Tagaytay
An hour south of Manila on a six-hundred-metre ridge, Tagaytay is the closest cool-air escape from the capital and frames the country’s strangest geological view: Taal, a small smoking volcano on an island in a lake on an island. The ridge road is lined with restaurants whose only feature is the view, and the standard weekend agenda is breakfast at Bag of Beans, the panorama from People’s Park in the Sky, and a late lunch of bulalo (beef-shank soup) on the way back to Manila. Note that Taal’s 2020 eruption closed the volcano-island boat tours; the rim view is the show now, and on a clear morning that is more than enough.
