The boat tossed and turned in the choppy water as the skipper maneuvered us within thirty feet of the red lava pouring from the land into the sea. Billows of sulphur smoke swept over us as we craned over the railings with our cameras and wiped our eyes. "What would Heidi think of this?" I wondered. Heidi is a safety engineer.
Safety aside, our boat trip to see the Kilauea lava flows was a highlight of our Hawaii vacation. Forty of us squeezed into a boat dragged onto the shore in Isaac Hale State Park, in the wilderness of Puno, south of Hilo. "Everybody fifty and older has to sit in the back of the boat," the skipper yelled. "My insurance company says so." The boat slapped down, hard, as it plunged through the waves along the coast, and we didn't envy the young folks up front at all.
We could see billows of smoke coming from the shore before we could see the red lava. Suddenly, we were upon it--huge cracks in the black earth, with red lava pouring into the sea below.
Back on land, we paused for a hike around Lava Tree State Park. As waves of lava poured through the park, they welled up around tree trunks, which later withered away. All that remains of those long-ago trees is lava in the shape of tree trunks.
The ability of the earth to heal itself and create anew is amazing. An orchid and ferns grew among the lava.
We learned a lot about sugar plantations on this trip to Hawaii, as we spent several days along the north and east coasts of the Big Island, where they were centered. We also learned a lot about tsunamis. There was a devastating tsunami along the north and east coasts of the Big Island in 1946. Hilo was devastated and 27 school children died in Laupapoepoe, northwest of Hilo, when a school bus delivered them to their low-lying elementary school just before the tsunami hit. We were fascinated by the Pacific Tsunami Museum in Hilo, which explained the causes of tsunamis, and also documented the devastation of tsunamis around the world. My favorite exhibit was a video of survivors of the 1946 Hilo tsunami describing their experiences.
The museum had photographs of the 1946 tsunami hitting Hilo, and of the destruction it caused.
Dave and I were in Brazil, picking Jonny up from his mission, when the Indian Ocean tsunami hit. We remember the continuous TV broadcasts of that tragedy.
We stopped by Suisan, the fish market on Hilo Bay, with its dozens of varieties of fish.
We relaxed on the porch of the Hilo Park Cafe, enjoying the views of the bay as we ate lunch.
We drove along the Hilo boulevard planted with banyan trees, each with a placard naming it for a famous person. There is an Amelia Earhardt tree and a Richard Nixon one. Many of the famous people stopped by to see their trees.
As we drove back to our condo in Wailoa, we stopped at another charming, small museum--the Hawaiian Plantation Museum. Several old, Anglo men played chess in the lobby, while a Nisei woman showed me around the crowded display cases--her husband's collection of artifacts from the sugar plantation era. I was interested in the plantation newsletters, the scholarship programs for plantation children, and the displays of items from each of the different cultures which worked on the plantations. The plantations originally had separate villages for each nationality, but in the Hawaiian way, there was interchange and intermarriage until the workers were no longer separated by nationality.
Our last stop was in Honoka'a, a small town along the north coast struggling to find an identity for itself. It had been a sugar town, then morphed into an art center, with many galleries, but it was battered by the Recession, beginning in 2008. I stopped in at the last fine art gallery remaining. "This town is trying to figure out who it is," the owner said, as he showed me the thousand dollar wood carvings and paintings that he sold.
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