The Big Island: Day 6 & 7

On Thursday we left Kauai and flew to the Big Island of Hawaii. John had been interested in seeing Volcanoes National Park, and I fearfully went along. John had been checking frequently and up until mid-June Kilauea had been erupting, unfortunately then it stopped. We weren’t going to see any lava flowing, secretly I felt a little relieved. Thursday was a whirlwind; we woke up, flew to Hilo, and checked into our bed and breakfast. Here is our room, we had a lovely view from our private lanai (balcony).

We then rushed out to the park to look around. Now while I do think that volcanoes are neat, I don’t share quite the enthusiasm for them that John does. The whole time he is saying, “Isn’t this cool, we’re walking on lava!” Meanwhile I am thinking …Um, well it looks like a lotta black rocks. We decided to do a short 4 mile hike (uh oh I’m starting to refer to 4 miles as short) through the center of an old volcanic crater. By now I was kinda sick of hiking, however it ended up being more interesting than I anticipated. The crater looks very smooth from up high, but when you are walking on it, it is very bumpy and uneven. That faint white line through the crater is actually the trail we walked on.
There were spots where steam was coming out of the ground, neat to see! Overall a good, but tiring, hike.



The next day was our last day in Hawaii, and so we thought we’d cram as much into it as possible. We woke up to a lovely breakfast on our lanai, and then set out for the day. We were not going to be able to see everything so we narrowed it down to a few favorites. We started by going to a beautiful botanical garden that had a lot of unique tropical flowers, birds, etc.

A large tiki named "Ku" carved from a single monkey pod tree.

A pineapple bush.

We then we drove to 2 pretty falls in the area. This one was the largest drop we had ever seen, 420 feet from top to bottom! This was a different one that we were able to stick our feet into, however had to be careful b/c the current was so strong.
After those stops we headed back over to Volcanoes National Park to see some things we hadn’t seen the day before. There is a road that you can drive on to see all of the most current lava that has erupted, so we thought we’d check it out. I have to say that this was much more interesting to me, and seeing where new land was being formed when the lava flows into the ocean was pretty cool.
Here is a geological phenomenon, a sea arch formed by the ocean hitting the lava rock.

Even though I was initially not too crazy about being near lava when it was erupting, I do think that it would have been a neat thing to see, and maybe sometime we’ll be able to go back and visit when it is erupting.