Joe and Françoise's excellent adventures!: The Big Island!

Another early start to catch a plane to the Big Island of Hawaii. It’s name is actually Hawaii, but that’s just confusing, so it’s generally referred to as only the Big Island - which it is: Indeed, it is more than 1.5 time bigger than all of the other islands put together. It is also - by far- the most recent one - at about 500,000 years, while Kauai is at least 2 millions years old. It’s because it is the closest one to the hot spot that has created them all, and is still growing because of it. It contains The Volcanoes National park, which (amongst many volcanoes) contains the tallest volcano on earth (Mona Kea - which, if you measure it from the bottom of the ocean where it starts, is taller than Everest), as well as several active volcanoes - one of which we visited - Kilauena.

But first, we had to get here. It’s a short flight, about 50 minutes, which provided very nice views of our hotel on Waikiki and of the entire caldera of Diamond head, as well as of some of the sights we had seen the day before.

We then drove to the national park and walked with a very knowledgeable guide along the rim of the Keleauna caldera: It has been quite active recently, sending lava 1000 feet in the air just a couple of weeks ago, but today, only smoke (a lot of it!) was coming out - It is very grand and awe inspiring, but very hard to capture in pictures - in part because of its shear scale, in part because the shades of the different layers of lava blend together. So just take my word for it - it is very cool.

Along the trail, there are many lush areas, which all kind of beautiful ferns and flowers taking advantage of all the heat and moisture provided by steam holes everywhere - right by the holes, nothing grows because it’s too hot, but nearby is very green and lush.

(More pictures of flowers at end of blog).

This is what the trail look like in places - just a long row of steam holes lining it……. And here is me getting a free facial from all that steam.

We then drove to the West side of the island - in between the 2 big volcanoes, on what is called, for obvious reasons, the saddle road. It was very overcast and gloomy, and we could not see the volcanoes (we will have other opportunities to do so), which apparently is not uncommon: they are so tall that they create their own climate and it is cloudy or rainy more often then not. Indeed, on the east side of the island (where we landed - on Hilo), it is the rainiest spot in all of Hawaii. Which explains while the big resorts are not there.

The saddle road goes through the lava field, which look even more grim with this grey weather. We learned more about the different type of lave than I remember right now…. (Top picture is the smooth lava - i think because it flows faster… but don’t quote me on that one….)

As soon as we started descending toward the ocean on the other side of the volcanoes, the sun came out as expected. We are still on a lava field: this entire resort town is built on a lava field! I’ll have more details about it tomorrow. For now, here are just a couple of pictures to show how very lovely it is.