Notes from Our Vacation - Hilo, Hawaii

We sailed from Los Angeles the afternoon of Wednesday, February 22nd, and arrived at our first stop - Hilo, Hawaii - shortly after 8:00 AM on Monday, February 27th. As I noted yesterday, we quickly learned why we'd gotten such a good price on the cruise ... it was the rainy season in Hawaii. Fortunately (being experienced travelers who have endured previous drenchings), we'd had the foresight to pack our brightly-colored rain jackets*.

Our first stop was at the Hawai'i** Volcanoes National Park, one of those places that Mr Trump's budget approach would probably consider useless and providing no return on investment. Our bus drove us up from the harbor into a lush, dense rain forest

eventually coming to our first stop, a lava tube created by previous volcanic eruptions

Yes, it was a very steep descent to the entrance along very slippery paths through very beautiful rain forest landscapes

It was difficult to get good pictures inside the lava tube, which was damp, dimly lit, and irregular, but this gives you a bit of an idea what it was like inside ...

 Leaving the lava tube, we proceeded on and made a brief stop at a very interesting and scary area where, in July of 1974, a sudden four-hour flow of lava had created a weird landscape of black lava rock and bleached tree trunks ...

I thought this picture was pretty eerie, with the dead tree in the center looking like it was desperately crawling away to escape the lava ...

From there we went on to the Thomas A. Jaggar Museum, located at the rim of the Halema‘uma‘u Crater***. We were only able to get as close as a mile from the rim of the crater, which was fine with me, as the smell of sulfur^† was strong enough from where we were. 

There was real volcanic activity going on, although it's difficult to see in the pictures we took. In this photo, you can see the flare of orange fire peeking over the edge of the rim near the right-hand edge. A fellow who had a tripod-mounted video camera with a powerful telephoto lens let us all get a closer look, and we could clearly see the molten rock shooting up from the depths of the crater. This picture also shows another feature of the park - steam vents. There are a number of random places around the island where steam just shoots up out of the ground ...

... making it necessary to keep gawky tourists at a respectful distance ...

After spending some time at the park, we proceeded on to the Nani Mau (Hawaiian for "Forever Beautiful") Botanical Gardens for lunch and a stroll through the lush tropical flowers and greenery ...

I didn't remember posing for this figure, but it's a pretty good early-morning likeness ...

The gardens were so beautiful and peaceful that I figured I'd apply for a job. They said they'd get back to me ...

And then there's the mandatory happy snap of Agnes and I, shot by an accommodating fellow tourist ...

Our last official stop of the day was at the Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut center, where we drove through 2,500 acres of macadamia nut trees (bordered by huge pine trees planted as windbreaks to protect the nuts) to the visitor center and the factory where the nuts are prepared for sale. There really wasn't much of anything worth taking pictures of, although we enjoyed the free samples of nuts, the big scoops (sadly, not free) of vanilla macadamia nut ice cream, and the ability to stock up on all sorts of macadamia nut products (which are ridiculously expensive here at home). One thing I was surprised (and distressed) to see among the array of flavored nuts was ... no kidding ... Spam-flavored macadamias. I'd heard that Hawaiians and many other Pacific islanders had developed a love for Spam when they were introduced to it during World War II, but the idea of using it as a flavor for otherwise delectable macadamia nuts seems somehow sacrilegious.

On the way back to the ship we stopped briefly at the absolutely beautiful Liliuokalani Park and Gardens on the edge of downtown Hilo. I could look at these glorious colors all day long ...

And that, Dear Readers, summarizes our visit to some of the sights of the beautiful "big island" of Hawaii. We didn't get to spend as much time anywhere as we'd have liked, but my travel journal is now full of notes on all the places we'd like to go back and see again when we have more time to spend.

Have a good day and come back tomorrow, when we'll visit the island of Kauai. More thoughts then.

Bilbo

* Bright yellow for me and bright red for Agnes. They not only keep us dry, but help us find each other in crowds!

** There's an old linguistic joke about whether the state's name is pronounced "ha-WYE-ee" or "ha-WAH'ee" (with a little glottal stop at the penultimate syllable). A group of tourists in a Honolulu restaurant were arguing about the correct pronunciation and asked their server, "How do you pronounce the name of this place?" The server looked at them strangely and replied "mak-DAW-nalds." 

*** Interesting factoid: it's called a "crater" if it's less than a mile in diameter, and a "caldera" if it's more than a mile across. You're welcome.

† Sometimes called "brimstone" by those who think of hell in terms of "fire and brimstone" rather than a Trump presidency.