Hello everyone, I hope you all had a nice weekend! I didn’t get to read this weekend because I met up with a couple of friends and yesterday, I went on a day trip to Mt. Pinatubo, a volcano a couple of hours away from Manila. I thought I’d share a couple of pictures. Click on the pictures to embiggen.
Here’s more info from Wikipedia:
Mount Pinatubo is an active stratovolcano located on the island of Luzon, at the intersection of the borders of the Philippine provinces of Zambales, Tarlac, and Pampanga. Before 1991, the mountain was inconspicuous and heavily eroded. It was covered in dense forest which supported a population of several thousand indigenous people, the Aeta, who had fled to the mountains from the lowlands during the protracted Spanish conquest of the Philippines which began in 1565. The volcano’s eruption in June 1991 produced the second largest terrestrial eruption of the 20th century and the largest eruption in living memory.
It’s funny because we spent more time traveling than staying around the area. It’s still a great experience and I recommend it. I’m not much of a hiker and I’m not very sporty so no need to worry about the hiking part, it wasn’t that hard. It was a nice trail for lame hikers like me. I enjoyed it because the trail area is really nice, there was a stream flowing near and sometimes across the trail and the greenery was refreshing to look at.
On the way to the trail, there was a very bumpy 4×4 ride that was about 1 hour 30 minutes in length. Mostly, we saw lahar on the way there. There were some cows there though.

I don’t have nice pictures of the trail because my camera was in my bag when we were hiking but I have this:

Here’s a picture of the crater lake:

I like the aqua color of the lake even though I have no idea why it looks like that. My friend said that the color used to change with the seasons but it hasn’t changed color for some time. We swam in that lake and the water was really cold and you can smell a hint of sulfur. It was real interesting for me to be inside the volcano’s crater. And because I like my camera’s color accent feature, here’s a picture of the lake with color accent:

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