Taal: A Lake Inside a Volcano Inside a Lake Inside a Larger Geological Argument

Taal: A Lake Inside a Volcano Inside a Lake Inside a Larger Geological Argument

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“The trip to Taal started with a public bus from Manila to Tagaytay, a town on the ridge above the lake that has a long view across the water to the volcano island.”

Elizabeth got soaked somewhere in the middle of Taal Lake, which was not in the plan but turned out to be unavoidable once the lake started running in short steep waves that came over the bow of the pump boat in sheets. The boat was about twelve feet long, the plastic awning covered perhaps a third of the passengers, and the boatman appeared entirely unconcerned, which was either reassuring or evidence that he had seen this before and knew there was nothing useful to do about it. Ashley and I held a piece of plastic sheeting over Elizabeth, which helped in a theoretical sense. The crossing took twenty-five minutes. By the end of it Elizabeth had stopped laughing at herself and started laughing at the inadequacy of the sheeting operation, which seemed like a healthy development.

Nobody had told me lakes could be choppy. In retrospect this is obvious. Taal Lake has a surface area of roughly two hundred and thirty-four square kilometres and is exposed to the winds that come off the Tagaytay Ridge to the north, producing wave action in ordinary conditions that a twelve-foot pump boat has to work through rather than over. The lake occupies the caldera of a much larger ancient volcano, a structure that geologists call Taal Caldera, formed perhaps five hundred thousand years ago by eruptions of a scale that makes everything that has happened since look like a footnote. Inside that caldera the current Taal Volcano island rises from the lake’s surface, and inside the volcano island there is a crater lake of its own, pale and sulphurous and hot in places from the geothermal activity below, a nested geography of destruction and reconstruction that has been operating continuously since before humans arrived in the Philippines to observe it.

1754

The eruption of 1754 lasted several months and produced lava flows that destroyed multiple towns on the lake shore.

Taal: A Lake Inside a Volcano Inside a Lake Inside a Larger Geological Argument

Taal has erupted more than thirty times in recorded history, a figure that reflects both its genuine geological activity and the relatively short period of recorded observation in the archipelago. The eruption of 1754 lasted several months and produced lava flows that destroyed multiple towns on the lake shore. The 1911 eruption killed more than a thousand people in fifteen minutes. In January 2020, a eruption sent an ash plume fifteen kilometres into the atmosphere and forced the evacuation of four hundred thousand people from the surrounding area, temporarily closing Manila’s airport and covering the capital in grey ash. In 2011 the volcano was classified as dormant, a designation in volcanology that means quiet rather than finished, the geological clock running on a timescale to which the word dormant is attached because it is the best available word rather than because it captures the situation accurately.

Elizabeth was American, a teacher at an international school in Japan, and Ashley was Canadian, also a teacher, also in Japan, and I had met both of them at Our Melting Pot hostel in Manila. They were in the Philippines for the school holiday, as many of the English-speaking teachers based in Japan do, the country offering a combination of warmth, relative cheapness, and English prevalence that Japan, for all its merits, does not. It was Elizabeth and Ashley who had persuaded me to go to Boracay instead of Cebu for the beach section of the Philippines trip, a recommendation I would have reason to be grateful for many times before that part of the journey was over.

The eruption of 1754 lasted several months and produced lava
flows that destroyed multiple towns on the lake shore.

The trip to Taal started with a public bus from Manila to Tagaytay, a town on the ridge above the lake that has a long view across the water to the volcano island. The bus was the kind of bus that exists in countries where public transport infrastructure serves the majority rather than the comfortable, which is to say older, more crowded, and entirely functional. At each stop along the route a different food vendor boarded, each one selling something different, the whole sequence forming an improvised catering operation that covered everything from bananas to something that I believe was coconut cake and which I would not recommend.

From Tagaytay we hired a trike, the Philippine motorcycle with sidecar that serves as a taxi across most of the country and which manages gradients that would challenge a more substantial vehicle. The jeepney, the other ubiquitous Philippine public transport, could not take us down to the lake shore, the roads being too steep and narrow for a vehicle of that size, though jeepneys are everywhere else, identifiable by the chrome and painted decoration that transforms each one from the American military vehicle it originally was into something entirely Filipino. The US military left behind several thousand jeeps when it withdrew from the Philippines after the Second World War, and Filipino mechanics and craftsmen remade them into the most distinctively decorated transport vehicles in the world, which is an achievement that gets less attention than it deserves as an example of a colonised culture taking what was left by the coloniser and making something unrecognisably its own.

From Tagaytay we hired a trike, the Philippine motorcycle with sidecar that serves as a taxi across most of the country and which manages gradients...

Taal: A Lake Inside a Volcano Inside a Lake Inside a Larger Geological Argument

The view across the lake to the Tagaytay Ridge and beyond to the mountains of southern Luzon was the kind of view that makes the journey to reach it feel adequately compensated.

At the top of the volcano the crater lake was the colour that the word green does not adequately describe, pale and luminous and slightly threatening, with steam rising from sulphur vents in the yellow-grey ground around the rim. The landscape was bare of vegetation for a wide radius, the earth cracked and bone-coloured, the air carrying the smell of rotten eggs that hydrogen sulphide produces and which you stop noticing within about ten minutes and which the guides have presumably stopped noticing entirely. The view across the lake to the Tagaytay Ridge and beyond to the mountains of southern Luzon was the kind of view that makes the journey to reach it feel adequately compensated.

A few weeks later Elizabeth sent a message to say she had seen the news about seismic activity around Taal and the evacuation of the local residents. She was fine. She had dried out, she confirmed, well before we got back to Manila.

Dave

Dave

A British ginger seeing the world one questionable decision at a time. Based wherever the wifi works.

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