Mount Pinatubo

In June 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted.  Mount Pinatubo is a volcano about two hours north of Manila.  I went to Clark in order to catch my flight to Malaysia, and while I was there I had the opportunity to visit Mount Pinatubo on a tour.  I visited the local Angeles/Clark branch of the Department of Tourism.  What can you tell me about taking a tour of Mount Pinatubo?  Well, I was told, they weren't currently recommending tours to the mountain.  Oh.  Why not?  Well last year, a number of tourists died in a mishap.  Oh.  It turned out to that there was a landslide of some sort that buried some tourists from Belgium.  The accident occurred during the rainy season and, if it was still my wish to go, they could set me up with a tour.  Hmmm...  They weren't recommending tours to the mountain, but they could set me up with a tour if I still wanted to go.  I love second-world countries.  Anything goes.

Well, yes, I would still like to go.  So I got set up to go out on Sunday, starting at the ripe hour of 6 am.  And off we went.  An hour later, we passed something I had read about in one of the maps I had been given.  During WWII, the Japanese had taken a large number of Filipino and American soldiers prisoner and marched to a place near where we were.  It is now referred to as the Death March.  47000 people died in the march and there is a shrine to memorialize it.  But we passed right by.  If I hadn't known about it, I wouldn't had any idea that it was anything special.  Hmmm...

A little while later, we stopped at this spa place that also served as tour guide repository and sign-in location, where we duly filled out waivers removing all blame from these people should anything untoward happen during the tour.  Hmmm...

We picked up our guide and headed off to the mountain.  Now to be fair, despite all my other misgivings about the tour as it turned out, the mountain is quite spectacular.  Here is one of the first views of the mountain as we moved up towards it in the 4x4.







We drove past small mountains of ash.

And we walked past them as well.  The little dots you can see in this photo... They are people.









We climbed from there into the are below the crater, where life has returned quite strongly in the past 20 years.










And crested the crater's edge to a breathtaking view.

There are one or two indications that the area is still active.  Lower down the slopes, a river runs warm (although the crater lake is not particularly warm).  And around the little mountain on the left there is a small vent that is discharging steam.

It truly is an amazing sight to behold.  And that is the source of the reticence I have about my visit.  I didn't learn much.  Our guide showed us up the mountain to the crater.  He made sure we didn't stray, or get hurt.  He kept his eye on us so that nothing untoward happened during our visit.  But he offered nothing in the way of explanations.  I asked a number of questions about the area and what had happened, but received short replies, often one word, a yes or a no.  It was a fairly pricey tour, all things considered, and I would have thought we would get some history, some explanations about what happened in 1991, who was affected and how.  But there was nothing except short answers to questions that I could think to ask.  It was the same with the driver.  We passed one of the other more significant pieces of history attached to the area in the Capas Shrine to the Death March, but had it not been for me having seen something about it on the map I had, we wouldn't have even stopped.  And the driver didn't say much about it when we did (after I asked if we could stop).  For the price of the tour, it seemed to me that we could spend a few moments at the shrine and learn something about the events that it remembers.  As it was, we only had time to take a couple of photos of the shrine...

...And I did manage to get a photo of one of the markers along the road showing the route of the Death March.

I'm glad I went.  I enjoyed seeing Mount Pinatubo and the hike to get up to the crater.  But unless the value provided during the tour changes, I don't think I would do it again, and I don't think I would recommend it to anyone I know.  Which is unfortunate because the area seems to be quite interesting.