Yesterday was our "day in Hilo". After our morning litany, we headed off Northeast up highway 130, past Pahoa and then to highway 11. Our first stop was the Pana'ewa Zoo.

Jenny is a big fan of zoos. I like them too. The Pana'ewa is small, but nice. They have a Bengal Tiger, giant anteaters and a number of cool primates. We wandered around there for a while, ducking for shelter during a brief rain storm.

Throughout out trip we have been seeing these squirrel-like creatures darting across the road. It turns out these are mongeese - like Riki Tiki in the Jungle Book. They have always slithered into the shrubbery before we could get a good look at them. I bring this up here because one of the exhibits at the zoo was a squirrel - not the brown squirrels that we have in abundance in New York, but a squirrel nonetheless. We thought it was funny that we've been seeing mongeese all over the place and came to the zoo to see a squirrel.

We stopped off at the gift shop on the way back, Jenny bought herself a cuddly stuffed anteater and some gifts for back home. After this, we were on to Hilo proper, a short distance away from the zoo.

As I said earlier, Hilo is pretty much a normal city. When we came into town on route 11, we kept on going at highway 19 to ride down Banyan Drive. As its name implies, Banyan Drive is lined with some very impressive Banyan trees. It looks like most of the hotels in town are built along this road, too.

Banyan Drive is also the home of Lili'uokalani Gardens - a set of gardens, paths, and bridges built around and over an ocean-fed pond network. We hadn't planned to stop there, but when we saw it we were so impressed that we had to check it out. The design is very Japanese, and we had fun walking over the bridges and watching the little black crabs scurrying into the rocks.

Every Wednesday and Saturday, Hilo hosts a farmers markey. A small portion of this is actual produce, the rest is cool stuff being sold by local craftsman and vendors. We walked through this for a while, had lunch in town and then went to the mall.

Yes, mall. There's at least two big normal shopping malls in Hilo, I needed reading material for the long trip home tomorrow, and we needed some groceries, so our trip was largely functional. But also, Jenny was longing for something that didn't involve scrambling over lava.

We saw the "Narnia" movie, then got some perishables at Safeway before heading back home. Our cottage is about 40 minutes away from Hilo.

The Volcano

Today we drove out towards Hilo again, but took a left turn onto route 11 instead of a right - this time our destination was Kilauea, the Big Island's active volcano.

The top of the Kilauea Volcano, where the crater is, is 4000 feet high. You don't really notice this as you drive up to it because, like all of the mountains on the big island, it is extremely wide. I think we were climbing during a gentle grade during the whole trip. Kilauea is actually a bump on the side of the 13,000 foot Mauna Loa mountain.

They charge $10 on entry to Volcanoes Natural Park, this buys you a receipt that you can use to enter the park as much as you want for the next seven days. We started by driving the road that runs around the park - we stopped at spots that looked interesting - the scenic view of Halemaumau crater, a little crater within the greater crater, was high on our lists.

Halemaumau crater was a simmering pool of lava between 1905 and 1925. It subsequently cooled off and was the site of some secondary activity, like explosions of steam building up under the hard surface, over the course of the last century. The rock forms three distinct bands of color in the inner walls. Hawaiian myth holds this crater to be the home of the goddess Pele.

Leaving the overlook for the crater, I had to check out some of the steam vents near the path - these would be the first of many that I explored that day. I don't know what it is about me and steam vents. It's steam coming out of holes in the ground - pretty cool the first time, but no big deal, right? But nevertheless, every time we saw a steam vent I felt the need to run up to it and stick my head in the whole. "Wo, check it out! It's steam!!" Jenny did not share my fascination.

After the Helemauamau crater, we circled back around the outer rim to the Kilauea Iki hike. This was our main purpose in being here. The Kilauea Iki hike runs about 4 miles - along the rim of the crater through rainforest, and then down into the crater and across a small sea of lava rock. It was rated in the guidebook as the best hike in the park.

It was late morning at this point, and we were both pretty hungry. We didn't want to take that hunger on the hike with us, so we drove down into "Volcano Village" nearby and had some lunch. Then we headed back to tackle the trail.

It really was an amazing hike - lots of scenic views of the canyon from above, and the incredible see of lava below. We descended a steep slope down a zig-zagging path onto the crater floor. At this point the rainforest gave way to crumbled rock. Cairns and the wear on the rocks from the many hikers before us showed us the way through the rockpiles. This went on for some distance (maybe 100 yards?) before crumbled rock gave way to a more or less smooth surface.

These kinds of "lava sheets" are interesting - they flow into small hills. It's like walking on solidified waves. There are big cracks in some places, holes in others. Through these apertures you can see that the surface that you are walking on is a thick, hardened shell that often has air-filled (or rubble filled) gaps underneath it. By way of confession, I believe it was I who first referred to the rubble filled ones as "rubble bubbles".

Again we saw steam vents, the first of which were on top of big piles of rocks. These looked particularly cool, so I had to climb to the top of one of the rock piles to completely experience one of them.

Coming out of the crater, we went back up another zigzaging path through the rainforest. Aside from the spectacular vegetation, the one thing that I noted about the rainforest trails were the "crevices". Along these trails were a good many crevices through the soil and into the rocks, some of which had no discernable bottom. In many cases, there were railings built around these, presumably to prevent the unwary from stumbling into them (this is a very user friendly trail).

We completed the trail in just over two hours - pretty good time. It was still relatively early in the afternoon, so we decided to check out some of the other sites in the park.

The biggest "tourist magnet" in the park appears to be the Thurston Lava Tube. A lava tube is pretty much what it sounds like - it's a channel through the stone that lava used to flow through. When the lava flow slows down and ends, an empty tube remains. In this case, a very big tube. Big enough to drive a car through.

It's very civilized. There's a paved path that runs through the rainforest, down a long set of stairs, and across a bridge into the mouth of the tube. The first 1000 feet of the tube have electric lights strung up along the sides and is very cool to walk through. At the end of this section is a break in the wall where a staircase has been installed to give you access back to another path that returns to the parking lot. Beyond this break is the remainder of the tunnel, which is not illuminated and can only be explored if you have flashlights. Needless to say, I was sorely disappointed that we didn't think to bring flashlights. I think Jenny may not have been quite as upset.

We finished off the day with - what else? Steam vents! Specifically, we went to the officially sanctioned steam vent viewing part of the park. Just off the road were some more of those big crevices, these surrounded by railings and emitting large amounts of steam. It was interesting to stand next to them, feeling the hot sun, the cold mountain breeze and the hot steam at the same time. We likened it to the experience of a hot-fudge sundae.

Beyond the easy-access vents near the parking area is "The Steam Bluff". This is a row of steam vents that run along the edge of the crater. It's accessed via a network of small trails running through a field.

This was to be our last night in Hawaii, so we made reservations at a nice Italian place in town. We sat and talked on the lanai for a while afterwards while I smoked a strong cigar. Tomorrow we will be homeward bound.