Day 0-1: Volcanoes und Park

At some point, my parents realized that they had never gone to Hawaii. Also, they realized that their copious amount of accumulated frequent flier miles would get them there. They asked my sister and I if we wanted to go. We did. And here we are!

Right after landing in Honolulu, we immediately headed to another plane to head to The Big Island of Hawaii, otherwise known as Hawai’i. An interesting thing about the airports in both Honolulu and Hilo (the airport in the Big Island) was that both of the airports were open-air, with lots of the walkways being completely open. Tells you something about how the weather is in Hawaii when they don’t even feel the need to build full walls.

We got into Hilo Airport fairly late, rented a car, threw our stuff in and proceeded to drive across the island to Volcanoes National Park. You can get a sense of the drive here via the blue line:

Day 0 Route

As the name implies, Volcanoes National Park is more or less right next to a few large volcanoes and craters, including Mauna Loa, which is apparently the largest active volcano in the world. Here’s an example of one of the large craters you can see in the park (Halema’uma’u Crater)

Halema’uma’u Crater

Around 9pm or so (which is 2am in my time zone), we get to the park and find our lodgings, which turns out to be a cabin near the campgrounds (Namakanipaio Campgrounds). 

Cabin!

This cabin was kinda great, being more or less right in the middle of the nature. Very Non Non Biyori. Apparently it was pretty cheap too, $65/night for 4 people? Part of that is probably because it’s closer to camp than lodge. The cabins didn’t have individual bathrooms, instead with communal bathrooms complete with showers. Interestingly, the bathroom doors were locked, requiring a key, which was kind of annoying since 4 of us had to share 1 key. (Something pretty amusing was that for the men’s bathroom, somebody had duct-taped the lock, essentially bypassing it. The groundskeeper found it later and ripped it out, cursing whoever did it). The other thing was that there were no electrical outlets in the cabin. None. At that point I realized how many electrical devices I wanted to charge that I couldn’t (my cell phone, 3DS, and the laptop that I’m typing this post out on of course). Of course, everybody else in my family was in the same boat.

Also, it was hella cold. I normally live in Pittsburgh, and when departing from there, I was escaping freezing weather and snow. When we got there at night, it was probably 40-50? Not nearly as cold, but I was prepared for tropical weather, with shorts and everything.

So in the morning, we climbed out of the covers (best sleep I’ve gotten in a while, too, must be the air and quiet) and had a simple breakfast of bread, nutella (acquired from the legendary Foodland grocery that we stopped by on the way there), and smuggled avocado and pomelo grapefruit (that my mom was totally supposed to declare to Hawaiian agriculture…).

Afterwards, we drove to the Visitor’s Center of the national park to get our bearings and confirm plans. There’s a nice map of the entire park there:

Volcanoes National Park Map

You’ll notice that a good portion of the park is closed (in orange), due to toxic fumes from one of the craters.

Don’t die.

Another interesting sign that I saw:

NENE ALERT

Apparently, there have been a bunch of Nene (Hawaiian goose, state bird too) that have been killed by cars. I kept looking for them when we were here, and I only saw one of them for a split second as we were driving. Every time I saw these signs about Nene, I kept thinking of this Nene, mostly due to playing Project X Zone:

Nene(ko) Alert!

We first headed to the Thurston Lava Tube:

Thurston Lava Tube

Before we actually got to the lava tube though, we caught sight of a bunch of kids holding hands and standing in a circle. Probably some sort of demonic ritual. Still kinda cute though.

School trip? Demonic Ritual?

Actually getting to the lava tubes, you can see how the tunnel that’s been carved by previous lava flows stretches out:

Lava tube~

Honestly, it reminded me a lot of some JRPG level. You literally walk from a forest path right into a dank tunnel, then, you go through the tunnel and back out.

Back out into the overworld.

Next, we visited an area with lots of steam vents. These steam vents are due to volcanic activity underground (or something like that? I don’t remember the exact phenomena).

Steam vents~

Somewhat surprisingly, they don’t really smell like sulfur, as you’d might expect (especially if you’ve been to places like Yellowstone).

Our next stop was Jaggar Museum, presumably named after famous geologist Mick Jaggar or something.

Jaguar Museum (421HK)

The museum had a bunch of exhibits, but more interesting were the views of the nearby Mauna Loa volcano (apparently the world’s largest active volcano) (unfortunately, the clouds obscured most of the actual volcano in the photo below):

Mauna Loa

You also get a really clear view of Halema’uma’u Crater which actively has lava boiling in it:

Halema’uma’u Crater

Originally, the plan was to head to Jaggar Museum to join a walk lead by a park ranger, but on closer inspection, it turned out that the walk was actually meeting at the visitor’s center. So, we ran back into the car and headed straight to the center to join that walk.

The walk was led by a Ranger Noah, who’s a master’s student at a university in nearby Hilo. The walk seemed to be down an old road that was actually meant for vehicle traffic originally that fell into disrepair and turned into a hiker trail:

Post-apocalyptic Nature Trail

I don’t remember how long the road had been closed off to vehicular traffic, but it really looks like nature is quickly reclaiming the road. Reminds me of some post-apocalyptic movie where humans are gone and nature is reclaiming these man-made structures. The ranger walk was really interesting, with Ranger Noah talking about many of the flora and fauna and the history of the volcanoes.

One story was about lava flows that got dangerously close to the city of Hilo back in 1880 or so, when Hawaii was still run by the Hawaiian Empire. The townspeople ran to their leader (King David or something?) to help them, but he wasn’t there. Instead, two princesses decided to instead do something about it. One, Princess Beatrice (?) (who according to the photo, was hot), very Christian, prays to God and offers things like roast pigs to stop the lava. The other, her cousin Ruth (who according to the photo, was huge and probably could hundred-hand slap someone into oblivion), decides to pray to the old gods, and goes right up next to the lava flow with alcohol, red silks, and other offerings and chants to the gods to stop the lava. Then, she turns to her men and tells them that they’re staying there for the night. Then, they all die.

RIP Princess Ruth

Nah, actually the lava stops and everybody lives. (alt ending provided by the ranger). We actually also end the walk with a chanting by the ranger to this Princess Ruth, presumably thanking her for stopping the lava flow.

We next head to Mauna Ulu, to walk among the remnants of a previous eruption:

Mauna Ulu Eruption Trail

During this trail, you can see a bunch of rock formations that used to be lava, like the black rocks here:

Old lava

The trail was also a good excuse to take pictures of the various fauna in the area, such as the flowers of the ubiquitous Ohia tree.

Ohia tree flower

Apparently, the default flower color is red, but there are rare yellow ones and ultra-rare white flowers. Personally, I never saw any colors other than red while walking around.

After getting lost among the lava rocks, we got back into the car and drove around the Chain of Craters road, which goes around the large craters in the park, to the point where you can actually see the coast:

Da beech!

Also at this time though, you can also see storm clouds rolling right into the scene:

Stormclouds going in

At this point, rain starts falling and it actually gets pretty heavy. We escape the area and get some dinner at a local Thai place (which unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of). Place was also pretty packed, probably because it’s one of 4-5 places to eat in the area. Also, because we didn’t have electricity in our cabin, we ended up commandeering outlets near us at this  restaurant.

Lastly, we headed back to Jaggar museum to take another look at the crater at night. Since there’s magma actively boiling in the crater, the plumes glow red at night:

Crater at night

(As an aside, it’s really freaking hard to take a picture of this plume at night, I ended up doing a 15s exposure).

Overall, it was a pretty fun day, learned a lot about the nearby nature and got to more or less walk around a bunch of volcano-related stuff.