Day 1822: Into the Volcano

The very first thing we did in the morning was visit the Thurston Lava Tube.

I told Alex that the tube gets crowded, but he is skeptical.  After all, we went there at 9am and it looks like this:

Outside the tube we also see a bunch of honeycreepers that are red, and trees with roots hanging in the air.  There are 50 types of  honeycreepers and other finches on Hawai’i, all evolved from a single variety of finch.  We learned that in the video at the visitors center, where we will rest after going on a hike.  But now I am telling the story out of order.

Next stop is Kilauea Iki hike.  It goes through the jungle, then across a volcanic crater.  

What a lovely forest trail!

Wait, we aren't really hiking down and across that, are we?

In the jungle, we see a bird with a red head, with a plume like a quail.  It doesn’t mind us very much.  

Walking down to the crater is verry treacherous, but at the bottom we are rewarded with crazy terrain and some of Pele’s hair, thin strands of lava that do indeed look just like blonde hair.  (The Hawaiians seem to attribute lots of volcano related stuff to different parts of Pele — the sulfur that crystallizes outside of steam vents is even Pele’s piss.)   

OK, technically the caption said the translation was "Pele's waste", but come on.

Another exciting part was finding a steam not-quite vent.  When you were quiet and crouched low to the ground, you could hear the steam flowing underground, which sounded like sand flowing through an hourglass.  The ground was also notably hotter there than elsewhere — I almost burned my hand touching the rock. 

Life, uh, finds a way

The hiking boots were a good investment

 

Steam not-quite vent.  Hot hot hot!

The terrain was pretty rocky and tricky but the group in front of us was wearing flip-flops so maybe it wasn’t as bad as we thought.  After hiking out of the crater (estimated elevation gain based on how the hike felt: 1 million feet) we were very hungry, so it was time for lunch.  We went to a vegetarian cafe and sat in the yard, which was also home to the owner’s pet rabbit, who is bigger than our cat and seems to share at least one hobby with her (laying in the sun and doing nothing).  The owner is also an artist and there was a really cool gallery with all kinds of jewelry, housewares, and prints.  The ribbon scarf, apparently designed to allow accessorizing with a scarf in a climate where the temperature rarely drops below 50 degrees, seems to be a signature item, although the only thing we got was loofah soap. (Later we discovered that ribbon scarfs were available elsewhere on the island.)

After lunch, we went to the visitors center where we saw an introductory film about Hawai’i and I only slept through very small portions of it.  We learned that the squirrel-like critters we saw darting across the road were mongoose, and that they had been introduced to Hawai’i to eat rats.  However, it turns out that mongooses don’t eat very many rats (they are diurnal, rats are nocturnal) and also they eat eggs of native birds.  It seems like this plan was not really thought through.  We also learn that because Hawai’i has no native grazing animals, plants lose their defense mechanisms — raspberries have no thorns, and mint doesn’t taste minty. In conclusion, if you care about good food, you should be a fan of arms races.

The Big Island is known as the "Orchid Isle" despite the fact that only three varieties of orchid are native to it.  Although I never got a very clear explanation of what it means for something to be native to Hawaii.

Next we drove Chain of Craters Road, going through and rating the craters.  This crater gets an A:

This crater gets a D:

This crater gets an “incomplete”:

It was kind of unclear whether it was a crater or a ditch

We admired the nice new pavement on Chain of Craters Road.  I guess it was because they had to redo the road recently...I suppose the reason might have had something to do with this?

There were a bunch of lava fields on the side of the road but lava fields at this point are like buffalo to us — we don’t stop for them.

zzzz

Yawnsville!