The Big Island Day 1

The past two days we were on the Big Island, it is about a 30 minute flight from Honolulu. It is the biggest island and is twice the size of Delaware. There are 13 different type of climates in the world and the Big Island has 11 of them. If you don't like the weather you can just drive a few miles and it will change. Another crazy thing is that there are old lava fields all over the island. It is like driving in a desert except it is lava everywhere instead of sand. We really liked this island, if we were going to move to Hawaii we would live there.

The first thing we did upon arrival at 6:45 am was go to Volcanoes National Park. This is what I (Josh) have been most looking forward to. We got there so early that we were the first ones to the visitor center and the only ones there. We did several things at the park. Unfortunately there is not place that you can see active lava right now so that was a little disappointing. We went and saw the active volcano Kilauea. You can't get real close but it was pretty cool to see. We also saw lots of steams vents while driving around coming up through cracks in the ground. We then went and did a 4 1/2 mile hike around the top and through the Kilauea Iki crater. This is the crater from the 1959 eruption of the volcano. The hike around the crater rim was very jungle like. Then we went down the crater and hiked through the lava lake bed. It was really cool to see all of the different lava formations, some of it was smooth, some was really craggly, some looked like asphalt, there were different colors of lava. From the crater rim the lava bed looks smooth, we were surprised that it was very rough and uneven. There were lots of big cracks and steam vents throughout the lava bed. They say the lava is still cooling and you can feel heat from the lava that is still hot a couple of hundred feet below the surface. It was really awesome to hike through. Also on this hike was the Thurston Lava tube where the lava cools on the outside and hot lava continues to flow through the inside and it makes a tunnel. After the hike we drove down a long road that went through the lava fields and had views of the ocean. The road ended where lava flowed over the road several years ago.





This is us during the long hike in the middle of the crater.


lava tube


lava field leading to ocean




After we left the park we drove to a black sand beach. It is black because the sand is made from lava. It was cool to see but was rough on our feet.



Next, we drove to Lava Tree State Park. This is where lava flowed a long time ago and cooled on some huge trees. The lava burned up the trees on the inside but the cooled lava stayed standing up like a tree trunk.



We then went to Akaka Falls which is a ginormous waterfall. It was really beautiful.



It was a really long day which included like 7 miles of of hiking. We finished the day by eating at an awesome Japanese restaurant. It was some of the best food we have had. It was mostly local looking people there, I think there may have been one other white american in there besides us. They did not even have silverware, just chopsticks. It was really, really good.

There are tons more pictures on our Picasa site. Day 2 of the Big Island coming soon.