I think the picture says it all.

A week later, we spent Sunday evening waiting for our flight out of Kona Airport. (After a disastrous experience at LAX in which we arrived 2 hours ahead and got to the gate with maybe 15 minutes to spare, we showed up early for the flight home. But Kona’s much smaller and better organized, so it took us maybe 15 minutes to check in. There wasn’t even a line to go through security!)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on our Hawaiian vacation. I’m sorry it took so long to finish it, but hey, I managed (just barely) to beat the 6-month marker!

Usually it looked more like this:

Note: Our stay in Kona was April 4-10, 2005

We never made it down to South Point (the southernmost tip of the island), partly because of time and partly because—believe it or not—our car rental contract forbid us to drive on the 12-mile road out to the point! Supposedly it’s poorly maintained—or it used to be, and the policy hasn’t kept up—and they don’t want the wear and tear on cars that aren’t designed for it. As I recall, rental trucks and SUVs don’t have the restriction. This was the closest we ever came to it, and you can only barely see it way off in the distance.

If you look at the end of the spray near the visible point, then go straight up toward the horizon, you’ll notice that the sky-sea line dips downward slightly and there’s a faint darker patch of sky. As far as we could tell, that’s the promontory heading out toward South Point. Even then, we weren’t quite sure.

The southern coastline of the island is full of rocky cliffs. Add in the wind that flows westward over the island, and you get some spectacular spray from the waves. It seemed that just about everywhere along that stretch of coast there were little coves, foam, and spray launching dozens of feet into the air. It’s just so hard to catch with a camera.

One of the places we stopped was Punalu‘u Black Sands Beach. Black sand beaches form when lava breaks into small enough pieces for waves to break them down into sand. Unlike white sand beaches, where the sand is made up of coral, black sand beaches have a finite lifetime. Once all the sand is washed out to sea, it’s gone. There are green sand beaches on the island too, but we didn’t get a chance to see any of them except by looking out the window of our plane as it approached Kona.

There was a little shrub all over the beach that reminded me a bit of jade for some reason, though there’s really not much resemblance. A little digging in A Pocket Guide to Hawai‘i’s Trees and Shrubs, and I’ve identified it as beach naupaka. You can see it in the foreground.

While at Punalu’u, I walked out onto the rocks to try to get pictures of the spray up close. Unfortunately the camera’s delay made that nearly impossible. There was a time when the water came a little bit too close, and I backed away in a hurry trying to avoid it without twisting my ankle! This is the best shot I got, but it was often three times that height.

The view inland proved quite a contrast, especially with the cloud cover we had while we were there.

Oh, I may have mentioned this area gets a lot of wind?

The sign says, “Camping Area.” I’m not entirely sure how you’d keep your tent from flying away, judging by that tree.

Note: This trip was Thursday, April 7, 2005.

It didn’t look nearly so blue to us, of course, since our eyes were adjusted to it. Each window had a pair of cards with pictures of different types of local fish labeled with their names, and the entire trip was narrated by a guide familiar with the local marine life. They did a good job of steering so that people on both sides could see everything.

You can’t see it in this photo, but in a lot of places you could still see the wrinkles of long-cooled a‘a lava beneath the coral.

By the end of the dive, we’d gotten out to where there was mostly sand, and very little exposed rock, so there was hardly any coral (and not many fish, either).

Here’s a view of the submarine from the ferry after we disembarked:

The view of the shore was, as most views were, fantastic. Note the clouds blocking any chance of seeing Hualalai!

This last photo should probably have gone in with the post about exploring Kona: it’s the ‘Ahu‘ena Heiau, King Kamehameha’s personal heiau dedicated to the god Lono. This shot was taken from the pier as we waited to board the boat.

Note: This tour was Wednesday, April 6, 2005.

We were originally scheduled to go the previous day, but so few people had signed up that they decided not to take the boat out. We rescheduled for Wednesday, which freed up Tuesday afternoon for exploring Kailua and the hotel grounds (and a round of Puzzle Pirates for Katie). Wednesday turned out to be very windy at Waikoloa, where the boat launched.

The beach is actually a strip of sand between the bay and what appeared to be a man-made lagoon. You can see the beach off to the left, with the wooden edging on the lagoon. An autograph tree is in the foreground.

We walked up the beach, looking for the boat launch, and met up with one of the reps, who walked with us to the meeting place, then took our names, ticket info, and release forms. There were about ten of us (two more couples and a family, IIRC), plus two crew. The boat clearly had room for two or three times as many people. Sometimes there are advantages to going at the end of the season!

One thing I could not get enough of was the color of the water. It was a beautiful turquoise near shore, and a deeper blue farther out. I went through several desktop wallpapers after we got back, and finally settled on this view of the Waikoloa shore, with the western slopes of Kohala in the background:

You may remember the pog craze that hit in the mid-90s and vanished without a trace? Well, Pogs originally started out as bottle caps from a Hawaiian drink called POG—passion fruit, orange, and guava—and the crew was serving imitation POG (mixing the juice themselves). It’s not bad, though I don’t recall trying any brand-name POG during our stay.

We motored up the coast a while—we were both disappointed that they never actually set sail—and occasionally spotted another catamaran that, we were told, was run by another whale watching outfit. Eventually, both boats decided to head back south, looking for a mother, calf and escort that had been seen in the area the day before.

And so began the dance of two boats and a pod of whales, as each of us tried to get close enough to see without scaring the whales off. Sometimes we were closer, and sometimes they were closer. The calf was a real show-off, coming up to the surface, flipping, and even jumping out of the water occasionally.

This is where one of our camera’s limitations caused us major problems. Unlike a film-based camera, our digital camera pauses for a short delay when you press the button. If you’re trying to catch something time-critical—like a whale jumping out of the water 50 feet away—even if you react fast enough to hit the button, chances are it’ll be back in the water by the time the camera catches up.

We have a lot of pictures of splashes.

But we did manage to catch a few shots of the whales. This is the best one:

Note: This cruise was Wednesday, April 6, 2005.

So late on an April afternoon, we started driving down Chain of Craters Road toward the ocean, hoping to see (from a safe distance) lava pouring into the ocean. The road is named because it connects a series of craters left behind by old vents. At first we stopped at all of them. They ranged from large craters like Keanakako‘i to fifty-foot-deep holes filled with rubble a dozen feet from the road. Soon we realized that would take way too much time, and stuck with the ones that looked particularly interesting.

I don’t recall which crater this one was at (probably either Puhimau or Pauahi), but there was a trail up to a wooden viewing platform. I stopped at one point along the trail and took this picture of a small tree on the edge of the crater.

The hill below is Mauna Ulu (“new hill”), which formed during a 5-year eruption from 1969-1974. We didn’t have time to hike out to it, so we just got a couple of views like this one from spots closer to the road.

As we left the forested areas up near the summit and started down the long slope to the sea, we started to notice a strange reddish cast to some of the clouds. Eventually we realized we were looking at them through smoke or vapor, though we could never figure out just what it was from. The road takes a couple of long switchbacks, and we eventually ended up east of the smoke, which put it in the opposite direction of the active vents, which were still further east.

Even the vapor and dryness of the lava fields didn’t preclude Hawaii’s trademark rainbows!

Along that switchback, we pulled over to the side of the road once because an old lava flow had left a very strange, knobbly texture on the side of the hill.

Finally we got to the coast. Since the lava flows have wiped out several miles of road and show no sign of stopping, the park service has left it as-is, blocked the road about a half-mile from the lava, and set up a temporary ranger station consisting of a trailer and a couple of outhouses. I’m sure they’ve had to move it more than once. Unfortunately, the only place to park is by the side of the road. We had to drive down to the end, turn around, and drive another mile before we found a parking space. We were almost to the point where the road turns inland!

At this point it was nearly sunset. I wasn’t going to miss this. So I started on the 1½-mile walk out to the viewing area. Katie, on the other hand, was already completely freaked out by being on an active volcano. Sam Adams had saved the day at first, helping her relax enough to handle the Crater Rim drive, but it had worn off by the time we headed down Chain of Craters, and there wasn’t time to go back for a second beer. There was no way she was getting any closer to flowing lava, so she stayed in the car while I took a hike. (That doesn’t sound quite right…)

I made two mistakes, one of which would have been disastrous earlier in the day, and one of which just limited my options for photography. The first was that I forgot to bring water. At sunset it was okay, even though I did end up walking more than three miles. At least I remembered to bring the flashlight!

The second mistake… well, remember that I left my tripod in the car at the Thurston Lava Tube? I did it again, only realizing it about 25 minutes into the walk. So I was bracing the camera on rocks and getting blurry pictures in the fading light.

If I remember correctly, the ranger station and roadblock were right by the Holei Sea Arch, which is just off the side of the road:

Here’s the end of the road:

I loved this sign, both for the design (there’s something funny about the stick figure being thrown off of the cliff), and for the damage. The burnt out corner of the sign may have removed the word “danger,” but it manages to convey the concept and actually emphasize it.

Here’s a blurry example of the kind of danger the sign is warning about. Just because the lava has cooled to just plain rock doesn’t mean it’s stable. Here’s a spot where there was an air pocket, and the surface just collapsed, leaving a gaping hole about 3–4 feet across.

And finally… hot, molten lava action! They had created “trails” on the cooled lava using the stick-on reflector tabs you often see on roads when they’ve been resurfaced but haven’t yet been re-striped. One trail was white, another was yellow. I hiked out about ¼-mile from the end of the road to a spot where I could see lava pouring into the ocean. Well, sort of. It was five miles away, and I didn’t have binoculars.

Way off on the other side of the bay you can see two orange points at the base of the cliffs. During the day you can also usually see steam. You may have noticed it’s started to get dark at this point. This is where I might have turned back, but I figured it would be years before I had another chance, so I hiked back along another trail to see if I could get a better view of something.

As I walked along the road, I started to notice orange lines on the hills. These became more and more visible as the sunlight faded. I never got particularly close (which may be just as well), and without my tripod, I had only limited success in the dim light. This next one is probably the best photo I took. (Click on it for a close-up view.)

Still, even if I didn’t get many sharp pictures, I at least got some interesting ones:

By the time I got back to the car (maybe around 7:00?), it was fully dark, stars were visible, and Katie was asleep. And the glowing hillside was visible from the car!

The drive back up Chain of Craters and out of the park took about an hour, though we had gotten used to winding roads without street lights—and intermittent rain—over the previous several days. The real challenge was finding a place to eat and a place to buy gas, since we weren’t sure whether what we had in the tank would get us back to Kailua. We stopped in Volcano Village, which is on the main highway just a few miles east of the park entrance. We found an open restaurant called Kiawe Kitchen, which had good food, though we got the impression they would have preferred that we eat somewhere else. (We were in shorts and T-shirts, we didn’t order wine with our meal, and the dishes we ordered were on the lower end of their price range.) I ate an entire pizza, which was probably about right since I had just walked 3–4 miles without water.

Since the “big island” is predominantly rural, things close early. There was a gas station next to the restaurant, but it was already closed by the time we arrived. Our hotel was about 90 miles to the west in Kona, but to find an open gas station we had to drive about 12 miles east to Mountain View, buy gas at the one open station, then turn around. At that point we were only 15 miles from Hilo, the closest we’d managed all week, and we were seriously wondering whether it would be worth spending a half hour to get there and check into a motel, tour Hilo for a day and drive back to Kona at a reasonable hour. Eventually we decided that with all our clothes, medication, etc. on the other side of the island, we’d be better off going back.

In the middle of the Ka‘u lava fields, miles from any lights but our own, we stopped at the side of the road to look at the stars. It was the most incredible night sky I’d seen in years. It was even better than the view from the Mauna Kea visitors center two nights later, because (except for the occasional headlights) there were no lights at all, and because it was later in the evening, probably around 10:00 or 10:30 instead of 8:00. We ended up jumping back into the car after about two minutes, though, because although we knew the insects buzzing us were probably benign, we didn’t want to take a chance. The last time we were in Hawaii, my mosquito bites took over a month to heal!

It was well past midnight when we got back to the hotel. We hadn’t spotted a single open gas station until we reached Kona.

Note: This visit to Kilauea was Thursday, April 7, 2005.

Lava tubes are formed when smooth a’a lava flows through a channel, then crusts over. The still-molten lava underneath keeps flowing until the source stops, and it drains out, leaving a long tubelike cave.

We were lucky in that there were very few other tourists there at the time. (It was the first week of April, which isn’t exactly the height of Hawaii’s tourist season.) The Thurston tube is famous partly because of its size, and partly because it’s very easy to get to. It’s less than a quarter-mile walk from the road.

I decided to use ambient light as much as possible here. Unfortunately, I left my compact tripod in the car. It was already late in the afternoon, and I wanted to get to the coast while there was still light, or else I would have gone back to get it. So I braced the camera against the walls as well as I could, often getting diagonal photos—and of course getting ghost images of the other people walking through.

The trail runs through a long section of the tube, then out through a break in the side. The tube continues several hundred more feet, but it’s gated off with a sign warning you to bring a flashlight.

Now the lava tube itself isn’t the only amazing thing. Hawaii is full of microclimates. Remember what the caldera a few miles away looked like:

The Thurston tube is in an actual rain forest with giant ferns and everything!

Next: chain of craters and lava flowing into the sea.

Note: This visit to Kilauea was Thursday, April 7, 2005.

Now there’s timing. If I’d read it when I first picked it up, I could only imagine that sequence. Now I know exactly what it looks like. Well, aside from the fact that there are twice as many observatories now as there were when the book was written.

Kilauea is often referred to as the most active volcano in the world. To give you an idea why, its latest eruption started in 1983… and is still going!

We got to the park fairly late in the day, partly because we underestimated the amount of time it would take to drive there from Kailua, and partly because we stopped at various points of interest along the way. It was mid-afternoon by the time we got to the visitor’s center, where Katie stood transfixed by the lava videos and I checked out the maps.

We stopped for a late lunch at Volcano House, an old hotel built on the edge of the Kilauea Caldera. Check out the view! (The image links to a slightly larger copy.)

The crater Halema‘uma‘u, which contained a boiling lava lake from 1823–1924, is visible near the center. The southern slope of Mauna Loa rises in the background. The whole caldera is roughly elliptical in shape, and Volcano House is one end of the longer axis. I don’t remember exactly how far it is from one side to the other, but judging by the map I’d say it’s about 2×3 miles.

Off to the right, behind a tree in the panorama, are the steaming bluffs. Groundwater gets heated by the magma below the volcano and seeps out through cracks all over the caldera.

We drove around Crater Rim Drive—three guesses where that goes—and as it turns out our first stop was those steaming bluffs. Fortunately, the wind was blowing the steam away from the vents while we were there. It’s a 0.1-mile “hike” from the parking lot to the edge. There was a group of schoolchildren on a field trip there, and we could hear their guide telling them about the geology and about various Hawaiian folk tales relating to the area. You can also see Volcano House in the background.

There are actually vents scattered all around the area, and we got a chance to look at one up close, where you can see all the mosses and mineral deposits.

This part of the island is comparatively arid (and the “repaving” it gets every few decades can’t help much), but the moisture from these vents creates its own mini ecosystem. Compare this to the dry grass in the previous shot:

This next shot was taken from the same spot, looking across the crater at a lava dome. I think it’s Pu‘u Pua‘i.

Moving along, about a third of the way around the rim are the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and the Jaggar Museum. We didn’t have time to stop in, but we did stop for the view of Halema‘uma‘u, which is much clearer from here.

We also got a view of one of the many instruments used to measure seismic activity in the area. Because Kilauea is both extremely active and comparatively safe, it’s being monitored constantly.

As you drive around the larger crater, you start seeing signs by the side of the road that say things like “1971 Lava Flow” or “1982 Lava Flow.”

At the opposite end of the crater from Volcano House, there’s a trail head for a short hike out to the Halema‘uma‘u Overlook. (Actually, the trail crosses the entire larger crater.) This area is riddled with steam vents and warnings about hazardous fumes. I couldn’t help but think of Boromir saying, “The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume.” It was around this point that Katie started staying in the car while I went out to explore.

The overlook takes you right up to the edge of the 3400-foot Halema‘uma‘u Crater. From that close a wide-angle lens can’t capture the whole thing, but the floor of the crater looked rather inhospitable, full of cracked, smoking lava.

From the museum I had spotted what looked like yellow patches on the side of the crater wall. I wondered if they were sulfur deposits. From the overlook I could see that they were…and they were still steaming.

This is near the road on the south rim, east of Halema‘uma‘u and probably in the 1982 lava field. What struck me the most was the red rock. It’s hard to see in this picture, but it’s a deep red, and not the color I’m used to seeing in rock colored by rust.

Just outside the main Kilauea crater is a smaller crater called Keanakako‘i. This apparently used to be the site of an adz quarry. You can see more of that really red rock at the right edge, near the base.

Across the road is a short loop trail to some lava fissures that erupted in (IIRC) 1974. Try to imagine sheets of lava launching up like curtains.

Yet while most of the recent decades’ lava has yet to break down enough for plants to take hold, these fissures are collecting just enough dirt. This one was full of ferns.

Next: lava tubes and rain forests, then more craters, danger signs the sea… and an active lava flow.

Note: This visit to Kilauea was Thursday, April 7, 2005.

We drove past a beautifully drawn whale several times before we finally decided to stop by the side of the road, and Katie stepped out to get a picture:

Then there was this one, which looks like it was actually spray paint instead of coral, but we couldn’t figure out whether it was supposed to be a missile, a cross, a tombstone, or, well, a phallus.

Back to initials in trees, we spotted an odd tree which seemed to have every single leaf covered with names.

At first we couldn’t believe people would do this to every single leaf, but we later discovered it’s actually called an autograph tree.

Note: These photos were taken throughout the week of April 4-10, 2005

Fortunately someone in charge recognized the humor value, and the visitor’s center sells bumper stickers:

Of course, it turns out other people, visiting during the day, have snapped better pictures of the sign.

Note: Our visit to Mauna Kea was on Saturday, April 9, 2005.

What I didn’t mention was that that shot was carefully cropped. The view really looked like this:

Well, hey, we got the cheap rooms, so you kind of expect that. Still, there was a lot to see right on the hotel grounds. First of all, we stayed at the Outrigger Keauhou Beach Resort. Outrigger had recently taken over the hotel, and they were in the midst of remodelling. They had to block off part of the parking lot for a couple of days in order to bring in a crane and replace the air conditioner. So I expect any review of the facilities themselves is going to be outdated within a couple of months.

The hotel grounds include a couple of heiau ruins, some tide pools, and a small garden area. The lounge/bar is open air and looks out on the tide pools. They light up the pools at night so that you can see the fish and sea turtles. Here’s a view from near the hotel lobby, at low tide.

Like everything else on the island, these tide pools are remnants of an ancient lava flow. You can still see the rippled pahoehoe patterns:

Beyond this area were the tennis courts and a path out to a bridge. Unfortunately the bridge was labeled “kapu” so I figured I’d be better off skipping it. I later found out that there used to be another resort nearby. I assume the bridge leads onto that property.

By this time the tree trimmers had finished their break and blocked off the path back to the hotel grounds, so I went behind the tennis courts and found this gem.

They were actually trimming the palm trees most of the time we were there. You might expect this to mean a couple of guys in hard hats with a crane go up with a chainsaw and hack off the limbs. No, there was a guy with a rope climbing up the tree trunks, hacking away at the fronds with a machete!

The hotel gardens themselves aren’t huge, but they did have some interesting trees and plants.

On Monday we spotted a squirrel in the hotel parking lot. Then we looked closer, and realized it wasn’t a squirrel. A mongoose? Yes, as it turns out, there are mongooses all over the Hawaiian islands. They were imported to cut down on the rat problem, having worked well in Jamaica(?). Only one problem: the polynesian rat is nocturnal and tends to nest above ground, while the mongoose is diurnal. So they never come into direct contact, and the mongooses never encounter rats’ nests, either. Now the islands have a rat problem and a mongoose problem!

Later in the week we wandered over to Kahalu‘u Beach (right next to the hotel) and finally got a mongoose to hold still long enough to get pictures.

Note: We stayed in Kona during the week of April 4-10, 2005. Most of the photos of the grounds were taken on Tuesday, April 5.

We caught a somewhat hazy view of it from the west, in the Kohala area, but our best view of the mountain actually came the day after the tour, on our drive out to Akaka Falls. We’re probably due east of the mountain here:

To get to Mauna Kea, you have to drive up the Saddle Road through the valley between that mountain and Mauna Loa to the south. The Hawaiians believed that Pele, goddess of fire, lived on Mauna Loa (the active volcano) and her sister Poli’ahu, goddess of snow, lived on Mauna Kea (which is often capped with snow). The saddle valley was their battleground, and someplace to be avoided whenever possible. And the road…

The road was built by the US Army in 1942. We had just entered World War II in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor—just a few islands away. The army wanted a road connecting the two sides of the island in the event that a Japanese invasion cut off the normal routes. They weren’t worried about things like lanes, or banked curves, or high speeds. Eventually it was handed over to the county or state, who opened it to civilian traffic and widened it to two lanes—by patching the sides, rather than actually re-laying it. According to our tour guide, the locals call it the “straddle road” because the best way to drive it is right down the middle, on the original roadbed, until you spot oncoming traffic.

Let’s just say our rental contract forbid us to take the car on the road.

Anyway, back to the scenery. This is a view from maybe 10-11 thousand feet up the slopes of Mauna Kea, looking across the valley at Mauna Loa (which itself is 13,677 feet high!) There are cinder cones all over from the last days of Mauna Kea’s volcanic career.

One thing I found interesting is that the big mountains on Hawaii don’t look big until you put them in context because the slope is so shallow. It’s like a tilted plain that just keeps going up, and up, and up. Of course, for something that shallow to reach 13,000 feet, it gets very wide too…Mauna Loa is apparently the largest mountain on Earth by volume!

On the upper elevations on Mauna Kea…and just about nowhere else…grows the endangered Silversword . Park rangers actually planted one near the side of the road and put a fence around it so that visitors could see it without hiking through the 11,000-foot-high wilderness.

The visitor’s center is at about 9,000 feet, and a 4– or 8-mile road leads to the summit and the 13 observatories currently located there. It’s above the treeline, so there’s very little vegetation, and you start seeing signs that things aren’t quite what you expect for Hawaii… like snow poles for finding the road when it’s buried:

(That’s the Caltech Sub-millimeter Observatory, by the way.)

I believe these are the University of Hawaii 0.6-m Telescope, the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope, the University of Hawaii 2.2-m Telescope, and the Gemini Northern 8-m Telescope the Canada-France Hawaii telescope, the Gemini Telescope, the University of Hawaii 2.2 meter telescope, and the UK Infrared Telescope. The Mauna Kea Observatories site has been very helpful in identifying these!

The tour brought us to the summit just around sunset. It provided parkas for everyone…and we needed them! We parked near the UH 2.2-m scope, and walked around the small parking lot.

This next photo is of the actual highest point on Mauna Kea. It was sacred to the Hawaiians (and presumably still is to some), who had built a small prayer altar at the true summit.

Just a bit to the left of that, here’s a view of the mountain’s shadow on the cloud layer below:

On the western slope of the hill (if you can call it that) where we were standing, a lot of the snow had formed into strange patterns like upside-down icicles.

Here’s a view to the west, with the two Keck telescopes on the left, the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility to the right, and Maui—yes, Maui—in the background, peeking above the cloud layer just above the silver dome. Apparently Maui’s extinct volcano Haleakala was the original choice for the first telescope, but when they went to survey it, they noticed Mauna Kea off in the distance, even higher above the clouds and the layers of atmosphere. Add in the very steady air from the mountain’s shield-like shape (even when there’s wind, it’s not very turbulent), and you have an ideal site for an observatory.

Now looking toward the southwest, you can see the mountain of Hualalai, Hawaii’s third active volcano. (It last erupted in 1801, but that’s just yesterday, geologically speaking.) Now, despite the fact that our hotel outside Kailua was on the slopes of Hualalai, it was covered in clouds so often that this was our best view of it all week!

Here’s almost the same view a few minutes later, with flash fill:

The sunset itself wasn’t terribly spectacular, since all the clouds were below us, but it was still amazing to be watching it from so high up.

As the light faded, the optical telescopes came to life. Here’s the Gemini North Telescope opening and moving into position.

Not long after the Gemini finished aiming and turned its lights off, we all piled back into the van and drove down to the visitor’s center at 9,000 feet, where they set up an 8-inch telescope and gave a quick tour of Jupiter and Mars, the Orion Nebula, a couple of star clusters, and some notable stars. It was the second time in years I’d seen the Milky Way (which used to be a fixture, back when I was camping every other month during high school). The first was two days earlier, driving through Ka‘u on our way back from Volcanoes National Park. Ironically, the two minutes we stopped by the side of the road in Ka‘u were actually better viewing because we didn’t have to contend with the light from the visitor’s center, and I’m pretty sure the air was clearer too.

The one thing I regret is that we had to pile into the van before Alpha Centauri rose over the horizon. I’ve always wanted to see the closest stars to our solar system, and I’d always assumed you actually had to be in the southern hemisphere to see it. But the Southern Cross was visible, and Alpha Centauri was rising maybe an hour after we had to drive back. And the Kona coast is too cloudy to see the stars.

Note: This visit to Mauna Kea was on Saturday, April 9, 2005.

When we first crossed through Waimea to Hamakua, we took a side trip north to the lookout for Waipio Valley. The valley itself is unreachable without 4-wheel drive (the road has a 25% grade), but the view from the lookout was incredible:

The entire coastline is beautiful, as you can see from this point somewhere along the Hilo or Hamakua coast. (We really should have been keeping track of signs or mile markers. I couldn’t have named this spot by the time we reached the airport.)

The eastern side of the island gets tons of rain. We lucked out in getting there on a clear day, but the signs were everywhere in the gorges cutting through the seaside cliffs, the many streams and waterfalls. This next one wasn’t even a turn-out—we just pulled over to the side of the road and walked back to the bridge. Update: Mark has identified this spot as Maulua Valley. Thanks, Mark!

We drove inland a bit to visit the 420-foot-high Akaka Falls.

The overlook for the falls is reached by a short loop trail through a rain forest, which also passes a vantage point for Kahuna Falls. We took about 20 photos on that “hike”—I mostly shot plants, and Katie mostly shot the streams we crossed. This picture replaced Kaleakekua Bay as my wallpaper on the Powerbook:

And finally, just to prove we made it to Hilo, here’s a beach just outside of town:

Note: This trip was Sunday, April 10, 2005.