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2nd Nov 2005
Nay ne ne ... but volcanoes
Wednesday, 2nd November, 2005
Again, not a fast start this morning. I wrote some logs while Anne and Betsy took in some heat out on the deck during an open air breakfast.
We finally left at about 10 and dropped into Macy’s in the village so that I could purchase a loud Hawaiian shirt. Standing round in a plain polo shirt out here you really standing out in the crowd!
We then stopped in at the Java Lava café with the intention of making a few quick uploads to the webpage. Got ourselves a table, bought smoothies … only to find that the connection was down. We set off for Hilo via the Saddle Road en route to Volcanoes National Park.
Picking your way up towards Mauna Kea, you drive though lush open grasslands on the way, and cut through what were obviously some quite long established ranches. Occasional lines of trees The Parker ranch just to the east is the largest ranch holding in the States and the Parkers seem to run pretty much everything in that area. They have a House of Bruar type outlet in Waimea.
Then you get up on to high plateau where the Saddle Road cuts through. The area is a military training ground so its not necessarily somewhere where you would comfortably linger; its also really windy … quite a warm wind , but blowing at Force 6 or 7.
It wasn’t really possible to get much of an impression of Mauna Kea – its nearly 14,000 ft high and I suppose that we must have climbed to 8 or 9 to get over the saddle, but from the road, its too close or too cloudy to get a view of the top and the observatory.
Once clear of the military camp, you start to get a view of the lava beds, just masses of black rock, some built into walls at the roadside … and with a road cut through. It looks like the moon.
Starting to drop down the other side towards Hilo we passed through Kipuka Puaulu, a Ne Ne (Hawaiian Goose) sanctuary … but didn’t see any. The area closes from November 1 to February 28, presumably for the breeding season.
As soon as we hit the ‘watershed’ and started moving into the east side of the island, the lichens started growing on the rocks and the completely black volcanic lava beds which were almost bare of vegetation, took on a grey tone as lichens simply carpeted the rocks and hung from the trees and bushes. Not sure what the habitat would have been called … it must be above the rainforest – perhaps wet temperate? Dropping further down, the rainforest trees, plants and ferns took over.
We arrived at Volcano village at about 3.30 and checked in to My Island bed and breakfast, owned and run by Gordon Morse – former local journalist, turned tour guide, now turned host. He has a certain style about him and obviously relishes the company of his guest house guests. He was holding forth at the table, as I gather he tends to do, with an attentive audience of new guests who had fortunately arrived just a few minutes before us and we were able to earwig on their briefing without the full blast of it being directed our way. Gordon is really knowledgeable about the islands and has written several books describing some of the sights and some of the history.
As we entered he boomed a welcome along the lines of ‘Don’t tell me. Your name is Moore’. It turns out that all his newly arriving guests this afternoon are called Moore - the others hailing from Tennessee. They were nice enough family, four of them but we quickly exhausted the possibilities of out Tennessee roots and their various Scottish connections.
The B&B is at 4000ft and gets 160 inches of rain per year. Outside it was laying down a good few millimetres in the garden, but luckily, just a few miles down the road, on the crater rim drive it was intermittently dry but really windy.
The landscape in the park and immediately surrounding the chain of craters is just so new and different; flat flows, strewn with boulders blown out by past eruptions and left lying randomly on the surface. Roadside signs urge slow speeds and constant vigilance for ne ne, but sadly, there were ‘nay ne ne’ for us to see,
We left at 4 o’clock in order to be able to get down to the shoreline by 5 and then to be able to walk out towards the active lava flows by the time it was dark – when you can see the orange of the flow. The drive down to the coast offers some spectacular views and we stopped once or twice to record it. As we arrived at the end of the road … or at least the point where the road has been cut off by a flow and where there is a ranger base set up, the red of the lava was just beginning to become visible as the sun dropped.
There were a lot of people there and a line of parked cars, with the result that we ended up with another third mile to walk we were so far down the road. Walking towards the ranger base the stench from the toilets over powered the faint sulphur smell from the lava. We watched the safety video which advised on the dos and don’ts of lava watching. The main don’t was not to go too near the coastal edge as the newly formed lava gets massively undercut and very large chunks of it break off regularly in to the sea.
We took the trail out from the base (along with a couple of hundred others). Many were diverting of to a nearby view point from where you could look along the coast perhaps half a mile and see the active lava edge pouring into the sea and the consequent billowing steam. We elected to take the trail … and then go beyond the trail so that we halved the distance. We settled onto a prominent viewpoint along with another fifty or so people. A few went on but they were very much a minority. It was quite spectacular, but too far away to get decent pictures … and and reviewing the pics I took, its clear that you need to be there just as the light is failing, this would give you enough ambient light to capture some of the rocks and the movement and it would also allow sufficient contrast for the molten flow to register deep red.
We walked back well after dark with torchlight and eventually found the car and then joined the procession up the hill which was mercifully fast and those that were dawdling pulled over to let the queue through.
We arrived back in Volcano Village at about 8.30, in time to be able to get a dinner at the Lava Rock café … it was still raining up there ! Dinner not much to write home about, but the ‘Volcano’ wine was interesting a really fruity, almost sherry taste to it.
We got back to the B&B at about 9.30 to find the lights on but everyone else in bed. I was delighted to discover that the place was hot wired so I was able to check e-mail and deal with the overdue making of various contacts for the Australian leg of the tour.
Bed was welcome but slightly damp and cold – what a climate! Who would choose to live in this when just a few minutes down the road is tropical Hawaii !!
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