We just cleared security and are about to board our flight. A great trip, lots of great memories and our new friends Jack and Traci.

Aloha Big Island!

Just about everywhere you drive on the Big Island of Hawaii, you see massive expanses where the lava has recently flowed (recent meaning within the last couple of thousand years or much, much newer). It doesn’t matter which mountain/volcano you look at either. The land is so new, it looks like construction crews have chewed up the earth and are getting ready to build something…but thats not the case… its just Mother Nature recreating herself.

This is s shot of just a very small section of the coastline as seen from the Chain of Craters Road. Some of the newest land on the planet. When I get home, I will be stitching photos together in Photoshop to create a panorama… this is Kiluea slowly forming its shield. One eruption after another…flow after flow…One flow covering the last, which covered the one before that… devastation and creation all at the same time…

Just a small section of the Kiluea Coastline

Detail shot of the ribbons of lava...beautiful patterns

The Kiluea Iki Crater is just to the left of the main Kiluea Caldera. This massive crater is from an eruption in November 1959 that spewed fountains of lava into the air filling the expanse. The whole eruption had 17 episodes and lasted only 5 weeks.

The lava lake filling its bottom is now a well hardened crust that you can walk on, but the ground is still steaming from the magma that is still cooling some 52 years later.  We didn’t go down because it was 400 feet to the base on a steep loose gravel path.  In this photo you can clearly see the path along the lava bed where many people have walked once reaching the bottom. To give you a sense of the size, if you look really close you can see little specs of people walking across it right now.  You can also see the active Halema`uma`u Crater releasing deadly levels of sulphur dioxide in the background.

Little specs of people can be seen walking across the bed...look close to the left...

At the end of the Chain of Craters Road is where the original Visitor’s Center to the Volcanoes National Park used to be… The road is now closed by the eruption event in 2003 and the Visitor’s Center moved up to the top of Kiluea on the rim of the caldera.

If you look close, you can see the "Road Closed" sign in the background on the left.

We missed all the big action by just a few weeks. While the lava has stopped flowing into the ocean with event #59 “the eruption of the Halema`uma`u Crater inside the Kiluea Caldera” back in March 2011, and event #60 “the overflow of lava from the Pu`u `O`o vent” now in a deflation cycle the Volcanoes National Park was still a sight to see.

Halema`uma`u Crater seen below is still releasing extremely high levels of sulphur dioxide gas into the air and the crater has an eery red glow at night. The road around the crater rim is still partially closed, but this is the view from the Jagger Museum, with Stacey sitting about as close as you would want to be on the edge of a volcano that (although it seems quiet at the moment) is still technically in the middle of an eruption.

A’a (Ah-Ah) and Pahoehoe (Pa-hoy-hoy) are the two kinds of lava you find flowing from the volcanoes in Hawaii. A’a is a slower moving lava that looks a lot like tilled earth slowly oozing along. It is cooler (relatively speaking) than Pahoehoe and more porous as it releases gases as it inches forward, destroying anything in its path.

Pahoehoe is a more fluid lava and this is the stuff you see flowing more like a river. This molten rock is usually a very high volume and can move very quickly along the surface (I think the park ranger said something like 300 cubic tonnes or more per second).  Pahoehoe can turn into a’a  as it gets cooler. It doesn’t always turn to a’a though as sometimes it can cool without breaking up and it creates a ribbon like pattern. The chunks below are from 1972 flows found at the Jaggar Museum  at Volcanoes National Park.  We saw some very cool patterns in the field as well along the Chain of Craters Road.  Stacey says the Pahoehoe looks like the surface of a brownie whereas the a’a looks like crushed Oreo cookies.

We saw a man die today while we were snorkelling at the Place of Refuge. We had just come out of the water after a quick snorkel and after touring the Place of Refuge; a sacred site where Ancient Hawaiians lived and celebrated rituals.

After coming up on the rocks, (there are very few sandy beaches here), we noticed a crowd of people on the rocks over to the left of us about 100 ft away. It was only a matter of seconds before we realized there was a young woman performing CPR on an elderly gentleman that had been pulled from the water. She had been working on him for at least 10 to 15 minutes before any Emergency Services were able to arrive.

We didn’t get close because there was nothing we could do and there is no point getting maha’oi (in the way or sticking our nose where it doesn’t belong), so we sat back by the boat launch and just watched. When EMS arrived, the man had still not come around and they quickly put him on a stretcher and whisked him into the ambulance. You could see they were still trying to resuscitate him, but to no success. The ambulance eventually pulled away without any lights or sirens.

We overheard another gentleman say “He already had a bad heart, but when he dove down deeper when snorkelling, it was to much pressure and he just arrested.”

noho lani aloha

Every night we head over to the lava wall, what separates us from the ocean and watch for what we hope is a beautiful sunset. Little did we know that a school (is that the right word for more than a few eels?) of eels was hiding below us in a tidal pool. It does fill up at high tide but late in the afternoon the eels will show themselves for a few bites of meat! Chicken, sausage, brat worst or whatever. Brad thinks they look harmless then remembers that they eat MEAT! Hard to get a good shot but here it is. Like our own personal aquarium that we get to feed every night!

Punalu’u Bakery. The sweetest most tasty bread ever. We’ve been eating this bread for as long as I can remember coming to the islands. I was very surprised to find out that the bakery was actually only about 60 miles away in the middle of nowhere. I mean nowhere. Located on highway 11 about halfway between us and the volcano is the bakery where they have been baking sweetbread ever since the recipe was brought here from Portugal sometime in the 1940′s. Or around that time anyway.

As well as the tasty bread (I bought five boxes of the mix to bake some of my own at home) they make fresh malasadas (fancy word for hole less donut from Portugal) in a few flavours, regular, strawberry filled, lilakoi (passion fruit) and my favourite, a bismark! The building is very clean, they serve sandwiches, ice cream, donuts and coffee. The patio is very nice and shaded by large plumeria trees and palm trees…………it’s too bad that the women working there aren’t servin up the aloha spirit. I almost apologized for being a customer until I realized that maybe they were all on a work release program from prison. Anyway, maholo for the sweet treats maybe by the next time we come back they will have added a little sugar to their personalities!

Hilo is a pretty big town.  Its not quite a city. At least not what we’re used to, calling a city, but it’s a bigger town than Kailua-Kona where we’re staying. It kind of reminded me of the time me and Mom drove through Drayton Valley, Alta in 1978… except I am on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with Stacey in 2011. There are glimpses of things that seem more modern, but its still just a town and it doesn’t seem like its going to get any mo’ bigga than it is today… its like “stuck in time”, 30 years behind all the other small towns in the world, but very pretty and peaceful….anyhooo… Big Island Candies…

Stacey had read about “Big Island Candies” in one of the tourist magazines you pick up when you arrive in the islands… 101 things to do on the Big Island… She came across an advertisement with pretty coloured boxes that caught her attention. Then we looked it up in the Lonely Planet guide book… there wasn’t a lot of info available about it, but hey there’s not a lot we knew about Hilo anyway except it seemed like an old town and well… “we like candy!”, so why not?

Well…you go through an old neighbourhood that seems kind of residential… “are you sure we’re heading the right way?” she asked… “Yup” I said…and then we came upon it… It was as modern a building as you would find in any large city in North America… “Damn, these must be good candies to build a place like this up around the shanty driftwood shacks you find in this old town…”

The best part when you walk through the door? FREE SAMPLES! and they’ll open just about anything so you can taste it first!  Stacey liked the shortbread, but the best thing I tried was the Hawaiian Chocolate Crunch… and there was this other chocolate toffee thing with a chili pepper spicy after bite… YUM! Anyway, about $75 later we were on our way!