(Continued from Day 3 - Part 2)
There was nothing about its beginning to presage a day spent amidst reminders of nature’s primordial (and very present) violence.
We awakened early. I grabbed my Bible and a cup of tea, and slipped out to breathe in the morning from our porch. Rarely have I experience such uplifting peace. I bathed in the natural beauty before me—okay, technically it was a golf course, but there were birds, and wind stirring the trees, and no sign of golfers. Best of all was the delight for my ears: I could hear the trilling of unknown Hawaiian birds, the crow of a rooster, and the lowing of a cow. I could hear the breeze, and the soft sounds of Porter puttering in the cottage behind me. More remarkable was what I could not hear: no lawn mowers, no chain saws, no air conditioning compressors, no pool pumps, no airplanes, no construction work, and no road noise—not even a single car. I was awed at how much more conducive to meditation is such a setting.
Somewhat reluctantly, we packed up and headed for breakfast (included with the room) at the Kilauea Lodge restaurant. The feature was French toast: three pieces of Portuguese sweet bread (note: not sweetbreads), each different—plain, taro, and guava—all delicious. It was served with two syrups, maple and coconut. This being Hawaii, not Vermont, the “maple” syrup was not the genuine article, but Porter liked the coconut, and I found the French toast sweet, flavorful, and delicious just as it was.
If forced to name the high point of our trip, I would have to say the helicopter ride on Day 2. No pun intended. Really. But Volcanoes National Park was a close second. Florida has resorts. Florida has botanical gardens. Florida has beaches. Very nice beaches, with surfing, and snorkeling. Florida even has cattle ranches. But Florida has no volcanoes. Not one. Walking across a crater is one amazing experience. Not at all like walking across a Florida parking lot in August. Well, only a little like that.
You can take a look at the park with this cool, interactive map from the National Park Service. Our first stop at the park was—surprise!—the Visitor Center. There, some friendly rangers helped us tailor our visit to our time limitations and personal preferences. We began by taking the Crater Rim Drive to the Jaggar Museum. Those who know how much we like museums may wonder at this, but we spent very little time in the museum itself. It’s full of interesting information, and if we’d had a week we would have enjoyed it. Information can be found elsewhere; not so the view!
This is the Kilauea caldera.
This is my Florida guy in Hawaii, wearing his hat from Thailand and his shirt from Tanzania. With the Kilauea caldera. Not at all the same as the grandsons' request for a picture of "Dad-o standing dangerously close to the lava," but the best we could do.
Porter’s favorite Hawaiian flora, the ohia tree. If you have five minutes to spare, enjoy this story of the ohia from HGTV.
The 11-mile Crater Rim Drive circles Kilauea, but for us this was the end of the line. Much of the park is closed due to dangerous emissions from recent volcanic activity.
No worries. There was more than enough still open to make us wish we had more than three quarters of a day to spend at the park.
This steamy trail reminded me of New Zealand, where we watched Maoris cooking food over similar steam vents.
After that warm-up we were ready for the main hike, the highlight of the day: the Kilauea Iki Trail. Kilauea Iki is a smaller crater on the east side of the main Kilauea caldera. The hike took us through rain forest along the crater rim, a pleasant enough walk as it was, but—this is where I reveal my bad tourism skills, having not read the brochure beforehand—I really became excited when I realized we were gradually descending to the frozen lava lake itself! The trail, now marked with piles of stacked rocks, known as ahu, ran more or less straight across the still-steaming lakebed before returning steeply to the top of the crater. If you want to follow where we trod, so to speak, you can read the brochure that was our guide.
View from the rim: You can see steam from the Kilauea caldera in the background, and part of the tourist-foot-worn path along the Kilauea Iki floor. That's the faint, white, straight, diagonal line that crosses from sun to shadow in the middle of the picture. We walked across from upper right to lower left.
Good thing I don’t mind looking like a tourist: Thai hat (gift from Porter); Carnegie Mellon shirt (gift from Heather); Swiss backpack (gift from Janet). The belt pack kept my camera handy, and the jeans protected my legs, which were still sore and oozing from the day before, when I foolishly climbed around on razor-sharp lava rock in shorts. Not that climbing was the problem; falling was.
But the pièce de résistance was the shoes. My Vibram Five Fingers. Walking barefoot across the lava was out of the question (see above comment about asphalt, Florida, and August), but I knew I had to let my Happy Feet make the journey. They make hiking more personal, more connected and responsive to the land. It was a sublime experience.
Eventually, and reluctantly, I switched back to my sneakers. Walking in my Vibrams may be more fun, but over such rough terrain it was also slower. Because we like to look around a lot while we hike, it was already clear that we would be exceeding the park’s hiking time estimate of two to three hours. More than that—did I mention that the lava rock is sharp? I decided I’d rather ruin a $35 pair of shoes than ones that cost twice that. (As it turned out, the Five Fingers probably would have been fine, as they showed no damage at all from the trek. I’m quite impressed.)
Beauty from ashes: the ohia tree is one of the first signs of life returning to the barren land.
It’s good to know part of all that money went to something more satisfying than repaving highways.
To be continued in Part 2.
