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Taal Tales
| Article
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11060 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1993 |
1,949 Words |
| Author
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Richard Bangs
Richard Bangs is the author of Island Gods, Whitewater
Adventure, and Riding the Dragon's Back, which won the
Lowell Thomas Award for the best travel book of 1989. He
is the founder of SOBEK Expeditions, an international
travel-adventure company, which has become part of Mt.
Travel-SOBEK. |
There is something terribly, dangerously alluring about the prospect. I'm regarding an island in the middle of a lake, which is in the middle of an active volcano, which is in the center of a larger lake, which is in turn in the middle of a larger volcano, which is surrounded by the waters of the South China Sea, smack in the middle of the Ring of Fire.
Circles within circles within circles, and I had penetrated all but the final band, the green-hatted island perhaps a half mile from my perch. Could I possibly swim to the tiny isle surrounded by geysers of white steam and sulfur-stained walls, the final ring?
This is the inner sanctum of Taal Volcano, the collapsed remains of a cone-shaped peak that prehistorically soared eighteen thousand feet above the sea and has since become known as the "killer volcano" of the Philippines. It has erupted with fury at least forty-one times since 1572. Most major eruptions until 1965 were from the main crater, now called Crater Lake, upon whose yellow shores I now stood. Those eruptions featured violent explosions that hurled, with savage force, boulders, ash, sand, and--perhaps the cruelest weapon--mud laced with sulfuric acid, which chemically burned victims to death.
Of the five hundred or so active volcanoes in the world, twenty-one are in the Philippines, a rattling string of some seven thousand worry-bead islands. Taal, in the southern stretch of the main island of Luzon, may be the cruelest one of all, with the most eruptions and the highest cumulative body count. Mount Pinatubo, which after six hundred years of sleep erupted in June 1991--in one of the most spectacular series of volcanic explosions this century--is a relatively new rival.
SEISMIC TREMORS
I traveled forty miles south from Manila to trek to the core of this perdition. The first stop was the outer rim of Taal at Tagaytay Ridge, a half mile above the immense, deceptively serene pearl-colored lake. It almost seemed a violation of nature's tranquility when a noisy Jeepney, a rickety minibus, bounced me down the skinny, serpentine road to the lake's edge. There, under bruise-colored clouds, I hired a fisherman, one of several thousand who moil in this huge, humid crater, to pilot me across the lake.
He sat me in the middle of his banca ,a hand-carved canoe with bamboo outriggers and a small outboard, and then puttered out into the
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