The Island of Hawaii – June 6th

We docked in Hilo, a pleasant city of 60,000. The Big Island is the tallest mountain in the world, rising 32,000 feet from the sea bottom to its twin peaks of Mona Loa and Mona Kea. The caldera is still active and we started the day at Volcano National Park.

Here is Joani at the Kiliawea Volcano, with one of its craters steaming in the background. If it was nighttime, we could see the orange glow of the molten lava in the cracks, but during the day only steam.

We hiked down to the floor of what as late as 1959 was a lava lake of Kiliawea. This one is no longer active so you can walk across it:

You could see where the lava on the lake surfce had cooled into thin flat stone; and then cracked like an old macadam road that heaved after countless spring thaws.

We went inside an old lava tube, a passage in the bedrock through which lava flowed:

Hilo gets over 100 inches of rain a year, creating some spectacular waterfalls as all that water runs off the mountain sides. Our guide took us to see about ten:

Rainbow Falls, below, was pretty cool:

But far and away the best was Akaka Falls, dropping over 400 feet and swollen with water from rain earlier in the day:

Lunch was a treat, a seafood take-out place just off a fishing pier, & featuring ten kinds of poke:

Tomorrow: Honolulu, the Arizona Memorial, a Diamond Head summit hike, and Waikiki.