Tagatay, Phillipines Jan 2015

You can see the volcano crater in the middle of the lake

We flew to the Phillipines at the end of January. My first overseas trip for 2015. And an exciting one because it was my first trip to this country. I missed the Pope's visit by a week. (Darn!) We spent the first night in Manila before heading to Tagatay the following morning.

And so here is Tagatay at its best. Tagatay is pretty near Manila a mere 55km away so with minimal traffic you can get there in 1.5 hours. There is a highway leading out of Manila to Tagatay but once off the highway, the roads become narrow and a single-lane up and single-lane down from the highland area. The scenery is lovely as we drove up. And the best thing of course if the cooler climate. We saw a lot of corn being sold along the way, some furniture shop and tart shops.

We drove back to Manila on Saturday evening. And oh boy, we saw the long line of cars heading uphill enroute to Tagatay. Definitely a popular getaway from traffic laden Manila.

In 1729, the Taal volcano destroyed the entire place. There have been signs of unrest as recent as 1991 but I'm glad to report, we had no worries during our short working trip.  On arrival, all of us went crazy admiring the beautiful scenery and enjoying the weather, we walked and stared and breathed in the fresh air.

In the evening we headed out and found a starbucks nearby and sat outside drinking coffee. Lemme just say, with the wind blowing it was freezing. Almost felt like winter. That was a very nice experience.