Adventure Trip to Taal Volcano

 4th March 2012

One of the highlights during our trip in Manila was the adventure trip to Taal Volcano, the smallest active volcano in the world. We were picked up by the tour guide, Gerald at our lodging. The trip took over 2 hours to reach Tagaytay city.

We had a quick stop for natures call at a dining cafe, and one of us, Shak intrigued at the sight of 'balut'. Oh, just so you know, balut is a Filipino well-known dish, which is a boiled FERTILIZED egg. Yes it was boiled, but c`mon, there were feathers blended with the egg for god sake!

Of course none of us dared to have a taste of it, thus we requested our tour guide to eat it. And like some jakun photographers, we snapped the eating scene like nobody's business. Ahh.. yes, I tried quite hard to keep my face as straight as possible when seeing him eating the egg. Well, respect other cultures, right?

 Afterwards, we descended to the shore to board onto the boat. The ride to the volcano across the Taal Lake took about 30 minutes to arrive.

On the paper, it didn't sound too adventure, thus we expected amateur level of hiking with leisure walking to the top of volcano. With little preparation, we didnt bring the spare pants, spare shirts as per advised. Degil.

It was sunny and dry day. The local guide recommended us to hop on the horse with an additional price of Php600. I was thinking that the deal was fishy, thus mutually agreed with others for not riding the horse. On top of that, we were also advised upfront by the tour guide from the mainland for not using the horse-riding service. After all, we are still young and strong physically, arent we?

After battling with dust in sunny day with blood and sweat (ewah!), even some of us almost gave up walking to some extent, finally we reached at the top of the mountain. Yeeha!

We were awestruck with the sight of bright turqoise lake which is surrounded with high wall craters. And amazingly, it is still active and ever ready to explode.( O God pls dont let it happen while we are still around~)

We took some time to have a rest after challenging hiking (yes, for us who have been less and less fit over working years :P), and the next activities were  capturing every breathtaking scenery while we could and hitting golf ball into the lake. That is source of income to the local too.

We descended down the mountain, and yes, again with the breath of dusty air. Hmmph! It was not a pleasant experience tho.

After having picnic lunch, we were ready to depart to Manila city.

But hey! We have yet to snap the picture together with this cute tour guide, Gerald. So,we stopped in the middle of the highway for capturing this sweet pic(sweet as I see it. Hihi)!

It was funny that his shy behaviour made me assuming that he was a teenager who dropped out from school. But surprsingly he is in 30s with a daughter of 3yrs old!Aiyayaiii!~