the island of the horses

the afternoon was young. the sun was still high but strange enough the air around me was a mixture of chilly and dusty. there i was on the road leading up to the taal crater, a road trodden by literally millions of horse hoofs.

i was upon one myself – it had been ten years since i last straddled a horse – and frankly the skinny thing, with a brush-like mane having muddy brown complexion, looked more like a... well, like a donkey than a stallion... but i soon discovered to my surprise that this was in fact a beast to reckon with: this horse, Cesar, bore me with a sense of confidence and he, together with my guide, led me up the dusty paths to the crater lake as if the mountain itself was its friend.

the ride itself was a terribly lonely one, even though there were like hundreds of other horses with hundreds of other foreigners (the not-so-pretty name applied to mere tourists) in front and behind me. the whole thing was like a scene from tolkien’s lord of the rings or from another legend of old: the atmosphere... the sun, the pale blue sky; the absence of human voices... impossible to find in a bustling place like manila, only the mesmerizing beats of hoofs ringing the entire trip; the horses and the dust path... scenes from a time long before toyota vioses or south superhighways ever crossed the innovative mind of man....

on one side of me played scenes of filipino farm life: houses sans electricity, miniature fields of rice and pineapples, lush trees and bushes that would at times block my view. on the other side was a view so dramatic that i even forgot to stop and take a picture due to my awe... a steep cliff running down my left revealed a deep valley filled with trees whose names i couldn’t guess. yes, i’ve seen scenes like this practically every month, but the horseback ride made the panorama so... different, special.

supplement:

i dipped my hand into the rushing water and tasted a few drops. fresh. it must have been my first time on a freshwater lake. so there i was on a banca in the middle of lake taal heading for taal crater. both the air and sunshine were gentle upon my face and for some reason i felt younger. before me loomed the lonely mountains of taal island, a place i’d soon after call the Island of the Horses due to the significance of its equestrian population.

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once i reached taal crater, my breath was yet taken away as i looked around me. it was very much like the view at the top of the Palace in the Sky (where i was three hours ago) although the range was longer and wider than the former, and the whole thing being accentuated with the blue of taal lake surrounding the island. the crater itself wasn’t much, though. yes, there was a lake – a lake within a lake, you could say – and upon its shores were deposits of sulfur. as i peered more closely i saw that the water seemed to be bubbling. it was then when i noticed the people around me, mostly koreans, and that the railing between the summit and the plunge was nothing but a single lousy pole held in place by a rope. some protection.

a few days later my classmate told me that the taal crater had this sort of minor outburst on a sunday and the whole area nearby experienced an earthquake sometime in the morning. that’s scary. i was there saturday afternoon.