Kilauea and Volcano National Park

Trip Start May 01, 2008
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Trip End Jan 04, 2009


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Where I stayed
(Hilo hotels)

Flag of United States  , Hawaii,
Saturday, November 1, 2008

At 4:00am on November 1st Max and I boarded a tour bound for the lava fields on the south coast of Hawai'i. We were leaving at this time for two reasons, one being that lava is best seen at night, and the other being that we were skirting the law by going on this tour. Where the lava is flowing used to be a town and the tour guide owned a house there. The house has long since been burned down, but the property is still hers, so if anyone asked we were "going to check on the property", which let us get past the security barriers designed to keep tourists away from the lava field. Instead of getting to a vantage point about a kilometre away from the lava we were instead less than 50m from where the lava was exploding into the ocean and oozing across the beaches.

While my pictures aren't that great, the experience of watching lava explode into the ocean and the air was an absolutely spellbinding one, and we stood watching for easily an hour while it seemed no time had passed at all. While we watched the sun came up, giving a totally different perspective of the lava, and just before we were going to leave the vent opened up and lava poured out in a flow across the rocks. It is incredibly surreal to watch the red hot lava ooze out of the ground and form all sorts of incredible patterns as it hardens on contact with the air.

After watching the lava for an hour or so we returned to the tour van and travelled back to Hilo, where our tour guide then endeared herself to us forever by helping Max and I find a car rental place that would rent to me even though I was only 21. For the remainder of the trip we had a little red sunfire to call our own, and it made getting around to all the tourist locations infinitely easier.

Around mid-morning we left for Volcano National Park, which contains the actual crater of Kilauea and a number of other lava formations. We had initially planned to hike around the whole park following the crater rim trail, but the Halema`uma`u Crater (the crater located in the center of Kilauea's caldera) was giving off massive clouds of toxic sulfur dioxide that prevented us from following that route.

Instead we took a couple of hikes, one along the caldera wall viewing steam vents and sulfur pits, and the other through the Kilauea Iki crater. The steam vents and sulfur pits were interesting, although sulfur certainly does stink. The walk through the crater, a smaller crater to the west of Kilauea Caldera, was the long one, and walking across a crater under the midday sun is a very, very tiring experience. The desolation of a crater cannot really be described, and the pictures barely do its bleakness justice.

We also took a hike through a lava tube, which is what we saw in action earlier in the morning where the lava hit the water. The lava tube is formed when lava flows in a large flow and the top layer hardens while underneath it continues to flow, creating a tube of solid rock around the molten lava. Obviously the tube we walked through was an extinct one, but the inside was still filled with interesting formations created by the lava as it drained out.

After seven hours of hiking we made our way back to town, stopping briefly at a Macadamia Nut factory on the way. While we were too late to take the factry tour we did manage to snag a lot of free samples, including the most delicious chocolate I have ever tasted. Unfortunately the price was such that free samples was all we could afford.

The day finished with a free pizza dinner supplied as part of the lodge's guest appreciation night, which was a wonderful treat by them and most appreciated by us.
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