Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (24 page)

 

 

The army weren’t able to provide the helicopter after all. It had been a long shot and given we’d had help from the police and the navy already, we thought we had done pretty well. Instead, Andi and his uncle took us to the port where we bought tickets for the ferry to Leyte.

The ferries - a couple of old container ships - were moored along the wharf. I went up to the bridge to talk to Jasper Nacita, one of the captains. A quiet, assured kind of guy, Jasper had spent ten years sailing the world on ships just like these. I took the opportunity to ask him about the next major leg in my journey - the proposed crossing from Manila to Taiwan.

‘What do you think?’ I said. ‘The only boat we can find is a thirty-metre fishing boat.’

He glanced at me, the lines of his face just a little rumpled. ‘When are you leaving Manila?’

‘In a week maybe? That’s the plan, anyway.’

Twisting his mouth at the corners he said: ‘You’ll be at the peak of the southwest monsoon.’

That didn’t sound very promising. ‘Will we?’

He nodded. ‘The current is very strong and it comes at you on the port side. You’ll feel it as soon as you leave Manila. Then it’s four or five days and you don’t know if it will create a typhoon, but if it does . . .’

‘It would be slow then,’ I said, ‘that kind of crossing?’

‘Slow and very rough. Lots of big waves.’

I swallowed. ‘How big exactly?’

‘Six metres maybe. But it’s a really long swell and with the current, the wind . . .’ He was shaking his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea at all.’

It was clear we would have to think about it. The terrible crossing I’d made from Timor to Darwin the year before was still fresh in my mind and I wasn’t keen on repeating that kind of experience.

Landing on Leyte, we found a couple of kids delivering batteries who agreed to take us to Carigara, which was halfway to Tacloban, where we planned to spend the night. Before that I spent some time in the local market - an old building with dark, narrow lanes and stalls piled high with fruit and vegetables, children’s toys, live pigs, a coconut grinder and a massive tub of minced pork that I helped knead into sausage. I even saw a couple of old boys steaming the skin off goats’ heads.

I took a moment to look at the map, reminding myself just how far we’d come in the past few days - all the way from Mindanao, travelling almost due north to the coast and across to Camiguin, then northwest to Bohol, before making our way around the coast with the navy. Now we were heading east across Leyte. I loved this place. The people were so friendly and welcoming, so interested in us and what we were doing. Our translator Justine told us that something like 42 per cent of the Filipino population are children. I don’t know if that’s partly because this is such a strongly Catholic country, but families certainly seem to have a lot of kids.

Talking of kids, an hour or so later Jon-Jon and Bernard, the two lads driving us to Carigara, showed up with their Isuzu truck. Bernard’s girlfriend was pregnant and he told me he would marry her if he could, but right now he didn’t have enough money. They let me out in Carigara, a tiny little town with narrow streets that were part cobble and part dirt. The houses were hunched up to the kerbs - tiny, single-storey places with tin roofs and darkened interiors. On one side of the main street were a couple of rundown colonial places. A few of the local kids sat watching us on the ancient steps. On the other side was an open-fronted shack with hundreds of decoratively carved knives on display. Crossing for a closer look, we met the stall-holder, a woman called Gloria, who seemed to radiate an aura of serenity. She was in her late forties, wore her hair in a single plait and was wearing a pair of John Lennon-style glasses. There was something about her; just being around her left an impression on me. I can’t describe it exactly, but it was almost spiritual. I told her she was wonderful to talk to, and the fact that she sold knives somehow seemed incongruous.

She just smiled and explained that the knives were ornaments not weapons. She and her five sons ran the business and she enjoyed the fact that they had visitors from all over the world.

‘I like to think of the world as a small place,’ she told me, ‘a positive place where everyone gets along. It’s lovely to spend some time talking to a man all the way from faraway London.’

She was wonderful. One of the special people you hope to meet on journeys like this. Someone whose presence seems to linger long after you’ve left them behind.

I spent the last leg of a very long day with a girl called Rochelle, in a vehicle her father had designed. Dr Rusty Balderian was the mayor of Tabon Tabon, a small, very poor town, where it seemed the only form of transportation was a regular motorbike. Rochelle told us that people would ride four or five up all the time. It was dangerous and there were lots of accidents, and because it was the only way of getting around, there were very few visitors to the town. The economy was suffering badly, and conscious of his responsibility to the people who had elected him, Dr Balderian decided to come up with an alternative.

His creation was the most bizarre vehicle I’ve ever driven, something between a tuk-tuk and a van, but made from woven strands of bamboo. There were bamboo benches in the back for passengers, a bamboo chair for the driver and, under the bamboo bonnet, an engine that ran on coco-bio-diesel, which is made from used cooking oil.

Rochelle and her three brothers had grown up in LA, but they came home to Leyte to try to help their father do something about the poverty in Tabon Tabon. They created opportunities by employing rice farmers (who have little to do between planting and harvest) to make these vans. Three had been completed so far. I drove this one all the way to Tacloban. The gears were the wrong way round and the brakes a little unpredictable and by the time it was dark the whole thing was becoming quite dangerous. Having said that, it was still far safer than four or five people balanced on top of a motorbike.

Rochelle was another inspiring person. She could have stayed a California girl, yet here she was on Leyte, trying her best to raise the standard of public transportation in an eco-friendly way. She seemed to exemplify the sense of purpose and ingenuity I could feel here. Thinking back, although we’d had a good time in Sulawesi, we’d also struggled a bit. It had been hard to get around, and the travelling hadn’t been as enjoyable. There were more smiles here - more laughter - and there wasn’t the sense of government interference that we’d experienced in Indonesia.

 

 

We spent the night in Tacloban, a big and noisy city that has been the capital of Leyte Province since 1830. Before that the capital had moved from one town to another, but eventually they settled on Tacloban, largely because it has such a sheltered port. Centuries before the Spanish showed up it was known as Kankabatok, in reference to the nomadic people who settled here. For years after it was a favourite spot for fishermen, who used a particular piece of gear called a taklub - they called the place Tarakluban, and eventually that became Tacloban.

The city is perched on the edge of the Leyte Gulf, which in 1944 was the setting for the largest naval battle in modern history. When the Japanese invaded the Philippines, General MacArthur made a promise to the people that he would return. He did, with the biggest modern fleet ever assembled. For three brutal days, over two hundred American ships locked horns with sixty Japanese vessels, before finally landing on the island on 26 October.

I’d been told about a local historian called Alex Montejo, who ran an elegant hotel in the middle of the city. Alex had been fifteen when the Japanese invaded. The hotel - a beautiful, colonial-style wood building with pillars either side of the entrance and a balcony above - had been Alex’s family home. A number of Japanese officers had been stationed in the house during the war, while Alex, his parents and eight brothers and sisters were confined to one room, which was now the hotel office.

‘What was it like?’ I asked him. ‘It must have been terrifying when the Japanese invaded.’

‘It was to begin with. The Japanese expected the people to bow before them and if they didn’t, they were slapped in the face.’

Alex was eighty-two yet he could remember everything in minute detail. I asked him whether the Japanese committed the kinds of atrocities you heard about in other parts of Asia.

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘The lower ranks could be a bit rough, but the officers were educated and they were courteous. One of the ones who stayed here played the piano beautifully. There were only three beheadings and two of those were thieves. The Japanese invited the whole town to come and watch and after that you could leave your door open all night and nobody would steal anything. The big problem was food. There was just no way of getting any to the island. There was nothing in the markets, so we planted vegetables in every vacant lot across the city.’

He showed me some photos from the days of the liberation in October 1944. There was one with a young Imelda Marcos on a float and I could see that even then she had a thing for smart shoes.

When MacArthur upheld his promise to return the first the local people knew about it were the massive explosions coming from the airport. They rushed out to see what was going on and, instead of Japanese planes, there were planes with American stars on the wings. For three days the locals stayed in the air-raid shelter while the Americans dropped bombs and sent up shells from the big ships. Then, at the end of the third day, 26 October, the Japanese fled and MacArthur landed at a place called Red Beach.

That moment has been captured in the most amazing memorial of the general, walking through water as if he’s just stepped out of a landing craft, surrounded by five men, two of whom are Filipino. Alex said that after the liberation, the Japanese carried out air raids at night, and unlike the Americans they targeted civilian areas. His abiding memory, though, is the food - for two years they had been half starved and suddenly here were the Americans again, with more food than any of them could remember.

I wanted to see Red Beach for myself, so outside the hotel I hunted down a tricycle, one of the motorbike and sidecar outfits that are all over the place here.

‘Is this yours?’ I asked a young guy wearing a pair of black wraparound shades, who was standing beside one.

‘Yes.’

‘Could you take me to Red Beach?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think I could drive maybe?’

‘Yes.’

A few moments later my monosyllabic companion and I were driving past the Price Mansion where MacArthur had stayed, heading out of the commercial district into the suburbs, where the houses were more like the shacks we had seen further south. The beach isn’t actually a beach any more. The shoreline has been reinforced with concrete and the memorial is a massive square with a flagpole in the middle. A series of steps climb to where MacArthur and the others appear as if they’re walking from the sea. I stood there trying to imagine how it must have been - lines of jeeps, tanks and landing craft and the water thick with every kind of US warship imaginable. It was very moving; another piece of Second World War history but very different from what we had seen on Thursday Island.

It was time to move on - northeast to Samar. I jumped in a Spider. Not the eight-legged variety but a yellow taxi with no windows. The driver took me across the longest bridge in the Philippines - the San Juanico Bridge - two kilometres of ironwork and concrete that connects the islands of Leyte and Samar. He let me out at a place called Basey - literally at the side of the road, where a path cut a passage between the palms. It was baking hot and I was sweating like a pig. Even the trees seemed to be suffering; the tops were moist and heavy, drooping wearily over the road.

The patterns meshed into Rochelle’s bamboo van in Tabon Tabon mimicked the banig, the hand-woven mat used everywhere for sleeping and sitting on. From here I was going to visit some banig-weavers - all women - who work together under a rocky overhang, almost like a cave. To get there I had to follow the path through the palm trees. After about fifty yards it broadened into a clearing. The weavers were sitting on banig mats under the overhanging rock, a dozen or so of them working individual strands of dried leaf into the most amazing mats. Squatting down, I spoke to one woman with a big smile and not so many teeth.

‘Wow,’ I said, pointing at her work. ‘That is incredible.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

I asked her what it was made from and she showed me some sea grass growing beside the path. ‘We pluck the strands one at a time,’ she explained, ‘then dry the leaves in the sun.’

‘Then they’re dyed?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And do you come here every day?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Why here? Why the caves?’

‘Because the temperature is cold, sir,’ she said.

‘And you make the mats to sell?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘How long does it take?’

‘For this family-sized one,’ she indicated a large multicoloured mat, ‘three days, sir.’ Then she gestured to another that was two-tone and patterned like tweed. ‘This one is just for you and your wife, sir,’ she told me. ‘It’s smaller, for two people, not the whole family.’

My wife. I hadn’t seen Olly for such a long time and suddenly I really missed her. The woman unrolled the mat. ‘Just for the two of you, sir,’ she repeated with a smile.

‘How long did it take to make?’ I asked her.

‘One day. Do you want to buy it for you and your wife, sir?’

‘Sure, why not. I haven’t seen her for a long time and when I get home we can lie down together and . . .’

With the mat rolled up under my arm, I managed to hitch a lift with a delivery man called Rommel, who drove a van for a company called 2GO, delivering parcels and packages all over Samar and Leyte. I helped him make his rounds and it was well after dark by the time he dropped me in a small town called Calbayog. It was only as I found somewhere to crash for the night that I realised what day it was today. Much of the morning had been devoted to General MacArthur and the American liberation of these islands. Fitting, somehow, given it was the Fourth of July.