So you know how I said the fish market yesterday rose the bar on this trip. Well today’s trip totally rose the bar…again!
They let us know that a few more people decided to join our trek out to Taal Volcano, which was great because the overall cost went down significantly among the 5 of us. There was Alex and me. Josephine from Spain, Samuel from Switzerland, and Tomas from Czech Republic. In the picture below you can kind of see the volcano to the left of me.

I am so glad we had this great group of people to get to know and hear their travel stories. Josephine has been living in the Philippines for over a year and is planning on going to London next. Tomas and Samuel met each other in a MBA similar program in Singapore.

We took a private bus out of Manila to the volcano which took less than an hour and a half, I was really thankful that we went on Sunday morning as traffic was very clear.

Part of the ride was navigating some mountains and driving down to the lake area. I got a little car sick because I was sitting in the front trying to turn around to talk to everyone in the bus, eventually I gave up and had to look forward.

We got into a boat and our driver was super awesome looking basically what a hipster back home would try to emulate.

It was a 10 min boat ride to the volcano and according to my fitbit, we hiked 3 miles up to the top. We had the option of paying 500 pesos to ride a horse to the top but the guys decided not to which I feel was the right choice to make. It did get really dusty and although the path wasn’t paved, I’m pretty sure it was almost 100% horse poop because it smelled like it the entire way up.

I’m really glad I thought ahead and brought extra bottles of water today. Just on the climb up I drank about 2 liters of water which is crazy. Most of which I think ended up being sweat out of my skin.

The view was fantastic and the lake within the volcano was slightly green due to the acidity so it was very cool to see the green lake in the crater and the blue lake bordering the volcano on the outside.

After hanging out at the top for about 45 min, Samuel noticed a big wall of rain that pretty much appeared out of nowhere and was coming right at us. It started pouring huge globs of water almost right away, also the rain was hitting us hard and at an angle.

It was either try to find shelter along with this big tour group of old Korean people or just enjoy the experience as you can see in the youtube video I posted below:

Honestly, getting soaked in the rain made the experience a lot more fun. The rain got the dust out of the air and we weren’t as hot anymore. We couldn’t help but just laugh and enjoy the entire thing.
On the way down we noticed that there were hot spots on the ground that were giving off steam from the rain. Stupid me decided to stick my hand in one of the vents to find out if the hot air was hot…it was

We got back in the boat and it started pouring again so it took twice as long to get back to our starting point. It was already past 2pm and we were starving. Josephine could speak Filipino and got the driver to take us to a restaurant outside of town called Seafood Island.
I have to say that the experience was awesome. They brought us a big tray of seafood: grilled squid, steamed shrimp, raw marinated fish, roast pork, clams steamed in a coconut, fried talapia, roast chicken, crabs, and salty fish fried rice.

I thought it was odd that we didn’t have silverware or plates and Josephine explained that it’s traditional Filipino food where you ate with your hands and everyone shares the food in the middle of the table. I think total, all this food was $40 for all 5 of us. MAN it was delicious, probably because we hiked almost 7 miles today.