Visiting the beautiful bridges of Leyte!

Since the Big Bike convention last April in Davao City, my bike group haven’t gone on a long ride, so I joined my brother Bing’s Star Touring group for a ride to Leyte last weekend. I expected the ride to be cancelled due to the coming of super typhoon “Pedring” which already caused rains in Cebu. But somehow, when we got into Ormoc City early Saturday dawn, only a slight drizzle greeted us on our way to Southern Leyte.

I haven’t been back to Southern Leyte in years and it was a pleasant surprise to see a spanking new bridge called the Agas-Agas Bridge that the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) built as part of the restoration effort of the Pan Philippine Highway, or Philippine-Japan Highway paid by a JBIC loan from the 5th Yen package costing P1 billion and finished on Aug. 2, 2009. This is dubbed as the “Tallest Bridge” in the Philippines with a height of 74 meters and surrounded by a virgin forest. Instantly, Southern Leyte had an infrastructure that doubles as a tourism site.

Adventurists took the advantage of putting the first tandem Zip line passing above the bridge and into the roadside several hundred meters from the bridge and indeed, there were people lining up to “fly” through the deep gorge. We use to pass this area before and it was NPA infested, but now even the NPAs keep out because there are just so many people passing through from Mindanao, coming from Sogod Bay or the town of San Ricardo which is the shortest route from Southern Leyte to Surigao.

On our return trip, we decided to pass around through the town of St. Bernard where the famous Guinsaugon tragedy occurred. This is considered as one of the worst natural disasters in Philippine history that happened last Feb. 17, 2006 when the side of a steep mountain gave way into a mud avalanche killing close to 2,000 residents in a Barangay of a little over 2,000 residents of Barangay Guinsaugon. Many of the fatalities were school children. It was a tragedy that brought world attention and even the US Navy sent three Navy ships, including the USS Harpers Ferry to help in the rescue effort. But only a handful of residents survived this disaster.

I took pictures of the mountainside of that mountain above Barangay Guinsaugon and it has once again turned green, but you can clearly see that only grass has grown five years after this disaster. We stopped at the next town of San Juan for lunch and proceeded to Tacloban City, just in time as fire was raging in the downtown area, luckily it was far from our hotel.

When in Tacloban City, I usually stay at Hotel Alejandros because this is the ancestral home of Alejandro “Alex” Montejo who did not destroy their ancestral home, but rather built a hotel around it and turned their home into the best museum of Tacloban City as it houses a World War II memorabilia that you cannot see anywhere else in the world. I’m a World War II history buff and you can say that I was in 7th heaven just looking at the black and white photos that Alex Montejo collected.

I took pictures of some of the rare photos on display. One that I never saw before is an aerial view of the City of Ormoc that showed how it was devastated by the bombings. There was a display of a pack of cigarettes with the words “I Shall Return” printed on its side. These were airdropped or given to guerrillas which boosted the morale of the Filipinos that indeed Gen. Douglas MacArthur would keep his promise to return to the Philippines.

There was a photo of two Elco class PT Boats off the Leyte Gulf. I have written it here before that I saw a photo of Gen. Douglas MacArthur arriving in Tacloban City on board a PT boat. He was believed to have said that he left the Philippines on a PT Boat, he would return to the Philippines on a PT Boat and he did so when Tacloban City was cleared of Japanese defenders. But the following day he decided to have that dramatic world famous photo alighting from a landing barge on Red Beach in Palo together with Philippine President Sergio Osmeña Sr. and Carlos P. Romulo.

Next morning we took a look at the famous San Juanico Bridge and like ordinary tourists, we stopped to take photos. Indeed the island of Leyte has something to show to foreign and domestic tourists having the most beautiful San Juanico Bridge and now the tallest bridge in the country, the Agas-Agas Bridge. And if you’re a history buff like me, you won’t make a mistake visiting Hotel Alejandro.

The following day, the Star Riding group’s junior riders invited us to a luncheon at the Philphos or PASAR plant in Isabel, Leyte where they asked me to talk about riding safety, and I gave the young riders a mouthful about staying alive on two wheels. We rode back to Ormoc City and into the swimming pool of my golf crony, Nelson Yuvallos, to wait for our boat ride back to Cebu. That was a great 500-kilometer unforgettable ride around most of the island of Leyte. Best of all, it didn’t rain on our ride.

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