Elly woke up sick. It seems she's caught my cold. Its not very bad, just sniffles and such, we're hoping it stays that way.
We'd mostly packed for our hike the night before, so all we had to do was put our store-bought sandwiches from the fridge into our bags and go have breakfast. On our first day, the guy at the car rental place gave us a coupon for Daylight Mind Coffee Company, and said they had great waffles. That sounded like a pretty good place for our pre-hike breakfast. I had a vanilla bean waffle with strawberries and Elly had the stuffed french toast. They were both pretty good, but nothing to write home about. (Ironic sentence.) Elly's hot chocolate came with milk-foam art, which is always fun. My coffee was 100% Kona, and brewed by the cup. Very delicious. The thing that made breakfast awesome was eating right on the ocean. The sound of the surf and the breeze was very invigorating; it made me want to get straight to the hike!
On the walk back to the car we got stopped by a jewelry booth. The saleswoman said "Good morning! How was your breakfast?" as we passed, and somehow we magically got sucked right in. Her shop was called Blue Water Fantasies, and she had a lot of beautiful stuff made from Hawaiian stones and woods. We browsed a bit and picked up a couple of pieces that we think will make good gifts. I cool looking worry-stone for my desk.
Breakfast and surprise shopping out of the way, we began the drive toward Volcanoes National Park. The drive was very scenic. I was beginning to suspect that the beautiful plants and flowers along the streets of Kona were just a cultivated city thing (which of course they are) and that when we got out of town things would be a lot less pretty. Boy was I wrong. If anything, the streets of Kona are only barely taming the wild rainforest they are encroaching upon. All along the 2 hour drive to the park was beautiful trees and flowers, interrupted occasionally by the tiny fruit and coffee farms that dotted the coast.
At one point we crested a hill and the beauty of the ocean unfolding before us became too much and we had to stop at a well placed lookout to take a panorama. It was during this stop that Elly noticed we had some kind of a leak under our car. A fair-sized puddle had accumulated under the car and begun running down the hill. She got on her hands and knees and could see that there was a regular drip coming down from somewhere. My sleuthing determined that the fluid didn't have any distinct texture, color, or odor/flavor, so I deduced that it was likely water. Still... it was dripping pretty fast. We elected to drive on, but to keep a close eye on our gauges.
Soon we arrived at the Kilauea Visitor's Center. We headed in and explained to a park ranger that we were looking for a long, challenging hike that we could complete before dark, and did she have any she could recommend? She told us that what she recommended initially was a 1 mile ranger-guided hike that would be leaving in 3 minutes. We dashed to the car, traded our horrible, flip-floppy devil-shoes for some hiking boots and joined the group just in time. The hike was basically a nature walk along a paved trail, but it gave the ranger an opportunity to point out some of the more common plants, and to orient us to the park. We learned about some of the hazards we might find on the more challenging hikes, and we learned about some park history, and we learned about pig gates. This is probably the most interesting, and eye opening, thing I learned about on the walk. Early on in the western-civilization habitation of the island, the settlers brought pigs with them. Occasionally a pig would escape and become feral. Feral pigs would breed more feral pigs, and now the island has a bit of a feral pig problem. The pigs LOVE the roots of a certain kind of fern, and they'll dig holes in the ground and eat up the root. These cup-shaped holes will fill with water, which will then become a breeding ground for mosquitoes. The mosquitoes become a vector for the rapid spread of avian malaria, and because of that (and other factors) several species of Hawaiian birds are now extinct. People → Pigs → Ferns → Mosquitoes → Malaria → No more birds. Very sad. So, along many of the trails you will encounter gates that are meant to keep pigs out. Large sections of the park are gated off, and in these gated off sections they corner the pigs and remove them.
Anyway, orientation now over we seek out a real hike. After chatting with a ranger we settled on Kīlauea Iki followed by the Thurston Lava Tube. This required us to go back to the car, because the trail head was a short drive away. When we got back to the car, there was another large puddle under our car. After a second inspection Elly determined that whatever was leaking we were now out of, because the drip had stopped completely. So, with fears that our hiking day was now ruined, I called Budget's roadside assistance while Elly and I ate the first of our packed sandwiches. A short conversation with them concluded that it was probably nothing to worry about. When you run the AC in your car it can get very cold, and here in the tropics there is so much humidity that you can get large buildups of condensed ice around these parts. When you stop running the AC it begins to melt off immediately. So, probably nothing to worry about, but we should keep an eye on things. Now that I know about it, I'm seeing these AC puddles everywhere in covered parking garages.
Whew! Crisis averted. To the trail! Kīlauea Iki trail begins at the rim of a volcanic crater. You descend via switchbacks through 400 feet of rainforest to the surface of the crater where you cross volcanic lake which is still steaming 54 years after its spontaneous creation. Then you hike back up 400 feet to the trailhead.
Wow.
The initial hike down was pretty incredible. Everywhere we looked was lush, green foliage punctuated by spiky, red flowers or purple and white orchids. Sink-holes and cracks regularly dot the trail, plunging deep into the earth but still filled with new life. Birdsong filled the air. Eventually we got to the bottom to the volcanic lake. That was a whole other experience. A vast, desolate, gray-black pit in the earth, with vents of steam wafting into the air all around. One does not simply hike into Mordor. On first impression the crater was very bleak. We headed out across the surface of the lake, connecting the dots from Ahu to Ahu (stacks of rocks that act as trail guides). When we got out far enough that we were surrounded by lake on all sides, we could see the surface was made of a tessellation of large, car-sized bulges in the lava, kind of like the surface of a pineapple. In the valleys between these bubbles the lava would often split apart, and in the shade of these splits new life was taking root. Lots of little plants and flowers were springing up everywhere, if you knew where to look.
At the end of a long, unsheltered trek we were back to the shade of the rainforest. (I was actually surprised that this part of the hike wasn't hot at all, actually. I'd anticipated sweltering and being utterly (comparatively) miserable, but turns out that while the color black may collect heat, the altitude and cloud cover that day had resulted in a very manageable temperature for our hike. -E) We'd figured out part way through that we were actually doing the hike backwards, and on the uphill we found out why. This side was much steeper than the way we took in. Hooo! But we're no strangers to an uphill hike, and we tackled it with a minimum of resting. I gotta say, though, when it comes to exertion I prefer Colorado hikes: A difficult uphill hike rewarded with an easy downhill to get back home. Hawaii has that all backwards.
Next was an extremely short hike through the Thurston Lava Tube. This large cave was formed as lava flowed through, cooling around the outside, but leaving fast enough to not cool in the center. This left a natural tunnel of lava rock you can easily walk through without ducking. The pictures are really not going to do this justice. (Branden made the comment on the way to the tube, "The birds sound so Disney; this sorta seems like a ride in Disneyland, like 'small world' or whatever." Once we got to the tube, that feeling got stronger. It actually feels a lot like Pirates of the Caribbean, but if you can keep the authentic-ness in mind, it's... just stunning. -E) If you are in Hawaii and you don't have time for a hike, the two things you absolutely MUST see is the Thurston Lava Tube, and the Kīlauea Caldera. Both of these can be seen only a couple minutes walk from your car, and they are truly awesome: both in the "whoa, cool" sense and the "awe-inspiring, kind of scary" sense.
The entirety of our hiking that day was about 5 miles. We didn't bother recording the visitor's center hike, but we recorded the rest of the hike via GPS. You can check out our route under "Hikes" below. Turn on satellite view to see actual pictures of the surface we saw, its pretty awesome.
Elly's phone battery ran out just as we ended our hike, because she was GPS recording. Our camera battery was on its very last tick, after nearly 3 full days of photos. My phone had enough juice to navigate us home, but only just. Our human-batteries were pretty close to empty as well. On the route home we ate our second sandwich and nearly a full bag of Maui Onion potato chips. Oh man, are those things tasty! They're very similar to sour-cream and onion chips, but kind of sweet. (They taste like caramelized onions, IMHO. -E) Very delicious, especially in context. We decided that our sandwiches and chips probably counted as dinner, so when we got home we had a bit of ice cream, watched an episode of The Fringe on Elly's laptop, and went straight to bed.
I wonder what tomorrow will bring?
Hikes
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bwn0Nhn0wkPTWS1NVUVaby1IbFE/edit?usp=drivesdk
Photos
https://plus.google.com/photos/105719328153023565846/albums/5940694298431429841?authkey=CL2j-fb2uo_M0QE
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