A weekend bike trip to Leyte and Tacloban
For our special presentation on our talk show “Straight from the Sky,” our guest comes from faraway Sapporo, Japan. She’s Mrs. Michido Yoshida who created Go Fly Wheelchairs and another advocacy dubbed Numbers. She was in Cebu to bring three specialized wheelchairs for Persons with Disabilities who received them through the Avila Foundation run by my sister Mrs. Adela A. Kono. Mrs. Yoshida has helped PWDs from all over the world asking for unused wheelchairs and sending these to 2,400 recipients in 75 countries.
As a young girl, Mrs. Yoshida came to the Philippines as an exchange student and studied in Maryknoll College and she studied in Japan in Sofia University, Japan’s foremost Catholic University. This explains why she has the heart of a true Christian who embraces the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ to love one another, especially the unloved PWDs.
In my 14 years on Straight from the Sky, we rarely encounter a Japanese guest for the simple reason that few of them speak good English. Mrs. Yoshida is one of those few. So watch her on SkyCable’s channel 61 at 8:00PM with replays on Wednesday and Saturday same time and channel. Replays also on MyTV’s channel 30 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7:00AM and 9:00PM respectively.
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Over the weekend, we took a Roble Shipping M/V Joyful Stars from Cebu City to Hilongos with my friends, Dodong Villacin, Kito Unchuan, Boging Palacios, Dr. Idot Atillo, Mark Lavajo, and Don Don Villamor to attend the Fiesta of Maasin. Hmmm, it’s been a long time since I got on a big bike ride just so we can attend a fiesta, but what really lured me to ride with the group was that the main plan was to visit Tacloban City.
I was surprised to find out that the Roble Shipping M/V Joyful Stars was very clean and well-appointed. I swear, I thought I was on board a Cokaliong Ferry. I hope that Roble Shipping can keep this up. Cleanliness in our Inter-island ferryboats should be a given… after all it is the passenger’s comfort that is of utmost importance to a ship owner.
We arrived in Hilongos around 4:00AM, a very ungodly time for me. But we had to ride to Maasin City some 40 kilometers away. In Maasin, we got invited by Dodong Villacin’s friends, one who gave us a sumptuous breakfast in his humble house. Then later, we were invited by no less than Gov. Roger “Oging” Mercado in his residence, which wasn’t far from our hotel. It was the Feast of the Assumption and inside the governor’s residence was a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary that greeted us in his sala.
I also asked Gov. Oging where was his family’s roots and when he said that the original Mercado’s hailed from Carcar, I told him that we had to be related somehow because my great grandmother was Adela Mercado Avila, the daughter of a Carcar gobernadorcillo… or mayor of today.
I told Gov. Oging that Southern Leyte holds a special place in my heart because it was Gov. Oscar Tan who gave me my first recognition as a journalist. Back in the early 80’s during one of the Sinulog Festival’s trips to the Island of Limasawa, I wrote about the First Mass done during the time of Ferdinand Magellan’s Armada de Moluccas and Pigafetta named this place Mazawa. But a priest from Butuan claimed that the first mass was done in Masao because they found Spanish artifacts there. Of course even if you have such artifacts, it cannot be proven that the first mass was done there. So I was invited to attend recognition day in Sogod, Leyte for my first ever plaque of recognition as a journalist.
From Maasin, we rode to the now famous Agas-Agas Bridge 88 kilometers away, passing by Malitbog, Tomas Oppus, Bontoc, and Sogod but it began to drizzle, so we didn’t have time to take the Zipline in Agas-Agas. From there it was a short ride to Mahaplag to cross to Baybay, Leyte. Mahaplag is the road to cross to Tacloban but this road is now in a poor state of disrepair. Then we rode to Ormoc City.
The next day we rode to Tacloban City. Come to think of it…it’s more than 10-months since super typhoon “Yolanda” (international code name Haiyan) and I’ve always made attempts to go to Tacloban, but our schedules just couldn’t afford the time. Our first stop was Palo Cathedral and we saw that portion where families were buried in the church’s gardens. I was looking for my good friend, Msgr. John Du Bishop of Palo but he was in Gonzagahus, the Archbishop’s residence.
Yes everything is being hastily prepared for the visit of Pope Francis on January next year. But riding on a motorcycle and not on an aircon car makes a huge difference, as you could still smell the stench of death in some places in Tacloban. But Tacloban has begun to recover. However, much work needs to be done and I’d say that in a couple of years, it would be back to normal. That’s if they don’t get hit by another super typhoon.
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