On the Path of Typhoon Yolanda: Leyte and Samar, Imelda Marcos's Islands

When people heard I was flying to the Philippines, most assumed I meant Cebu. It is the country's tourist capital, the archipelago's front door, the place with the direct flights and the dive resorts and the iconic lechon (crispy whole roasted pig ) stalls that make it onto every itinerary. I did not go to Cebu. After three cancelled connections out of Manila, I landed instead in Tacloban, the capital of Leyte, to co-host an international conference on small island cultures.

Leyte and Samar sit at the eastern edge of the Visayas, facing directly onto the Philippine Sea and, beyond it, the open Pacific. The region sits squarely in the path of the tropical cyclones that form over the warm western Pacific and travel west, and Leyte and Samar, jutting out to meet them, are often the first solid ground those storms find. Samar is the third largest island in the country. Leyte lies just to its west, separated by the narrow San Juanico Strait, now spanned by a bridge that locals will tell you, with pride, is the longest in the Philippines.

Together the two islands, along with Biliran and the waters around them, form the region known as Eastern Visayas, home to more than four million people, most of whom identify, in language and feeling, as Waray. Waray-Waray is the region's mother tongue, though Cebuano threads through the western towns of Leyte, and English and Filipino carry the business of school and government.

The islands were, in a sense, where the Philippines began, at least in the version of history that outsiders wrote down. In March 1521, Ferdinand Magellan's battered fleet, having crossed most of the Pacific, put in first at Homonhon, a small island off the southern tip of Samar, to rest a crew wasted by scurvy and take on water. From there Magellan sailed on to Limasawa, off southern Leyte, where he and the local ruler Rajah Kolambu sealed a blood compact, and where, tradition holds, the first Catholic mass on Philippine soil was said days later, an important fact in a country where Catholicism has a strong presence. I saw several imposing statues of Magellan on the islands, and found it strangely disorienting, monuments that read, however you look at them, as a celebration of colonisation.

The country's own name has its roots in this stretch of coastline. When a later Spanish expedition under Ruy López de Villalobos arrived, they called the land between Leyte and Samar Las Islas Felipinas, in honour of the Spanish crown prince who would become Philip II. Only afterwards did the name spread to cover the whole archipelago. The Spanish who eventually settled here gave the local people another name too, Pintados, the painted ones, for the elaborate tattoos that covered their bodies, a practice the missionaries worked hard to erase and that the region's festival culture has, centuries later, revived.

A colleague from Samar island talk to us proudly about the history of resistance. Waray communities rose against Spanish rule more than once, in the Bangkaw revolt of the 1620s and the Sumoroy uprising of 1649. When Spain gave way to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, resistance did not stop. In 1901, in the town of Balangiga on Samar, Filipino fighters armed mostly with bolo knives overran an American garrison, one of the most decisive local victories of the entire Philippine-American War.

Then came the Second World War, and Leyte found itself again at the centre of the story, when General Douglas MacArthur waded ashore at Palo in October 1944 to begin the liberation of the Philippines from Japanese occupation. At the Red Beach, I stood before the seven bronze figures marking that moment by a large scale memorial that every visiting delegation is, sooner or later, taken to see. The park built around those statues carried another name before its current one. For years it was called Imelda Park, after the Tacloban-born first lady whose family made this province its political base.

Then, on the 8th of November 2013, Typhoon Haiyan made landfall, first at Guiuan on the tip of Samar and then, within hours, at Tacloban, where it is remembered, and named, as Yolanda. It remains among the most powerful tropical cyclones ever recorded to make landfall anywhere, and the storm surge that followed, several metres of seawater forced into the funnel-shaped bay on which Tacloban sits, did most of the killing.

Officially more than six thousand people died, the great majority of them here in Eastern Visayas. Unofficial records speak of over 20 thousand dead and missing. Whole neighbourhoods were levelled within the hour, and in places rebuilding is still under way. I heard officials warned people of storm surges which did not carry the same level of warming with tsunami, and so it was not taken as seriously with disastrous repercussions. Disaster communication at its worst!

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More than a decade on, the damage is still visible in Tacloban's downtown, in facades that were never fully repaired, and almost everyone I met had a story from that morning. We were taken to see a rusted hull that has become its own kind of monument. The M/V Eva Jocelyn, a cargo ship anchored in Tacloban's harbour, was thrown ashore at Barangay Anibong by Yolanda's storm surge and people in its path did not survive. It sits there still, a shipwreck turned shrine.

In Palo, we visited the Metropolitan Cathedral, a fortress church the Jesuits raised in 1596, itself badly damaged by Yolanda and since restored. Photos shows only its Altar surviving the typhoon. The adjacent cemetery with the dozen small Angel statuses is a poignant place, a mass grave of 2 thousand unidentified bodies.

In Tacloban city we stopped at the Old Leyte Provincial Capitol, a neoclassical building from 1907 that briefly became the seat of the entire Philippine Commonwealth government in October 1944, when President Sergio Osmeña governed from Tacloban while Manila was still under Japanese occupation. Its walls carry grand murals of the first mass at Limasawa and of MacArthur's landing. It now lies eerily empty, damaged beyond repair by the typhoon.

In the island of Samar outside the town of Basey, we visited the Saob Cave, a low limestone cavern, where for generations women have gathered to weave banig, mats made from tikog, a swamp reed that stays soft and pliable in the cave's cool, shaded air. Watching them work, hands moving over grass split thinner than ribbon, the patterns and vivid colours, I understood why Basey calls itself the banig capital of the country.

One of the highlights of the visit on Samar island was the Mabaysay Cultural River Cruise up the river people here call the Golden River (its waters turned a warm amber decades ago by upstream logging). Along the way  we stopped at river communities where we were welcomed with the kuracha, a traditional dance shared across Samar and Leyte, watched men demonstrate the tapping and preparation of tuba, the local coconut wine with a distinctive taste, and further upriver were met by members of the Mamanwa community, one of the country's oldest indigenous groups, who performed one of their dances for us.

Food threaded through the whole trip, and Waray cuisine has its own word for the pleasure it is meant to produce karasa. Literally meaning "delicious" or "tasty," the word also evokes the deep contentment that follows a good meal, the feeling that, for a while at least, life's problems have faded into the background. Binagol, sweetened taro and coconut steamed inside its own coconut shell and sold along roadsides wrapped in banana leaf. Moron, glutinous rice rolled with chocolate into two-toned lengths, a Leyte speciality you unwrap. Fresh kinilaw, fish cured in vinegar with ginger, onions, and chilies, sharp and clean against the heat of the day.

No visit to Tacloban is complete without passing by the former residence of the Marcos family, now known as the Santo Niño Shrine and Heritage Museum. Built during the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos and intended as the official residence of Imelda Marcos whose family comes from Leyte, the mansion offers a striking glimpse into the extravagance of the Marcos era. Lavishly decorated with crystal chandeliers, ornate furniture, and themed guest rooms prepared for visiting dignitaries, it stands in sharp contrast to the everyday life unfolding outside its gates. Today, it serves not only as a museum but also as a reminder of the complex legacy of power, wealth, and memory that continues to shape conversations about Philippine history.

The last evening in the islands reached its peak with something I will carry for a long time. The 29th of June is Sangyaw, Tacloban's parade of lights, held on the eve of the city's fiesta in honour of the Santo Niño. Sangyaw, in Waray, means to herald or to announce, and the festival does exactly that, a procession of large illuminated floats, thunderous drumming and sparkly costumes representing months of collective craftsmanship, creating a fantastical spectacle that draws everyone in. The festival has its own history, first staged in the 1970s, quietly shelved for two decades, and revived in 2008.

What stayed with me from this trip is the way people keep going in the aftermath of such a disaster. I have been trying not to reach for the word resilience. It gets handed to small islands too easily, as if suffering were simply a stage a person passes through on the way to becoming admirable. I wanted another word, and at the parade the night before I left, watching the costumes and the dancing and the sheer unwilled joy of it, I thought maybe the word is resistance. Not the absence of suffering, but a refusal to let suffering be the only true thing about a place.

The next morning, a few hours before my flight out, I wandered down to the fish market by Tacloban's port. Someone had a radio going, and the opening bars of Bella Ciao, a song of resistance, caught my attention. I found myself dancing with a young woman by her stall right there between crates of tuna and chicken feet, while the market carried on its business around us. Someone picked up my phone, and turned it into a small souvenir of the morning. It was the perfect ending to my trip, embodying the spirit of the island's people: spontaneous, generous with visitors, and always ready to share a moment of joy.

Leyte and Samar are not, by the usual measures, an easy destination, and that is rather the point. Between the history, the food, the rivers and the festivals, there is a great deal more here than the tourist trail from Manila to Cebu ever shows, and it rewards anyone willing to take the detour.