The one thing I like about hangin' out with professional (or pro-wannabes) photographers is that I get to go to all kinds of interesting places. Even though they're packing heavy-duty SLRs and all I have is a lousy second-rate point-and-shoot, but the adventure more than makes up for the lack of first-rate photos I bring home (Mind you, they're not first rate because of picture "technical" quality, but at least I can say I have a decent composition skill hehehe). The only thing I DON'T like about hangin' out with pros is that one of them has been telling/taunting/suggesting/persuading/begging me to buy an SLR. An expensive one, to boot. I'm still reluctant at throwing away my money for a ****ing expensive hobby like photography...so I'll try to ignore him.For now.
Anyways, I decided to come along for a trek to mount Pinatubo here in the Philippines on Feb 9th 2008. It was quite a daunting prospect: the photographers wanted to capture the sunrise at the crater. This translated to us having to leave early, like, midnight early on Saturday. Which meant that we gotta leave early from the office on Friday evening to get ourselves some rest before the journey began. I kept dinner to a minimum (it's not funny when you need to 'empty' your stomach and no decent restroom could be found anywhere) and unfortunately only managed to get an hour of sleep before leaving for the trip.
We gathered in front of our office in Makati first (most of them works in the same project as mine) and started rolling at around 12:45 midnight. First part of the journey was getting to the town nearest to Pinatubo. At one of the gas station there we met up with the 4x4 offroad cars that will take us through the off road part of the journey. That happened at around 3 o'clock in the morning. We first rode together, the off road cars and our regular minivans. Took us about half an hour until we get to the point that we had to transfer to the offroad cars because the road started to become too rough for regular cars.
My memory's kinda fuzzy on this part because it was around 4 o'clock in the morning, but I remembered that we took a wrong turn once and that cost us about half an hour. The last part of the journey was the hardest, where we had to travel on foot to the crater. We had to walk on this wide, dusty pathway that was located between two stone walls. It was dark, wet, and quite dusty, and we had to whip out our flash lights, but light was coming fast and mid journey the flashlights were useless. After about 40 minutes of jumping from rock to rock accross small creeks and a light uphill trek, we arrived at the crater...
...too late for the sunrise.
Thanks to the slight detour during the off-road part of the journey and also the underestimated travel time for the part where we had to travel on foot, by the time we got to the crater the sun was already quite high. That didn't stop us from packing out our gear and started shooting, though (*cough* as for me, all I needed to do was pull out my point-and-shoot out of my pocket). For the results, click this link!
40 minutes my ass...
All in all, it was quite an exciting journey (and a rather sleepy and tiring one as well, considering the time that we had to start traveling and the time we finally got there). Sleepy and exhausted, we went back to where the off-roaders were parked and headed back to our cars. Stopped several times along the way for some photo ops. Now that the sun was up, we only realized then how barren and dusty the off-road track was. After getting back to our cars, we drove off and had lunch in a mall in a nearby town, and headed off to an aeronautic festival (within the same town) with the intention of catching the hot air balloon show and snap some pics. No such luck. It was a windy day and it was deemed rather risky to fly the hot air balloons.
It's not hard to imagine what I did when I got back to my apartment (hint: the sound effect should sound like "zzzzzzzz").
