The Big Island Part 2

After lunch, we got to go to the main attraction of our tour: Volcanoes National Park. Volcanoes National Park is a huge area, and takes up a major portion of the island. They started by taking us to an overlook in the front of the park, where we could see the steam venting out of one of the main fissures in the park.

The park is up at a higher elevation, and as such is actually quite a bit cooler in temperature than the majority of the islands.  From the lookout we walked about a quarter of a mile through a fairly lush group of trees, and to the entrance of the Thurston Lava Tube. I can't really explain it as well as Wikipedia, so here's the link to that page.

A bit of a blurry shot from inside the lava tube.

 We then went to another steam vent before heading for the visitors' center. Brynn (and nearly everyone else) cheesing it up at one point or another.

Brynn cheesing it up :)

From the visitors' center, you can see the main fissure of the volcano, but of course at a much further distance. This is actually the second visitors' center, as the first one was within a 1/4 mile of where that particular fissure is now spewing smoke. Thankfully at the time it started erupting was at 2 in the morning, so there were no injuries from the new eruption.

As Brynn put it, me blowing my top

The volcano was extremely interesting, but the better views were actually later on. But first, they took us to another feature I'd never seen before, a black sand beach near Kalapana.

The beaches are formed by the volcanic dust related to the new eruptions, and are an extremely cool sight to see. As the tour guide put it, we were standing on the newest land in the world, and even younger than us.

The final stop on the tour was out to the lava flows at Kalapana. This is the area where the lava continues to flow, and has done so for years. There used to be housing out in the area, but over time a lot of them have been taken by the lava flow. However, some still remain, and are even trying to move the properties still.

Out in front of some property in danger of the lava flow.

We were lucky enough to see a couple of breaks which caused some lava to show on the surface.

Taken from about 200-300 feet away approximately (not sure)

Overall, it was an extremely interesting trip, and the fact that we were able to see some lava flow before leaving was extremely cool. The tour bus took us back to Hilo's airport, where we were able to get a snack at the one dining counter/refrigerator before flying back to Oahu. All in all, it was extremely interesting, even in spite of the poor performance at lunch. It was just so cool to see not only the black sand beaches but also the newest land being formed out there.

The Big Island Part 1

Well, it's been a while since I've written again, and I've actually been busy working (I know, it's a shocker). A little less than a month ago now, Brynn and I went on an all-day trip/tour to the Big Island of Hawaii.

The Big Island, (actually named Hawaii, as opposed to Oahu, where we are), is much more sparsely populated in comparison to Oahu, and part of the reason for this is the fact that the island is home to active volcanoes. This was the biggest reason we actually wanted to go, so that we could see the volcanoes potentially.

The tour started with a pretty early pick up. At 6:15 am, the tour group and their smaller tour bus (about 20 people at most) arrived to pick us up for our ride to the airport. It was only about a 30-40 minute ride to the airport, and we were ready to wait for our short flight.

It was a little less than an hour until our flight, and the irony was not lost on me that the wait would be longer than the flight. From Honolulu, the flight to Hilo Airport is only about 40 minutes long. We then arrived there around 9:15, and were greeted by what can only be described as a tiny airport.

We walked to the tour guide, who proceeded to inform us that we needed to get our boarding passes for our return flights before the tour would get started. After a bit of frustration, we were able to get the passes, and proceeded to wait on a similarly small bus as the rest of the group joined us.

We were a bit surprised as the bus left the airport with only about 15 people on it, despite a capacity of probably 25. The tour guide informed us that our first stop was the Big Island Candies, a business that would allow us to see them make a bunch of sweet treats. What we did not realize at the time was that the bus was dropping us off here, and leaving us there while they went to go pick up some other tourists from Maui for our tour as well. The inside of the place was realistically, only going to take up about 15 minutes of our time. However, the bus did not return until almost an hour later. Needless to say, there were quite a few concerned looks from the tour group who had been sitting there. This did, however, give me the opportunity to take a picture of the cool scenery that could be seen from the building. The land just kind of rolls slowly upward, and makes for a really cool effect.

Once the tour bus finally picked us up again, we were taken past Hilo's hotel row. It consists of about 6-10 hotels at most, but the interesting part was the fact that on the other side of the street were a number of banyan trees. Each of the trees had a small sign in front of them, notating who had planted the tree. There were quite a few famous people (Amelia Earhart, Richard Nixon), but to us the most interesting one was the tree with a sign in front of it noting James S. McCandless. We haven't been able to determine if he was related to Brynn's family, but apparently he was a fairly important figure in the early part of the 20th century on the Big Island.

We were then brought to Lili'uokalani Park, which is a Japanese garden set up right on the coastline of Hilo Bay. Not a lot to say necessarily about the place, but the pictures came out extremely nice.

Ground Level view of a small lake in the Park

The view from ground level of a small bridge

After a stop at a small farmers market, we were on our way to our next attraction, Rainbow Falls.

The park where the falls are located actually had a few different interesting things to it. With some lucky timing, we were able to get a really great shot of a small gecko hanging out there.

In addition, there was also an extremely large banyan tree in the park, which has actually rooted itself in multiple locations at this point.

After finishing up our time in the park, we then went to Volcano Country Club for our scheduled lunch. I'm not going to get into this too much, but the essentials are this: the food was not that great, the service was even worse, and was really not a very good feeling overall.

The second half of our trip will be in the next post.