Because we were successful in finding Whale Sharks in Donsol yesterday, today we had time to do something else, so we decided to move on from Donsol to Lagazpi to check out Mount Mayon, the Philippines’ most active but pretty volcano.

Our taxi ride arrived at 7:20AM to take us to Legazpi, meaning Karl was early. What a professional. But to no one’s surprise Ippy was not ready.

Karl drove us to a place called Mayon SkyDrive, which offered ATV rides on trails near the Mayon Volcano National park. We had to get in early because we wanted to beat the midday sun when it would simply be way too hot to be outside.

There were a few different trails to pick for our ATV ride and we picked the Black Lava course, which seemed like a decently beefy course, apparently being 22km long. This course is meant to showcase the lava flows from the 2018 eruption of Mt Mayon. We were of course, opting to have our own ATV.

We locked our suitcases up in the lockers provided, paid our fees (PHP 4500/AUD 124.20, and environment tax PHP50), watched the intro video they played for us and picked helmets, which also had a GoPro mount which was useful.

Ippy had never ridden an ATV before, so we did a small training session in the practice area outside. She knows how to drive so it was honestly pretty straightforward.

The drive towards Mt Mayon

The tour came with our own guide who would also take pictures for us. He brought with him a young boy who I assumed was a relative of his, who sat behind him. We started our journey going onto the public road for a bit before turning onto presumably their own land to go off-road. There was a few construction vehicles around so presumably this land also functioned as a mining/industrial route too. We ate lots of dust.

We stopped at a viewpoint where we had the first of our dozens of photos taken. This particular viewpoint was of the main attraction itself, Mt Mayon.

Continuing on, we drove across a river and the little boy was there filming us from the back of the guide’s ATV. Off-roading was great, but unfortunately it didn’t last long and we found ourselves back on the public road, which had no real traffic on it. I would say the public road made up 70% of our trip to the black lava site. Ippy would later say that there was a 1 review on Google Maps mentioning this, but it was overweighed by the flood of 5 star glowing reviews undoubtably from less experienced tourists… but the lone voice was right after all.

Black Lava Site

Upon arriving at the black lava site, we had to pay a seperate entry fee (50 pesos each) to the site (which this was explained to us earlier). This paid the landowners of the site and we got our own seperate guide for this site. It was compulsory to have a guide. The ATV tour guide’s little companion accompanied us as well. I’m gonna pretend it’s school holidays because it was Easter after all. He was put in charge of carrying our big 1.5L water bottle, which now seemed completely unnecessary.

The black lava site was up a short trail with some rocks and stairs to climb. It was hot AF, like 35+ degrees. But the trail seemed pretty short, about 300m or so and there was a bit of shade. After climbing the stairs however, the sun and the heat emanating from the black lava rocks was quite something… The top of the site had a helipad and a great view of both sides of the island. We had a good view of the Albay Gulf where Legazpi is, and to the north the Logonoy Gulf. Beyond the helipad was a no-go zone. The volcano is active after all.

Of course, we had a spectacular view of Mt Mayon itself, but it was no different to what we saw previously, except there was black lava rocks littered everywhere. Our guide was quite enthusiastic about taking lots of pictures of us; even insisting we do lovey-dovey poses much to Ippy’s chagrin.

After the impromptu photoshoot we walked back down the trail. At the top of the trail they also had a zipline that would take you all the way back to the start in about 20 seconds. It was a very nifty upsell, but today we didn’t take them up on the offer.

As I walking down, I noticed that the little boy that was carrying our water was sneaking sips of water from our water bottle. I don’t blame him, it was hot. We opted to let him keep the water in the end.

After getting back to the ATVs, we reunited with our original guide and we all headed back to the ATV office via a different route. Sadly, this route was also mostly on public roads, however we did cross a river and drive over shallow water again.

Overall, it was a nice activity to kill time and most importantly, we got to see Mt Mayon. However, we could’ve gotten to the Black Lava Zipline site ourselves by taxi, which would’ve been way cheaper ha ha ha than taking an ATV. We both wanted to spend most of our time off road but unfortunately that was not what we got. Ultimately, we did not ask enough questions but who knows if they would’ve been honest about that. Ippy, as a first time ATV user found the experience to be fine and easy.

SM Mall, Legazpi

We were meant to get a lift from our original taxi driver Karl, but he wasn’t responding on WhatsApp. We waited a good hour to give him a chance, but in the end we took a Grab from the ATV office to the SM Mall in the centre of Legazpi.

The funny thing was we arrived at this mall with all our suitcases because of our flight to Cebu in the evening. Every mall in the Philippines has a security guard at the entrance to do their standard security theatre. They didn’t even bother with our large suitcases.

We walked around the mall for a bit looking for a decent place to have lunch. We settled on a restaurant called 1st Colonial that focused on family friendly local Bicol Filipino cuisine.

1st Colonial Restaurant

We ordered Spring rolls (PHP 239), Liempo (PHP 425) and Grilled Mussels (PHP 335) along with tinapa fried rice, a steamed rice, pink lemonade and a mango shake.

The tinapa fried rice was quite good, it was quite garlicky and had little flakes of fish in it. The spring rolls did the job, but weren’t amazing. It came with I think Banana Ketchup; it wasn’t too veingary or too sweet. And the Mussels were a bit unfortunate, they were quite small (but that was to be expected) but the cheese just wasn’t that pleasant. The Liempo (grilled pork belly) was overcooked but we both enjoyed the sauce and luckily it was not too fatty!

Ippy noticed they were ~famous for their Sili ice cream~ so we “had” to order some to try. We ordered three different scoops of ice cream for dessert:

• The house specialty “Sili”, which means chilli in Tagalog. You could choose the spice level and we played it safe and chose “level 2”. This was a very good implementation of chili flavoured ice cream as it was both spicy and refreshing. Ippy did actually find it a little spicy.
• Pili, which is a local nut. Nutty but not a strong flavour. Ippy liked it though.
• Kape Bigas or “Rice coffee”. It’s not actually coffee, it’s toasted rice flavour. Nothing to really write home about, a bit nutty.

After Lunch

After lunch we bought a pack of Honey Pili as a souvenir from a dedicated Pili store. You have to picture us walking around this entire time in a shopping centre lugging around our big wheelie suitcases.

We had a lot of time to kill before our flight to Cebu so we explored more of the shopping centre. Ippy found a massage place called “Viva massage” that offered massages with very attractive pricing so she decided to go for an upper body massage (PHP 200). Whilst she was there, she quickly learned that “Viva” stood for “Vision Impaired Voice of Albay” and that most of the staff there were visually impaired. She was quite satisfied with the strength of her masseuse who was indeed visually imparied and made polite banter with her.

With time running out after the massage, Ippy lamented that we weren’t able to go to a hairdresser as well.

We found and bought fake Aloe Vera at the SM department store for Ippy’s sunburn and then promptly went to the Legazpi bus terminal, which was across the road from SM Mall. Surprisingly, there didn’t seem to be any shuttle buses to the airport despite a whole range of other destinations available, so we took a Grab to the airport instead.