From our home base in Waikoloa, we visited A’Bay beach, Hapuna Beach, Mauna Kea Resort Beach, the Mauna Kea observatories and Waipi’o valley. That was a lot of new sites and experiences for us. On Wednesday, we left the resort area of Waikoloa and drove south along the west coast of Hawaii Island stopping for lunch at the Kona Brewery, Co. and arriving in the evening at our new home in Volcano Village. This house was quite a change. The house is a stilt house built in a rain forest. The lot is dense with fern trees, flowers and other ‘wet forest’ looking plants and trees.
We spent Thursday in Volcano National Park. This is a very interesting park – rain forest, steep trails, desert-like caldera, earthquakes, steam vents, lava tubes, fault zones and flowing lava. We hiked about 7 miles through a rain forest, through a lava tube, across the Kilauea Iki caldera, and around the Kilauea caldera. Cheryl called it “the land of the lost”.
All four of us in front of the Kilauea caldera.
Looking into the Kalauea Iki caldera (the twin of the Kilauea caldera).
…and through an ancient lava tube…
Hiking across the Kilauea Iki caldera stepping over cracks in the lava that expose deep holes.
I took a ton of pictures of various ferns, flowers berries and other vegetation. But I thought the new growth on the giant fern trees called fiddle heads were cool:
We came back that night to look at the steam rising from the caldera. The steam is due to rain water finding its way down to the molten lava. At night, the steam cloud glows from the lava pool right below it.
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