THE SONGS OF ORMOC

No, it's not the wandering whistling duck who broke the morning calm but an eerie lullaby hummed by a silhouette etched in the still waters of Ormoc Bay, a sad song about PR 2985 that almost departed on time despite changing gates in Manila to a late lunch of seafood samgyupsal in Baybay. 

The shadow, revealed as a green two-piece bikini with a dragon tattoo, enticed me to sing a lamentation of not having laundry service at the Sabin Resort Hotel and failing to visit the Flash Flood Memorial.

There was MacArthur's ballad too as we passed by the Leyte Landing Memorial National Park in Palo, a sorrowful ode to the three lonely bottles at Mimay's Seafood, Australian beer gone too soon in the bowels of Rainbow Warrior 3, and chewy kinilaw that were the stories told behind the Yellow Doors.

The blues were played all night at Hotel XYZ to herald PR 2892's collision with a bird, the closure of the airport for his royal higness BBM, an eventual cancellation and the ensuing madness of a 14-hour wait for PR 2988, then 7 more hours at Hop Inn-Morato. 

But it was the blues from Ormoc so everything was all right in Bakal 2 where the Thursday Group belted birthday songs.     

But the classics rule --- an orchestra of tires crunching dirt roads blending with the songs of birds and the sounds of inner villages as I pulled out from the last 12 days in Luang Prabang and Tacloban to segue into the next 5 days at Johor Bahru.

In 24 hours, I had a dinner of baby squids and crunchy adobo in Mandaluyong, a lunch of pork ribs-prawn noodles at the Old Airport Food Center in Singapore, a dinner of Malaysian buffet at the Lepak Corner of Johor Bahru, and seamlessly passed through four immigration checkpoints.