"Coastway"

“Coast way” is the name of the beach we have in Diatagon. The beach stretches more than one kilometer beside an airstrip covered with green Bermuda grass. The Airstrip was used for the logging company’s turboprop airplanes.

The beach and the airstrip were perfect combination for swimming and playing badminton or volley ball. You can view the bay (Lianga bay) and the lands on the other side of the bay tens of miles away. The cool, fresh and clean wind blows endlessly. During low tide, a large portion of rocky beach is exposed where beach-goers can go shell hunting or catch strange sea creatures like “tabugok”, “halas-halas”, kasag and tuyom that sticks their painful needle-like fingers to your feet.

When I was about 10 years old, I always anticipated weekends when my family would have picnic at “coastway”. My favorite picnic food were “Lupak”, (mashed young cardava banana mixed with coconut meat and sugar) the “Sinugba” (grilled fish) and “Biko” (sweetened sticky rice). Catching small fishes and putting them in a battle was a memorable adventure.

Every Sunday, hundreds of families would have picnic at “coastway”. They would build huts made of colorful blankets, sticks and ropes, making the beach looked like a colorful Carnibal full of children playing, teenagers flirting, mother gossiping and fathers drinking. You could see smokes in every hut courtesy of endless grills of big tuna fish and pork bellies. Countless Beer Grande and family size Coke bottles were laid in the beach waters for it to be “cooled” or so they say.

This is the story of “coastway” many years ago when the Lianga Bay Logging Company was still operating in Diatagon. Today, “coastway” remains the same minus the hundreds families that go picnic every weekend and minus the airplanes that were parked in its hangar.