Holy Week 2014 - Mt. Maculot

To celebrate Holy Week vacations and the streets of Manila being more traffic-free than they usually are, we had a happy hour at a sky deck in the Spanish colonial section of town.  It was actually a beautiful, clear afternoon perfect for views of the city.

On Good Friday, I headed south of the city to do a hike called Mt. Maculot.  It was a traverse hike that had a bit of a surprise at the end.  

Towards the end of the hike, there was a small hill where some Good Friday processions were taking place.  Looked like minimal crowds and nothing too big.

However, upon re-entering the woods for the final descent, we ran into a huge group of hundreds of people also trying to make the descent back to the village following their procession.  There were so many people that the military had been deployed for crowd control at a bottleneck point on the trail with some steep rocks.  We eventually got through and the pushing didn't give way to anything too bad, but it I have never seen so many people on a single trail before.