Yesterday we packed up the car and said goodbye to Mauna Kea. We were off to the other side of the island, for the final leg of our trip in Puna.

Most of the trip was spent on highway 19, which runs roughly along the coast of the big island all the way around to Hilo. The trip took us through all kinds of terrain - pastures, rainforest, coastline. The road dipped into some very cool gulches along the east side of the island.

Hilo is a fairly large city on the east coast. Unlike Kona, it is a "normal" city - not a tourist town. We hadn't been following directions, and we missed the turn in Hilo and ended up on a local road that continued to follow the coast. There were some really nice looking parks where the ocean flowed into small marshes of lava-rock, augmented by footbridges and paths.

A number of people at Mauna Kea had warned us that the west side was "the rainy side" of the island. This semed to coincide with our experience, for as we drove through Hilo it started raining quite hard.

But we were going to Puna. We found the turn-off onto highway 11, and headed southwest towards Pahoa (the town nearest where we are staying). As we proceeded into this region, the skies cleared up a little and the rain stopped, turning into a beautiful partly-cloudy day.

The cottage where we are staying is in a strange little residential area near the coast. It's strange because it's very much like the suburbs I was raised in, but cut into rainforest. The yards tend to be surrounded with all manner of local trees and bushes. Vacant lots are basically jungle. Aside from that, it's on a normal two lane road grid with houses and parked cars. I guess the roads are a little narrower than where we came from, and it isn't a very big grid - we counted three roads parallel to the main road with two cross streets. The parallel roads dead-end on either side of the cross roads. The cross roads terminate on the third street.

The cottage itself is amazing. It's kind of the Hawaii equivalent of a cabin in the woods. It has electricity and a phone line (shared with another vacation house nearby). There's a small kitchen area with a cold-water-only sink. The bathroom consists of a composting toilet and not much else. The shower is outdoors - a hot and cold water showerhead surrounded by rock walls and shrubs for privacy. I wouldn't recommend it for the very modest, although it is nice to shower outdoors here.

Also not for the very modest, there's a "swimsuits optional" black sand beach a short walk away - we went over to it yesterday afternoon but there's a steep path that runs down to it and Jenny was wearing flip-flops, so we didn't go down. But from the top, we could definitely see nekkid people.

Last night we polished off the bottle of champagne that the Mauna Kea had given us and went to bed. Our plan was to do the "Puna tour" today.

The Puna tour is described in an article that we found in the cottage. It consists of a number of interesting sites along the coast and on the way back to Pahoa. One of them was our nearby beach. We decided to save that for last so we could relax and enjoy it.

Our first stop was the lava field and the island's newest black sand beach. We drove to the beginning of the main road we're on, you can see the lava fields right along the road - the result of a lava flow in 1990. The fields are incredible. Acres of black rock, the surface sculpted into sinuous organic patterns. We had to walk over it for about a quarter of a mile before we came to the beach.

Black sand is pretty cool. It feels just like any other sand, but it's black. The surf on this part of the island is very heavy, and we were treated the first of many of the day's watershows as it crashed against the beach and black rocks.

There were a lot of very young coconut trees along the beach - I guess "sprouting coconuts" is a more correct description than "young trees". Some of them were arranged with patterns of stones as some sort of rock garden. I'm not sure why people arranged them that way. I wondered if the coconuts themselves were brought there by humans or just ended up there as the result of some tropical storm. As it turns out, they are planted by the locals in an effort to reclaim their beachfront.

After the lava flows, we went to the painted church - this was a nearby church that had been moved out of the way of a previous lava flow. Formerly a Catholic church, it is now mainly a tourist attraction.

Next up was the "steam vents". There are fields in puna with rock formations where steam - heated by the volcano system - comes up through the ground. At first, you're not sure what you're looking for. There's a parking area off the side of highway 130 with a sign saying "scenic point". The first time I saw it I couldn't imagine what they could be talking to because it appeared to be right next to a field of brush. Nothing to see there!

If you park there, you can find a very narrow footpath through the brush. The path goes in a little ways, and lots of other paths jut off to the sides. We stayed on the main path (determined to find our way back) and at some point I passed some rocks and noticed heat coming from them. I stopped and pointed them out to Jenny, and sure enough, the rocks concealed cracks in the earth from which steam was rising.

It turns out that the paths the branch off from the main one formed a network of trails to the various steam vents in the field. Some of the more impressive of them were in the form of big pits with ladders descending into them.

In the course of all of this, Jenny ran out of memory in her camera, so we decided to go back home for lunch and continue the tour in the other direction. We stopped off in Pahoa so Jenny could pick up a new pair of cheap sunglasses (hers had been cracked on the nose bridge and had finally fallen apart on the lava flow) and headed home for sandwiches.

After lunch, we headed out in the opposite direction on our main road. Our first stop was McKenzie Park, whose only claim to fame was that there were park benches and picnic tables made out of pieces of lava. We saw the tables, and they were good. We also saw some more very impressive watershows, as the monstrous southern surf beat against the cliffs of McKenzie park. Imagine, if you will, a wave crashing against a thirty foot cliff with force enough to splash buckets of water onto the top!

I tended to get very close to the edges of those cliffs to watch the show, it occurred to me at some point that this might not have been wise as I saw the pile of rocks that had previously been the cliffline at the foot of one of them.

After McKenzie, we went to Isaac Hale beach park and watched surfers riding good sized (8 foot?) waves. There's a boat launch there which makes the surf accessible - there's no beach. The water ends in a rocky shore. The surfers ride in to about 100 feet from shore and then dive off their boards to avoid crashing.

We proceeded Northwest along the shoreline until we reached Ahalanui park, which features a pool heated by the volcano. The water is comfortably warm, not very hot. We might have stayed for a swim but we weren't into it.

Our final stop of the day was the "Lava Tree" state park (and if you are considering any jokes about having to go to the "lava-tree", stop it - done that already). This park is on the way back from the shoreline to Pahoa. The road runs through some sort of fruit plantation with bizarre looking little fruit trees.

The Lava Trees were a forest that was inundated by a lava flow. When the lava surrounded the trees, the moisture from the trees cooled it off, causing it to harden around the bottoms of the trees before the trees themselves were incinerated. The area has now reverted back to forest, but is full of these cylindrical monuments to the original trees. If you examine them, you find that they are hollow inside and the original root, branch and bark structures are visible. Additionally, the park has lots of deep crevices in the ground - walking off the path is not recommended.

On our way back, we stopped off in Pahoa and got some drinks and snacks. By this time it was after four. We headed back to the cottage and took a walk down to the beach, but the angle of the sun was already against us - not a very good beach for late afternoon. As soon as we got to the beach, it started to rain. Most of the people there were started to leave. The rain passed quickly, but the lack of direct sunlight and the force of the surf here conspired to create a situation that was not very hospitable to beach-frolicking so we went back home. We went back into Pahoa for Thai food later.