It was mid-year last year when I was itching to travel again. If you can remember from my old posts, my back pain recurred bringing the nastiest physical pain I had to endure last year. In the same year, provinces in the Philippines slowly opened up to tourists with lesser restrictions.
I hated the circumstances I’m in. Just when the thing I loved the most was doable, my health prevented me from doing just that. From March until May 2022, my spine injury worsened day after day but I thought my willpower is stronger than my physical body. So I convinced myself and my friends to book a flight to Tacloban in Leyte.
We aren’t doing long backpacking, just five (5) days so I had to strategically pick the best destination in the area. In the entire Visayas, there’s one Province left on my list that I haven’t explored either for personal travel or official business and that’s Eastern Samar.
That’s how I narrowed down our itinerary for this trip. After doing intensive research on Eastern Samar’s best destinations, we decided on the itinerary below:
Day 1 – Travel from Cebu to Guiuan, Eastern Samar
Day 2 – Travel to Homonhon Island from Guiuan town proper
Day 3 – Explore Homonhon Island/ Back to Guiuan
Day 4 – Road trip in Eastern Samar + Surfing in Calicoan
Day 5 – Flight back to Cebu
How to get to Guiuan?
There are various ways to get to Eastern Samar from Cebu but the shortest route would be taking a 30-45 minute flight from Cebu to Tacloban City then a van ride from Tacloban City to Guiuan, Eastern Samar that will take at least 2.5 hours.
There are various vans that ply Eastern Samar but we took the Duptours. You have to give an allowance because the trips to Guiuan are limited/irregular. In a day there are more or less 3 trips (Duptours only).
The search
We left Tacloban City at 1 PM and arrived in Guiuan at 3:30 PM. It’s July and that means off-season so I was confident that we’ll find a hotel to spend the night. Turned out I was wrong and every single hotel/inn we checked is fully booked.
After a couple of minutes, we finally got a room with only a queen-size bed at Soledad’s Inn. The room’s small that we can no longer add another bed/foam. We’re in no position to complain so we got the room and settled. Anyway, we’re leaving early the following day.
We had a couple of hours to roam around Guiuan's town proper; we were told by our tour operator in Homonhon Island that there are no market or convenience stores on the island so we bought snacks, water, and other needs at Guiuan that night. We spent the rest of the night walking around Guiuan’s town proper until we reached the terminal and the port. We stayed there for a bit and talked about a few things before heading back to the inn.
That's all for today. In my next blog be ready for the surprises that this underrated Province has in store for all of you!