Higatangan is not on the map

Next to music, I love geography the most. I could spend an inordinately long time just going over a map. There was a time in grade school, and before the ravages of time diminished memory, when I could name every capital in the world, and every state capital in the US.

To my great pleasure and redemption, one of my daughters has acquired that distinction. It is now her that I consult when memory fails, or when I feel mischievous enough to test her sharpness. The rest of the family cannot tell east from west standing on the seashore.  

But unlike music, which is readily available, I have resigned myself to the fact that I will never get to see all the places I would have wanted to visit. So I just content myself with travel books and TV programs. And yes, maps.

I thus find it terribly agitating when a map that I acquire for a specific purpose does not show what I have come to look for. For example, the Leyte-Samar map that is widely available in most bookstores does not show a beautiful island I have been to very recently.

My sister-in-law Alma Calandria Grantham, who lives in New York, recently paid for a group of American volunteer doctors, who conducted a medical mission in her hometown of Carigara in Leyte, to visit and stay at the Higatangan Island Resort on Higatangan Island, Biliran.

The island is much closer to Leyte than it is to Biliran province, but geopolitics have a way of rearranging boundaries, in ways that may seem surprising, such as the way that Camotes is much nearer to Leyte than Cebu, to which it belongs. But let us not get into that.

Anyway, Alma also paid for the entire family. But my two elder daughters could not make it from their jobs, and her octogenarian parents did not relish a long boat ride. So it was just me, Arlene, and the kid joining the American doctors, and Ayen Fama, who coordinated the mission.

I specifically bought the Leyte-Samar map because I wanted to plot our journey by land from Carigara, which sits at the base of Carigara Bay, all the way to Naval, the capital of Biliran, and from there by outrigger boat to Higatangan.

But the map inexplicably did not show Higatangan, despite its growing importance and renown as a fine destination for tourists wanting a fine combination of diving-snorkeling, rock cliff exploring, beach combing, or simply checking out the rich marine biodiversity at low tide.

Higatangan is also noted for one other thing. It is said to be the place where Ferdinand Marcos — remember him? — cooled his heels from the Japanese during World War II when things were getting too hot for comfort in Luzon. Tales about him can be retold by the old folk there.

Anyway, missing the island on the Leyte-Samar map is too minor a disappointment to distract me from the real pleasure of having visited the beautiful and out-of-the way place, which is just a 45-minute boat ride from Naval.

From where the resort is situated, one could not see the sunset, and thus I could not compare it to the one in Carigara Bay, which, as I have often insisted in the past, is one of the most beautiful I have seen.

But the balmy nights on Higatangan, from where one can see all the way to Biliran, the lights of Naval and what I presume to be Almeria flickering in the distance, and nothing but the waves crashing on the shore to disturb one’s thoughts, can be heady and intoxicating.

And mornings are truly a killer. But you have to wake up before sunrise to be able to catch the sun slowly peeking up, first in pink then in orange, over the high peaks of Biliran, pushing away the black into pale blue.

I need maps for memories like these, more than the photos my wife posts on Facebook. With maps, the big picture stays in my head, the human dramas linger in my heart. Maps allow memories some flexibility for the what ifs of life. Photos, to me, are too rigid and defined.