THE PHILIPPINES
Beauty and the Beast
by
SIMON WINCHESTER
I suppose I shouldn’t have been all that surprised when shortly before noon one Philippine morning, somewhere about a mile and a half up the side of a volcano, my guide and the porters announced that they were quitting and ran away.
It was getting pretty frigid this close to the summit of Mount Mayon, and like most Filipinos, my guide—who confessed to having gone on a bender the night before, drinking locally made gin until dawn—was quite unused to the cold. Besides, everyone was soaked to the skin, the gales were plainly terrifying them, the black cliffs were rain-slick and extremely vertiginous, and the volcano was just then starting to emit ominous (but as it happens, quite routine) puffs of sulfurous gas.
So when Elmer, the previous night’s party animal, cried out to me, “Sir, we are dying here!” and began shivering and chattering his teeth uncontrollably with what looked like gin-induced hypothermia, then started to scamper back down the mountainside, I was dismayed—but not altogether astonished. No sticking power, I muttered darkly, along with one or two other stronger imprecations, and turned back up toward the top, teeth set into what really was a most inconvenient, unexpected, and freezing-cold gale.
Mount Mayon is said to be the most perfectly conical volcano in creation, a classic of its kind, a type specimen of the volcanic art. It has a base that is a flawless circle, eighty miles around, and from which it rises with a spare and unwavering elegance to a point that stands eight thousand feet above the sea. The angle of repose of its andesite ledges is a gem of geologic symmetry. A good map will show its contours as a series of perfect concentric circles, like a spider’s web, a dartboard, or an archer’s boss.
From a distance the sight is unforgettable, especially if the weather is fine, the tropical sky a deep, clear blue. Dark green jungles cloak the volcano’s lower slopes; temperate forests, grasses, and bamboos in a range of paler shades limn its upper reaches; black and smoking rocks, streaked yellow with sulfur, are then riveted onto its final few hundred feet. The mountain towers over the surrounding rice paddies and cornfields and the grazing livestock, and mariners who sail across the Pacific into the Albay Gulf say they can see its peak from a hundred miles and more. Mayon is a landmark, a source of much pride to the villagers and towns-people above whom it towers; and though it steams fitfully and has an unfinished look to it, in consequence it remains, in fair weather or foul, breathtaking in its simple perfection.
Yet Mount Mayon—its name comes from the Bicol dialect word for beautiful—is also terribly dangerous. Not because it is difficult to climb, though its cliffs and slippery rocks can badly injure those who are foolish enough to try, but because it has the irritating habit of exploding, prodigiously and without warning. It did so in 1993, and more than seventy farmers tending their tomato plants inside a deep ravine known as the Bonga Gully were killed.
Elmer said he had been on the mountain that day, trying in vain to lead three Germans and an Israeli to the top. He shuddered theatrically at the memory. “All four of them got away—by running,” he’d warned me the day before our own climb. “But then I saw other men, the farmers, who were caught in a hot wind. They were roasted dead, like chickens on a spit. They had no chance. The hot wind can go faster than any man, you know. It is quite silent. It just races down and cooks people. They were”—and I swear that at this point he seemed to lick his lips—“done to a crisp.”
All of the world’s landscape is, ultimately, the product of geology. That much is almost too obvious to state. The type of rocks, their ages, the way each sits in relation to its neighbors—all of these simple factors determine as absolutes the shape of the land, what crops and foliage grow on it, what creatures live on it, and exactly how. Geology, like mathematics, is one of the core realities of the universe, its laws underlying all that we do and are.
What is a little less apparent, though, is that the earth’s surface comes in two essential forms. There is first the landscape that has been created by old geology, where the forces of creation are long dead, where the landforms are the product of events that happened in the very distant past, and where no new events seem likely. And then there is the landscape that comes from new geology, which shows that the planet is still in the throes of creation, where the geology is still alive and at work, where the earth can still be seen to be flexing its muscles.
By muscles, we mean essentially two things—earthquakes and volcanoes, both of them almost casually destructive means by which the earth demonstrates its ultimate mastery over everything that lives upon it.
There are more than thirteen hundred potentially active volcanoes in the world. And while not all of these have yet been explored and analyzed and classified in detail, and though there is still no foolproof way to tell which of them is going to erupt, how impressively, and when, a simple axiom holds: Although there is such scenery and grandeur around the edge of the Pacific as to make the heart stop, all of this beauty and magnificence conceals a terrible and, what’s worse, a quite unpredictable danger.
For where live geology reigns, dreadful things can happen. Japan’s Mount Fuji, for example, is inexpressibly lovely—but the forces that made it so also devastated the city of K¯obe 300 miles away three years ago. San Francisco charms everyone who visits—and yet what made all the pretty hills is the selfsame geology that wrecked the city in 1906 and will likely do so again one day. And the perfect symmetry of Mount Mayon lulls onlookers into forgetting that the lava flows and gas surges that made it so perfectly symmetrical can roast a man to death in ten seconds flat. Man dies in places like this because, once in a while, the earth chooses to remind us that it is still very much alive.
And in the main, the world appears to come most dramatically alive where the geology is newest, where the volcanoes and quakes are most numerous—around the long and ragged edge of the Pacific Ocean.
More specifically still: Most of the world’s truly great volcanoes exist and have long existed—and most of the true seismic and tectonic spectaculars take place and have taken place—in Asia. These stupendous seismic events are a phenomenon of the entire Pacific Rim but are not evenly sited along the so-called Ring of Fire. They are concentrated on the rim’s western side, on its Asian arc. They lie along the chain of island-states that begins with Sumatra in the tropical Indonesian west; they continue through the seismically active islands of the Philippines (where there are at least twenty-one big, active volcanoes) and end in Hokkaid¯o in the frigid Japanese north.
More than anywhere else on earth, these five thousand miles of islands are where beauty and the beast most dramatically coexist, where you can see the most breathtaking scenery and at the same time enjoy, suffer, or derive vicarious pleasure from the risk that something—and who knows what? who knows when?—may happen. The world’s most beautiful and most symmetrical volcanoes are there, but if you choose to visit them you risk, as Elmer’s German and Israeli partners risked, the possibility of being bombarded by hot boulders, swept into newly torn crevasses, licked by gusts of flame, drowned in lava, or sucked up by some terrible pyroclastic wind, roasted and done to a crisp.
Yet these days none of this seems to be much of a deterrent. Quite the reverse, in fact. As ever more travelers continue to weary, as they say they do, of the more conventional destinations, so volcanoes, at least in Asia, appear to be nudging their way into becoming a new kind of travel business. And there is also a mood developing toward this kind of mountain, a new appreciation that has been spawned by a rash of books which argue that volcanoes are ultimately benevolent, giving us fertile soils and moisture and doing far more good than their destructive, fearsome reputation deserves. Volcanoes are hero-mountains, goes the new thinking; they should not be shunned so much as they should become the subjects of pilgrimage and reverence.
It is not an entirely new phenomenon. People have long been fascinated, if wary. You could always find a boatman to row you out to clamber up the remains of the great volcano of Krakatoa, between Java and Sumatra (although a visitor was killed there five years ago), or you could hire a strong young boy to take you up Mount Bromo on East Java. There have always been men like Elmer, fit and wiry-legged fellows who hang out at the local bars near the big exploding hills, available to anyone who wants to come and climb.
But now the scale of the business and the personalities involved have changed. A new band of entrepreneurs appears to be springing up, enthusiasts who believe that volcanoes can offer the kind of challenge and spectacle that will lure even the most jaded of Westerners, will reinvigorate both the body and the spirit.
A former U.S. Air Force maintenance man by the name of Rusty Kitchin is one of this new breed—a man who is currently betting that today’s travelers are made of stern enough stuff to be beguiled by the combination of beauty and danger. He believes that there are enough sensible and thoughtful new adventurers who will figure that the risk of personal catastrophe is measurably small, and a risk that will in any case be well offset by the experience of seeing one of these mountains firsthand.
So he has settled in the Philippines and is among the first to open a small guiding company—leading people to the top of what is perhaps Asia’s most notoriously dangerous volcano: Mount Pinatubo.
When I arrived in the Philippines, I had been planning simply to try to reach the top of Mount Mayon—it is the sort of breathtaking peak that once seen (even in a small black-and-white snapshot in Volume 7 of Britannica) demands to be climbed. I had long wanted to climb Mount Pinatubo, too. So when I saw Rusty’s advertisement in a Manila magazine, it seemed a good idea—since I wasn’t in a hurry—to try his mountain as an appetizer. I tracked him down in the lobby of the Swagman Narra Hotel in Angeles City, handed over a fee for his services and those of a couple of porters, and at dawn the next day we set out.
“We’re off to see the belly of the beast,” he said jauntily as we swung onto a track leading up the lower slopes. “Six hours and you’ll be able to have a swim in it.”
In the summer of 1991, Mount Pinatubo had a thousand feet blown off its summit, as if a crude giant had sheared it off with egg scissors. Huge flows of mud and ash and hot water, known as lahars, had cascaded down the volcano’s flanks and had spread unchecked for dozens of miles. Villages were submerged; hundreds died; a landscape was changed and ruined.
We walked first across the strange moonscape of one of these lahars, now frozen into peaks of compressed ash, chalk white, and fringed with new grass. The cliffs are a hundred feet high and razor-edged. The flow forms a huge, impenetrable maze that only Rusty and his local Filipino guides know how to navigate: Only the course of an old river, the O’Donnell, suggests an entryway. We trudged up it, weaving past immense towers of ash, for hours.
There were clouds swirling across the tops, and once in a while a shower; and when the view improved, we could see a rainbow over the buildings of the air base below. We passed a sweet spring, then another of hot, sour water that steamed and left a crust of chemicals along its bank. There was a small grove of trees, a patch of blue flowers, and then the canyon closed in—but only for a while, because suddenly the vista opened up and we found ourselves standing on the lip of the crater lake itself, a lake so new that it appears on none of my maps, formed when the dome of the mountaintop had been blown off.
We clambered cautiously down a sheer cliff face toward a dark sand beach and stepped gingerly into the water. It was hot—not scalding, but like a pleasant bath—rich with chemicals, and had a faint but luminous green tinge. We swam in it: The solutes buoy one up, like in the Dead Sea. My skin turned a strange color for a while but suffered no obvious harm.
Some days before, two of Rusty’s porters had lugged an inflatable canoe up the track, and within moments I was out on the lake in it, paddling for the far side. I wanted to go where I could see a suture line, with clouds of steam venting from the shore. As I paddled closer to it, the water became hotter until it was far too hot to touch, and the canoe started to melt and sag in an alarmingly rubbery way. Close to the steam vents, which now roared deafeningly, the water was boiling, and the little craft tossed as though it were in a kettle. Small gobbets of sulfur were spat into the air, and soon the bow glistened with bright yellow crystals.
And then there came a deafening crack from up ahead, and a massive slab of black cliff dislodged itself, as though the mountain had shrugged it off its shoulder: A vast rain of rock plunged into the lake, frothing the surface and setting the canoe rocking even more alarmingly. Further, the heat was now making the boat sag still more dangerously, and my seat was uncomfortable and scalding; and what with the noise and the choking air, it seemed prudent to paddle back to cooler, calmer waters.
Probably bottomless, a visiting geologist said of the lake. One of the entrances to Hell, said Rusty, more poetically. He and his porters insisted over lunch that they will make a business out of bringing travelers to this most extraordinary of sights. “You feel like one in a million up here,” Rusty said. “I mean, who else comes up to see a green and boiling lake, to paddle through a mess of steam jets, to watch a whole side of a cliff crash down a thousand feet?”
But that, I said, is just the problem. The volcano hissing and crumbling and steaming away in the background has to be a powerful reminder of the old caution that man proposes, but God disposes. “Sure,” said Rusty, ever the optimist. “But so long as he carries on disposing nicely, we’ll be okay. I have faith in him, you know. You have to, sitting under a volcano.”
The next day, after taking a perfunctory side trip to what is said to be the world’s lowest volcano, the island-in-a-lake-in-an-island-in-a-lake complex known as Taal (where a spectacular eruption in 1965 killed two hundred), I flew to Legazpi City in southern Luzon to make my long-awaited attempt on Mayon. I had been there three times in the previous decade: Twice we started too late to finish the climb in a day; once we were beaten back by bad weather. This, I reckoned, was my last chance.
The pilot took a long and lazy descent around the mountain, spiraling down from the summit over the slopes where we would be struggling the next day. The evening was still, with not a cloud in sight. The great mountain cast a five-mile shadow over the rice fields, and at the top coughed yellow smoke gently from what seemed, from this height, a small, untidy throat, like a hungry fledgling’s. As we landed, the mountain turned purple in the twilight, and a small shower of sparks danced at the summit, reminding us that it was very much alive. It was then that Elmer told me of the bodies he had seen and of his terrified charges running ahead of the pyroclastic gales.
We rose at four and drove through pitch darkness to a hut where we collected our porters—two men who emerged blinking and sleepy, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, and hefted our bags onto their backs. Like the hungover Elmer, they wore plastic thongs on their feet; they had on ragged shorts and T-shirts. It was cold just before dawn, and I felt I needed my Patagonia fleece.
The guidebooks insist that it takes almost eleven hours to make the summit—two and a half to Camp 1, four to Camp 2, another four to the final ridge. But we must have been a great deal fitter than the average guidebook reader, since we took no more than ninety minutes to reach Camp 1.
But what we saw ahead was dismaying: An anvil-shaped mass of cloud was scudding in from the east, blotting out the rising sun and, worst of all, spreading itself like a skirt over the lower slopes of the mountain. The gullies and ravines ahead began to fill up with a thick mist, and from time to time gusts of wind blew patters of rain down, cooling us after our hearty prebreakfast walk—which was nice, but ominous.
We stopped for ten minutes, ate mangoes and chunks of bread, and drank noisily from a stream. Then we set off again, up one of the radial gullies that reach down from the summit—a mile-long pathway of cliffs and river-smoothed andesite that sloped upward at an ever-increasing angle.
It was murder to climb—slippery, steep, wet, deceptively long. Once in a while the porters took us into the forest, clapping their hands to keep away snakes. On the whole, however, it was just a constant slog upward: wet, bruising, wearying. We made Camp 2 after another two hours—we were well ahead of the plan, having taken a total of three and a half hours to achieve what the book insisted would take six.
The going above Camp 2 became steadily worse—ever more cliffs, ever more steep gullies, rocks made ever more slippery by the rain. And then the smell of sulfur started to pervade everything, and there were strange yellow-rimmed cliffs that, if you peered over, seemed to be the edge of a giant nothingness. “Crater,” said Elmer helpfully, and I kept well away from the lip.
To his credit, he and his men soldiered on for another half an hour, up another three hundred feet. We passed two young men from Belgium, both on their way down, the look of failure about them. “Too windy,” one shouted. “Too dangerous. And we felt movement. A bucking in the ground—as if it was going to explode.”
I gulped but trudged on. By the time we reached the part where the slope became truly steep, where the ground became friable and broken, the wind was howling and knocking us flat each time we emerged from behind a sheltering wall of rock. By the time we were at the point where the book said “it is most advisable to be roped together,” the porters had clearly had enough. They conferred in whispered Tagalog and then turned away.
“What’s happening?” I cried.
“Sir, we are dying here!” shouted Elmer. He was soaked and shivering and looked terribly frightened.
“Eruption?” I shouted.
“No, sir,” he replied. “Just too dangerous. We wait below. You go on.”
And so I did, painfully, one handhold after another, one foot after another, hiding below the cliff every few moments for shelter. And slowly, like a great gray tombstone, the summit ridge eventually appeared out of the gloom, and I found my way to its center, keeping well away from the edges and from a certain and unpleasant death in that sulfur-rimmed crater.
A gust blew me, staggering, to the very lip, and I had a momentary feeling of vertigo, staring down into the glowing heart of the volcano. But I recovered, and with the fumes now half-choking me and the gale buffeting me, I found myself at the narrowest point of the ridge, a precarious and tiny black boulder from where all the rock faces and surfaces at long last pointed down.
It was eleven-thirty in the morning. To reach the summit, at 7,943 feet, had taken five and three-quarter hours. There was no view, nothing of which to take a photograph, no reason at all to linger. So I simply turned back the way I had come, and slipping and sliding and falling until I was bruised and cut and bleeding, arrived back at Camp 2. Elmer and the porters were there, hiding in a cave.
Then there came a rumbling from above and a strange shaking deep in the ground, as though some giant were stirring in his sleep, turning over, grunting, acting restless. It was time to head down, I thought. The sun came out. We were off the lower slopes by five and taking a cold San Miguel at the Trinidad hotel in Legazpi by the time twilight fell and it turned to dark.
The next morning the air was clear and still once more, and the mountain gleamed in the morning sun. There was not a cloud in sight, and besides a slight wisp of yellowish smoke drifting from the very summit, no indication that the mountain was anything other than it looked—serene, perfect, beautiful. The hotel receptionist, waiting for my credit card to clear, said she expected Mayon to erupt again next year. “But you really never can tell, which is what makes it so exciting.” And she smiled.
VOLCANOES EXPLAINED
What you need to know about volcanoes: plus, where and how to see the world’s most active
THE PROTOCOL
Locals recognize the idiosyncrasies of active volcanoes: If they tell of hearing or feeling ominous grumbles, get well clear. The magnificence of these slumbering monsters is matched only by their dangerous sense of caprice. (In descending order of danger, volcanoes are classified as active, meaning that they are known to erupt; dormant, meaning that they are not currently erupting but have the potential to do so; and extinct, meaning that they have a history of erupting but are not likely ever to do so again.)
If you are on a mountainside when a volcano erupts, beware the active lava flow. In Hawaii and at Etna, the flows will be fiery; in places like the Philippines, however, they may be black and slaglike on the surface but molten a few inches below—and stepping onto what looks like a solid crust could plunge you into redhot lava.
If an eruption produces the scalding rock-filled winds known as pyroclastic flows, stay at least sixty miles from the volcano’s cones. Pyroclastic flows move fast and kill either by blast or by heat.
If there is any local indication that a volcanic dome is changing its shape, keep your distance: The handful of tourists who die each year in volcano accidents around the world do so after straying onto exploding domes.
If, as on Mount Pinatubo, there are water-and-ash streams, or lahars, run like hell. These have a nasty habit of increasing in volume and speed.
Poisonous and suffocating gases may be produced close to a crater or from the tiny piped exits known as fumaroles. The poisonous gases—hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide—usually smell distinctively foul, and you’ll want to move away (always make sure you have an escape route). Carbon dioxide is odorless, however, and heavy enough to remain in a pocket—and can choke you to death in minutes. If you see dead animals or bones in a crater, you could go the same way if you take the same path.
If rock and lapilli bombardments start up, immediately find a cave to shelter you until the eruption subsides.
And take care in an obviously geothermal area where there are mud pools and geysers. Crusts that are formed here can look deceptively solid (and alluringly pretty): Plunging through a crust and ending up neck-deep in boiling mud can really take the shine off your vacation.
Following is a rundown of the volcanoes most worth a visit in the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Russia, and the Hawaiian Islands.
PHILIPPINES
There are twenty-two active volcanoes in the Philippines. The most easily accessible are Mount Mayon and the notorious Pinatubo, both in the southern part of the principal island of Luzon.
The closest town to Mayon is the port city of Legaspi, which is well served from Manila by air and bus. Mountain guides, though not always reliable, are available. Start your climb before dawn to ensure that you’ll make it up and back in a day.
INDONESIA
Indonesia has 173 active volcanoes, most on the suture line where Eurasian and Australian plates collide along Java, Sumatra, and Bali.
The most famous is Krakatoa, now called Anak Krakatau (“Child of Krakatoa”), where on August 26, 1883, what was likely the greatest eruption in recorded history took place—its death roar, reckoned the loudest sound ever, was heard from Ceylon to Australia. The island lies between Java and Sumatra and is accessible only by boat.
The twin peaks of Merapi and Merbabu, near the southern Javanese city of Yogyakarta, attract visitors because of the lovely sunrise between them each day. Both are active—the eruption of Merapi in 1006, it is said, prompted the Hindu raja of Java to flee eastward and bring Hinduism to Bali.
Bali’s sacred Mount Agung, ten thousand feet high, last erupted in 1963, killing almost two thousand. The climb starts in the village of Besakih. Stay at one of the many small hotels around Lake Batur.
JAPAN
Japan claims 108 volcanoes, of which the best known is Mount Fuji. Its last eruption was in 1707, and it can fairly be expected to remain quiet—a good thing, since hundreds of thousands of people get to the top every year. The trails are open in July and August.
Mount Usu, on the northern island of Hokkaido, has spawned sinister-looking upstart mountains in recent years, including the thirteen-hundred-foot Showa Shinzan, which rose out of a wheat field in 1943 after a series of earthquakes. There is a cable car up Usu itself, but exploring the neighboring peaks is a good way to remind yourself of the bizarre power of vulcanicity. Stay at any of the hotels around the pretty Lake Toya.
Sakurajima lies in Kagoshima Bay, off the southern island of Kyushu, and erupts more or less constantly. Its three peaks can be reached from several places on the road around its base. Tiny oranges grown in groves at the foot of Sakurajima sell for a small fortune in Tokyo markets.
RUSSIA
With Kamchatka, the dangling peninsula off far eastern Russia, now getting easier to reach by air and sea, its twenty-nine huge active volcanoes are becoming increasingly accessible. The most famous is the Bezymianny peak, which can be reached by charter helicopter (quite inexpensive) from the regional capital, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky—the headquarters of Russia’s Pacific atomic submarine fleet.
HAWAII
After 70 million years of volcanic activity Hawaii still has five active volcanoes, including two of the world’s most active. The 13,680-foot-tall Mauna Loa, the world’s largest active volcano, last erupted in 1984, and Kilauea, where the mythic volcano goddess Pele made her eternal home, has been erupting continuously since 1983.
Located thirty minutes southwest of Hilo on Hawaii’s Big Island, these volcanoes compose part of Hawaii’s three-hundred-thousand-plus-acre Volcanoes National Park (nps.gov/havo). Adventurous backpackers can hike the park’s Mauna Loa summit trail in about two days, holing up for the night in the Pu’u ‘Ula’ula cabin at 10,035 feet, or in the Mauna Loa cabin at 13,250 feet. Visitors preferring a two-hour trek can traverse verdant rainforest and a mile-wide crater on the Kilauea Iki trail. Those who left their hiking boots at home can loop around the Kilauea caldera by car on the scenic Crater Rim Drive.