To Taal and back

Like I mentioned in my previous posting, I headed to what is constantly touted here as the world's smallest volcano and the world's most active volcano, Taal (Google Earth coords 14° 0'41.52"N 120°59'52.65"E). It was also my very first trip outside of metro Manila so I was a little apprehensive not knowing what local conditions are like. To top it off, it's typhoon season here too so it's really wet. Anyway, the journey was uneventful as the bustling, traffic jammed wide highways of Manila turned into serene narrow countryside roads. All the buildings turned into vast corn fields and there were numerous roadside fruit stalls selling pineapples, bananas and of course, corn.

After two hours, we finally arrived at Tagaytay, which is a very popular holiday destination for tourists both local and abroad. Yep, tourist destination so you get harassed non-stop (argh). You can see dozens of people holding out cardboard signs touting their boat rides to the the Taal crater island. Anyway, the car continued on for another 30 minutes as we descended into the huge crater. You can feel your ears popping! The crater is huge with a big giant lake in the middle and apparenly 10 other volcanoes that exist within this one big one. It kind of reminded me of the scenery at Hoover Dam except it's a lot greener. Attempted to take some photos with my phone:

Taal is the one in the middle. No idea what the other one is called.

And so we finally arrived at the 'resort', a non-descript building with a small stone jetty attached. All the other 'resorts' in the area look the same, certainly not five-star looking ones. :-)

As an indication of how big the lake is, the wind was really blowing and you can see big waves. The boat ride was very wet as the waves pounded us. I didn't have my rain jacket with me because I didn't expect strong weather. The good thing was the sun didn't come out from hiding in the clouds either so the 45 minute trek to the top of the volcano wasn't hard even at my current fitness level. I didn't bring my trekking shoes with me so I had to really look where I was stepping to make sure it wasn't horse dung. :-)

View from the jetty. That's the boat I went in. Was completely soaked by the time we reach the island.

It's windy!

Like I mentioned, this is a tourist area so from the moment I stepped off the boat, peddlers were trying to sell me everything under the sun including drinks, hats, plastic rain coats, electric mosquito swatters, soft toys. Geez...they never let up. I brought my own trekking food (bananas) and two bottles of water so they went a different track - "buy drink for your guide sir? buy rain coat for your guide sir?" I know they're trying to make a living but it's just plain annoying and irritates me to no end and then I don't want to buy anything out of spite.

Anyway, like I said, the trek to the top took about 45 minutes and this place is full of Korean tourists. I estimate 8 out of 10 tourists there were Koreans. Even the peddlers were trying to call out to me in Korean followed by Tagalog. I guess they all couldn't guess that I'm Malaysian.

To tell the truth, the volcano was a bit of a disappointment when I got to the top. I was expecting to see lava flows and geysers and stuff. What I ended up with was this:

That's my guide. He said he was going to give me the history of the volcano as we trekked. What I got was a 3 sentence history. :)

View from up high on the island.

See those tiny dots? They're goats so my guess is it's not boiling hot down there. I asked about the lava flows that was touted as part of the tour. The answer? "That's extra sir - 1800 pesos". At that point I had enough...I said you wait there, I'll walk around on my own and then we go back. And the tour company had the nerve to ask me tip them nicely after charging me 3850 pesos! (~USD90) So all in all, pretty disappointing trip although standing there at the edge of the crater was pretty cool (figure of speech). I nearly slipped too. That would certainly have made it more interesting trying to peel me off the floor after a 500 foot drop.

Taal crater.

Can you can see the goats?

At least I can still trek up a small peak. :-)

Crater from another angle. There's no fence on this side. Pretty scary stuff with the sheer drop.

They had my lunch waiting for me when I got back to the 'resort'. I had baked fish (yuk), chicken Adobo (not bad) and stir fried vegetables (yum) with about a million flies for company. I can buy the same lunch back here in Makati for 300 pesos so in the end, I really felt the trip was a rip-off. It was organised from the hotel too. One would think they'd partner with better tour companies. The driver wanted to rip me off even more when he said that there's a surcharge of 500 pesos for pick-ups after 8am. I said he'll have to settle that with the hotel because the hotel told me it starts at 10.30am. I should have known it wasn't going to be so good when they wanted to charge 6250 pesos in the morning. Apparently if there's only one person i.e. just me, there's anothe surcharge. I said ok, let's cancel the trip because nobody told me that. In fact what I was expecting was a tour bus full of people and I would have preferred that anyway.

I slept the whole way back to the hotel so nothing too exciting except for more traffic jams. 45-minute trek or not, I was exhausted.

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