The Whole Island in 12 Hours

Well, they said not to try to do it, but we did. Yesterday we went around the whole island in a day. It just sort of happened. We set off at 8:30 to visit the volcanoes. On the way we saw 1)Waipio Valley 2)Akaka Falls 3)Hilo 4)Mauna Loa Macademia Nut Factory 5)Volcano National Park 6)BlackSand Beach (Punalu'u)

1)Waipio Valley is an enormous valley on the North side of the Big Island. It empties into the ocean.

2)We stopped at Akaka Falls and took some pictures. There is a short walk through a cool rainforest to get there. There are two separate falls. Gorgeous.

Afterwards we stopped at a roadside fruit stand and got passion fruit, apple bananas, and a

coconut. You split the passion fruit in two and scoop out the seeds to eat. It's a little bit like pomegranate-- kind of tart and the seeds are juicy. The fun part about the passion fruit was that you ate it with a coconut shell "spoon." Bo hogged the passion fruit. The apple bananas were teensy little sweet bananas. I loved both the passion fruit and the bananas. The coconut was interesting. First you cut a hole in the top to drink the milk. Then you split it in two and eat the flesh. Nobody really liked the coconut much. But it was a good experience.

3) Hilo is a town on the East coast of Hawaii. The West coast (where our hotel is) is pretty arid, with crazy lava fields. It still has beautiful plants and flowers, but it's not as lush (Well, unless you are at a resort. Then it's always lush!) The beaches are beautiful and it's so rugged and diverse. But the East coast is unbelievably green. Apparently it gets 200 inches of rain per year. Hilo wasn't very pretty itself though. It was a little industrial. We stopped and had lunch at a sports bar. I had mahi mahi and a salad with papaya dressing. (I forgot to mention my meal on Saturday--Charley's Thai. I had chicken satay and a papaya salad. Papaya might be my new favorite fruit!)

4)On the way to the volcano is the Mauna Loa factory. They do all their processing at this cute little factory set back off the road. You drive down this road through thousands of macademia nut trees and arrive at the factory and store. We just had some ice cream and bought a few post cards there.

5)The volcanoes. Wow. So apparently Hawaii was formed by volcanoes. All the islands were

formed over the same hot spot, and the plates just moved them all west over it. There's a new island 3000 feet under the surface of the sea forming right now. Isn't that cool? The volcano is active, but it wasn't spewing any red hot lava out. It just had steam and gases coming out the top. It's a giant crater.

We also went through a lava tube. That's formed from the river of lava rushing through and hardening. Then another river of lava will come through and cut through that hardened lava and it leaves a space through the middle of it. It was like a big cave.

6) Lastly we happened upon Punalu'u Black Sand Beach. Oh, man...back to the picture thing.

The whole drive took 12 1/2 hours. We were very glad to be back to the hotel at the end of the day. This place is so beautiful.