Photo: George Tapan

You are probably trying to work this out in your brain right now – how can you have an island within a lake, on an island that is within a lake, that all happens to be on another island?

Let’s start at the end and work our way down to the smallest island. The largest island in the Philippines is Luzon. On Luzon is a big freshwater lake, Taal Lake, that is roughly 15 by 10 miles. But the lake is not just water – on Taal Lake there is a medium-sized island formed by a volcano, appropriately named Volcano Island. Here’s where things get crazy. On Volcano Island is a lake sitting within the volcano crater. And just one more for good measure, in the crater lake is another small island (the speck in the middle of the picture above).

Does this remind anyone of the children’s song with the descriptive lyrics, forever zooming out and always ends with “and the green grass grows all around”?



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