Samar Island
— — the green the storms keep coming back for.
Not only on a wall.
“The third-largest island of the Philippines, facing the open Pacific across the Philippine Trench. Limestone karst, river caves, rainforest still thick in the interior. San Juanico Strait separates it from Leyte, crossed by a two-kilometre bridge built in the 1970s. The weather comes in hard, more than twenty named storms in some years, then the rivers run green again. Sohoton's natural arch, near Basey, was probably the first picture most people saw of the island.
Samar Island, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Samar is the third-largest island in the Philippines after Luzon and Mindanao, covering about thirteen thousand four hundred square kilometres. It sits in the eastern Visayas, divided administratively into three provinces: Northern Samar, Samar, and Eastern Samar. The Pacific coast faces the Philippine Trench; the interior is karst limestone, dense forest, and rivers cutting through cave systems including Langun-Gobingob at Calbiga, one of the largest cave networks in Asia. The San Juanico Bridge, two point one kilometres long, links Samar to Leyte across the narrow strait.
The Sohoton Natural Bridge, an arch of limestone over the Sohoton River near Basey, has been the postcard image of Samar since the 1930s. Reached by motorised banca up the Cadacan and then the Sohoton, the route runs through caves with stalactite chambers the locals call Panhulugan. Further inland, the Ulot River drops through a series of rapids and falls used now for guided rafting from Paranas. The east coast holds the longer surf beaches; Calicoan Island, off Guiuan, takes Pacific swell unfiltered.
Samar takes the Pacific weather first. The island lies inside the main typhoon track, averaging fifteen to twenty named storms a year crossing its waters, and the strongest ones land on Eastern Samar. Super Typhoon Haiyan made first landfall at Guiuan on the eighth of November, 2013, with sustained winds near three hundred and fifteen kilometres per hour, the strongest storm ever recorded at landfall. Between storms the air is clean and heavy, and the forest interior holds it the way only old growth does.