More Big Island Wonders

29 March 2008-

My last day on the Big Island was awesome. I started out early and spent a few of the morning hours browsing and shopping at the outdoor farmers market in the center of Hilo. It was amazing how cheap the fresh produce was. Huge heads of organic romaine lettuce for $1. If I were staying longer I would've done my grocery shopping there.

There were also vendors selling jewelry, I bought a few things, mostly earrings. All of the stuff was handmade and gorgeous.

Around noon I met with Brendan's friend Archie, he is from the Big Island. He picked me up near the hostel and brought me back to meet his house to meet his parents. The front yard had a giant above ground swimming pool, and there was also one in the backyard. I found out later from his dad, that they were in fact water treatment tanks. They use only rainwater for showering, cooking, sewage and drinking! With 142 inches per year, this makes sense. They collect it in the swimming pools and treat it themselves, self sustainable.

So Archie took me to the Volcanoes National Park. We went to the Volcano House for lunch and got to see the steaming lava from the window while we ate. The above sign greeted us as we entered the park.

As Archie is not a big hiker, we did part of the Crater Rim trail, enough to view this beautiful phenomena. I can't believe that I was lucky enough to be on the Big Island when the gasses were being emitted from the volcano. Usually these pictures above would be just large valleys looking over the craters, no smoke.

The lava tubes were something we went to have staring at the smoking volcano for awhile. Archie did not seem to be as impressed with all of this as I was. He grew up taking his field trips to lava flows, craters and volcanoes, I took my field trips to museums with little particles of rock behind glass saying "do not touch". For me this was a mind-blowing experience. The lava tubes were kind of like caves formed by hot lava. We didn't venture too far back into them because I am a bit claustrophobic in caverns and tunnels. At one point we got to a point that when we turned off the flashlight, it was COMPLETELY black.

This is a shot I got coming out of the lava tube.

Above was the last sunset, an overcast one on Hawaii. It was still beautiful. The Big Island is the most spectacular place, where nature is a living being.