My recent trip to the picturesque city of Tagaytay allowed me to take this nice panorama of the lake. Taal is classified as a complex type volcano having more than one feature. Taal has 47 craters and 4 maars, constantly changing. Tagaytay is part of the main Caldera, yes-caldera differs from a volcanic crater! It is very active, I remember my Nov 2006 expedition to the main crater with my group- Astroleaguephils. It was LEVEL ALERT 1, the whole place is dry and warm and you can see steam vents from the fissures around. The place smelled like rotten egg from the Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S) gas in the air and sulfur deposits in the whole terrain.
The most amazing thing is, people actually do live there. There is a whole barangay, around 4000 people-600 families. Aside from fishing, they cater to tourists for boat rides, horse rides, tours and your merienda. Upon stepping to the Island all I saw were Koreans riding horses! It was a great trip for me and we were able to see the main crater of about 1.9km diameter and visit the 1968-69 and 77 eruption sites to collect lava samples.
If you go there, i have 3 notes:
1. Make sure it's LEVEL ALERT 1 or 2 or else it's boring (if PHILVOLCS allows boat trips-there's a workaround!)
2. Coke (soft drink!) is very expensive once you're up in the rim of the main crater.
3. Don't ride the horses, just hike it.
The photo is a stitch of 8 frames captured in RAW format from a sandy450d at 55mm ISO100 F11 1/200on OCT 2, 2011 12:22. JPEG upload suck!
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