. 

Seeing San Juanico bridge was one of the highlights for me. I wanted to stop and take a picture but we literarily zoomed by it. I told myself after seeing it that I am ready to go back to Manila.

En route to Marabut, thanks to mobile internet, we had a vague idea where we are going. We wanted to try out Marabut Extreme Resort instead of the touristy option. We figured there’d be a lot of people in the latter. But finding Marabut Extreme was tricky. We overshot the location twice because people don’t know where it is exactly.   

When we finally found Marabut Extreme, after Nadine convinced the van driver to go back after he missed our correct drop-off point, we found a ran-down resort in the middle of a quiet town. Entering the resort is quite an experience since you would be passing a long stretch of unpaved road strewn with carabao grass and huge rock formations along the road. Our “pedicab” navigated through this terrain amidst pouring rain.    

While we were discussing with the equally-surprised caretakers, rain poured and we were stuck in a ran-down resort with two caretakers who were as surprised as we are that we were staying there. After seeing the resort’s amenities or lack thereof, we decided not to stay in Extreme. The location of the place is nice, giving you a nice view of a cove and a nice beach, but I think the owner forgot the upkeep of the whole place.  By this time however, rain was pouring so we had no choice but wait it out, eat Nutella  with bread and stare at the rain. I reminded myself of this quote from G. K. Chesterton. An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

While waiting for the rain to stop, I decided to chat with the lady caretaker and found out from her that the resort is 15 years old and on its heyday, had a lot of tourists flocking it. The resort was managed by a French couple who went back to France a couple of years ago. “Ate” (I was not able to get her name) has been working there for 15 years and has managed to send her kids through school. They have very few visitors lately and I guess they are used to being “rejected”. Hearing that story, how I looked at the place, changed. The story made me sentimental and made me re-assess my mood for the day despite the rain.   

Our ride finally arrived and we requested to be brought to touristy resort instead.  Wet and tired, we quickly settled in our new room. There I received an uber-cool birthday gift, a hammock made of parachute material. After changing to dry clothes, we enjoyed a hot dinner in the resort’s open cottage.

A lot has happened and not happen on our first day in Samar. But I know we will look at this day as an inconvenience that we managed to turn into an adventure.