Monday 1st February

Another lazy breakfast with Gigi the cat for company. She is very vocal and rules the roost here.

Drove down to Volcanoes National Park on the south of the island.  I don't know how many of you are familiar with the size of the Big Island but big is appropriate. it's double the size of all the other hawaiian islands put together. It took 2.5 hours to get there via a long, winding coast road to start with then it headed inland and climbed up to 4000 feet.

Kilauea is massive. The Halema`uma`u crater is just a small part of it. No lava but a gas plume is visible. A fantastic and impressive landscape. Lots of steam vents alongside the roads as we drove around Crater Rim Drive. You can't go all the way around due to sulphur dioxide gas but what you can see is amazing.


The Thurston Lava Tube was also recommended to us. A bit creepy to think that molten magma used to flow through it and now people can walk in it.  There's also another bit you can explore if you have a torch and suitable shoes (we didn't).


The drive continues along to the coast passing lava fields from various different eruptions. There's no lava going into the ocean at the moment. We took a short walk through some from 1971. It is already being colonised by plants and flowers. A pretty desolate landscape in all. There are two different types of lava - pahoehoe which is smoother and a'a which is spiky and difficult to walk on. The hawaiian names have been adopted as names for lava across the world. 


The USGS site has loads of information about the volcano http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/kilauea/

 A long drive home partly in the dark which was 'interesting' (read slightly scary) on these roads.