Day 1823: The Red Road

After stocking up on sunblock, we went to drive the scenic Red Road, so called because it used to be red.  We did not go to Lava Tree Park, instead going to a number of other state parks, including one where a woman had her pet parrot perched on her shoulder.  

My favorite was MacKenzie Park, where there are gorgeous ironwood trees and even more impressive splashes from water hitting the cliffs.  Our guide told us that the water splashes so high because it’s deep, and thus the waves don’t slow down before they get to the land.  Anyway, you can go out to the edge of the lava cliffs and peer over the edge and watch the lacework-like fanning out of the water as it splashes in the air.  

If you Google “mckenzie park hawaii yelp” the first result is for a Yelp review that says  "Fantastic park to have a toddler birthday.”  This is probably for a different park because MacKenzie Park is probably the worst place I can think of to have a toddler birthday except for maybe a china shop or an explosives factory.   We had to park to ourselves for a while, but were then joined by a group of hula dancers out to film themselves dancing in front of some suitable scenery.  MacKenzie Park is said to be haunted, but we did not see any spooky ghosts.

The photos don't do it justice, but at the very least you should click on the photo to see the full size version (for this photo and all the nature photos) and you'll start to get the idea

 

All along the Red Road are places where the trees and vines encompass the road in a green tunnel.  It looks like one of those places you’d see on an Imgur collection of beautiful roads, if you were willing to set up a tripod in the middle of the street to take a picture.  We were not willing to do that so our pictures just looked like this:

We then went down to a place where a bunch of cars were pulled over.  We pulled over too and found a bunch of little stalls and a guy trying to sell us weed and some naked people.  It was just like home!  Actually the naked people were down a steep path, where we found Kehena black sand  (clothing-optional) beach.  It is a testament to the ground here that a black sand beach seemed super logical and we were only wondering why all the sand is not black.  On the way back from the beach we bought some delicious blueberry cobbler from a nice woman smoking a joint and charging what seemed to be impractically low prices for baked goods.

In a stunning example of evolutionary adaption to Hawaii, we saw a crab on the black sand beach that was black.  It looked so similar to the rocks around it that you couldn’t see it unless it moved.  This is fortunate, because we didn’t take a picture of it, so here is a picture of some rocks that is indistinguishable from a picture of a crab.  

Actually, the worst part is, when I went to pull up the photo of rocks I had taken for this paragraph, it turns out that my finger had been in front of the camera lens, so this is just something from the Google image search results for "lava rocks"

Finally, we got to Kalapana at the end of the road.  There used to be a village there, but it was destroyed by lava, so now there are just a bunch of people selling things.  It kind of sucked - we tried to eat lunch at a hippie-crunchy-granola place called Karuna Foods, but it appeared to be manned solely by someone dicing onions who felt no need to ask if we wanted to buy anything - which was just as well, since the menu didn’t really appeal. So we went back to where we started.  We took the fast route and not the scenic route, but we failed at not being scenic because we had to pull over after finding these guys:

Chickens are basically the bison of Hawaii

We found that because they live on the side of the road, we could get much closer to them in the car than on foot, because while they are afraid of people, they are used to cars.  Chickens!

Speaking of chickens and lunchtime, our guide at another stop mentioned that one day a friend of his got really bored and killed and ate a roadside chicken.  His friend's report was that it tasted terrible.  So, if you are in Hawai'i, our advice is not to eat chickens that are wandering by the road, unless you are very very hungry.

To get to our next destination, we had to loop around, and so we did go to Lava Tree State Park after all!  It is full of trees that have been engulfed by lava and so look like this:

The next stop was Isaac Hale Beach Park, where we went to pick up our boat tour in the operator’s homemade boat (it took them over a year -- to make the boat, I mean, not to pick us up.  You can tell because this entry is dated 2017).  

As a side note on time, I'd heard the expression "Hawaiian time" used at work to mean "keeping business hours that would make sense in the Hawaiian time zone" but people on Hawaii use it to mean "running behind schedule".  Despite this, pretty much tour we went on asked people to arrive at least 15 minutes early to "check in" and then started almost exactly on time; our lava boat tour actually left 15 minutes early.  But if we were on, say, a 15-person 2pm tour that actually left at 2:04pm, our guides would attribute this "lateness" to Hawaiian time.  Maybe it's just folks in the tourism industry trying to meet tourist standards, but it seemed like Hawaiians are in fact terrible at being late.  It was like what would happen if you told Germans to relax and not to worry about the timetable.

Anyway, back to the tour, where we first had 40 minutes of rollercoaster-like riding on massive swells — according to our guide, ancient Polynesians would use the swells to navigate, making sure that the swell hit their boat at the same angle to know they were going straight, and detecting that they were near land by changes in the swell patterns as waves bounced against the shore.  Along the way we spotted sights like perfectly round holes in the cliffside.  Can you guess what this is?

If you're having trouble figuring out what you're supposed to be looking at in this photo, click on it to enlarge it, then look for the hole in the middle of the cliff.  Or you could look at the screen and shout "enhance!", I hear that works too.

Answer: It’s a lava tube, the former ocean entry point of the lava flow.

You would probably do better at identifying the modern day ocean entry, which looks like this:

Although our view was mostly huge clouds of steam, we did get to see some red-hot lava oozing into the ocean. Other observations: jets of brand-new rocks hitting the water and being kicked up into the air, like a series of muddy splashes; more pumice-like rocks hitting the water and floating, leaving trails of steam in their wake; a weird not-quite-sulfur smell that helped make everyone seasick; the “bonk” sound of volcanic rocks that had been flung into the water floating upwards under the boat and hitting the hull.

After the boat tour it was time to go home.  In part to protect Mauna Kea from light pollution, the island has limited street lighting — what we did see was generally LED lighting, highly directional and pointed straight down.  Some of the older lights are sodium vapor instead, and produce an effect exactly like that of the Exploratorium’s Monochromatic Room (which also uses sodium vapor lighting), washing away all colors in the areas they light.  The road to Volcano, despite being a major route, has no streetlights, but Alex was continually impressed by the high quality reflectors. They were really good!