With still some time left in Hawaii, we decided to organise flights over to one of the other Hawaiian islands. So we flew to Hawaii or Big Island as it's known, the most southern of the islands. There was one main reason to go here....the bloody great big active volcanoes! One in particular, Mauna Loa which is 29,000 feet from the ocean floor and at 19,000 cubic miles is the biggest, single volcanic structure on the planet so pretty cool! It's also "active" but the current lava flow was in a place off limits which was a shame as sometimes you get to see it flow, so the next day after we arrived in the town of Hilo on Big Island we headed off to the Volcanoes National Park aboard our little tour bus.
Soon we were well in the park and looking out across a massive crater, the "Kilauea Caldera" and other craters. They were absolutely massive, I had a hard time trying to fit them in the photos. You could see steam escaping from cracks in the ground in places as we drove by and when we got out to look at another crater (at the Kilauea Iki Overlook) soon enough we were coughing from the fumes in the air that turn slightly acidic in your lungs. We drove through lava flows from past eruptions and even saw where there used to be roads before the lava flows. The whole landscape was barren, with rocks, craters, mounds of the cracked black cooled lava that stretched out over the horizon...it was like the surface on the moon or something. Except that it was raining - darn volcano attracts a lot of cloud!
Our last stop of the day was to walk through the Thurston Lava Tube, made from magma sealed in by rocks that after time of being constantly kept hot, the outside hardens, then when the magma is released, a tube is left behind. It was a rainy trip but pretty good!
With still some time left in Hawaii, we decided to organise flights over to one of the other Hawaiian islands. So we flew to Hawaii or Big Island as it's known, the most southern of the islands. There was one main reason to go here....the bloody great big active volcanoes! One in particular, Mauna Loa which is 29,000 feet from the ocean floor and at 19,000 cubic miles is the biggest, single volcanic structure on the planet so pretty cool! It's also "active" but the current lava flow was in a place off limits which was a shame as sometimes you get to see it flow, so the next day after we arrived in the town of Hilo on Big Island we headed off to the Volcanoes National Park aboard our little tour bus.
Soon we were well in the park and looking out across a massive crater, the "Kilauea Caldera" and other craters. They were absolutely massive, I had a hard time trying to fit them in the photos. You could see steam escaping from cracks in the ground in places as we drove by and when we got out to look at another crater (at the Kilauea Iki Overlook) soon enough we were coughing from the fumes in the air that turn slightly acidic in your lungs. We drove through lava flows from past eruptions and even saw where there used to be roads before the lava flows. The whole landscape was barren, with rocks, craters, mounds of the cracked black cooled lava that stretched out over the horizon...it was like the surface on the moon or something. Except that it was raining - darn volcano attracts a lot of cloud!
Our last stop of the day was to walk through the Thurston Lava Tube, made from magma sealed in by rocks that after time of being constantly kept hot, the outside hardens, then when the magma is released, a tube is left behind. It was a rainy trip but pretty good!
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