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Volcanoes fascinate me.  This is strange.

You see, I have not seen many volcanoes.  I have never seen a volcano erupt.  Although, I felt the wrath of Mt. Pinatubo when it erupted some years ago.

I was in college in Manila when Mt. Pinatubo, which is located outside of Manila, coughed out ashes that spread across the globe. At about 5:00 p.m., the sky darkened and it began raining ash. By 6:00 p.m., it was completely dark and everything was covered in a thick blanket of ash. By some miracle, my dad found me and took me home. We drove at a speed of about 2 kilometers per hour as our windshield was covered in ash and we could not see where we were going. Mt. Pinatubo buried several towns leaving many dead or homeless. Such was the effect of its fury.

Despite the danger that volcanoes pose and even if I never saw a volcano cough out lava or ash, I am drawn to them.

Before my trip to Indonesia, I have only seen four volcanoes, Mt. Mayon, Mt. Pinatubo, the Taal Volcano and Mt. Sto. Tomas.  So you can imagine what joy I felt when I saw not one, but seven volcanoes, while I was in Indonesia.  Even better, I saw five of them at one time.

I should not have been surprised by the number of volcanoes I saw in Indonesia since, according to this article,

“Indonesia leads the world in many volcano statistics. It has the largest number of historically active volcanoes (76), its total of 1171 dated eruptions is only narrowly exceeded by Japan’s 1274, and these two regions have combined to produce 1/3 of the known explosive eruptions. Indonesia has suffered the highest numbers of eruptions producing fatalities, damage to arable land, mudflows, tsunamis, domes, and pyroclastic flows (104, 186, 84, 13, 76, and 96, respectively). In the first five of these, Indonesia also leads other regions in the global proportion of eruptions with each characteristic.

Four-fifths of Indonesian volcanoes with dated eruptions have erupted in this century, and history shows the danger of volcanoes that have not erupted in recent centuries. Relatively few stratigraphic studies of older volcanic deposits have been completed in Indonesia, and only 0.5% of known Indonesian eruptions have been dated by other than historical techniques, emphasizing the need for more study of the prehistoric record in this region.”

But I was surprised.  More than that, I was awed and humbled by the strange sort of friendship that the Indonesian volcanoes have extended to me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 12:08 am and is filed under My Indonesian Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.