Part two! I'm going to post the map that I gracefully nicked from the state park's site again to show where we drove. You can click on it to make it larger.
After we finished the hike, we ate lunch in the car before driving what is called the Chain Of Craters road, which sounds menacing and is exactly that, a chain of craters along the road. On the map above it's the yellow line down to the coast.
The first stop was a hardened lava flow from 1974 I believe, right below the large caldera on the map. This was basically just a really big part of the land that was covered in black lava rock, wedged in between lush green land, and there was a small crater.
The crater.
These holes were all over the place, and are places where a tree stood, got wrapped in lava and then burnt out inside the lava while the lava hardened around it.
Lava rock is beautiful! This rock was iridescent, changing color as we turned it! The area was pretty interesting to look at, the destructive force of lava pretty clear, as this part was 40 years old and still only small areas had started to regrow. But you could see small signs of life all over the lava rock, with flowers taking base on burnt out logs or in the ground down dust from millions of tourists walking on certain paths.
After that stop we drove on, and we stopped at another crater, this one much bigger than the small one at the last stop.
And we kept driving, all the way to the coast. Unfortunately we found out at the visitors center that the actual visible lava was at the end of a 8 hour long hike, and at the moment closed off because the surrounding area was so brittle, so our hopes of seeing actual lava was shut down. But we saw some cool nature and drove to the end of the line, before turning back for dinner at the Volcano House!
Ominous clouds! It was raining for a good bit of the coast line, so while it was possible to hike to the part of the road where the lava crossed the road, we decided not to, just to avoid the rain.
Our dinner was as mentioned at the Volcano House, though we discovered after eating that we ate in the lounge/bar, not the restaurant. But the portions were much more sensible than most restaurants so we both got perfect amounts of food for once. I ate a pulled pork and pineapple pizza that wasn't any good, it was completely undercooked! And Martin got 3 sliders with sweet potato fries, he liked his!
And the view wasn't so bad either..
After dinner it was time for a walk through the Thurston Lava Tube, a round tunnel where lava flowed and the outer bits hardened while the inside kept flowing and emptying out. It was a short hike through some of the biggest ferns Ive ever seen, I felt like I was a Borrower! Ferns literally as big as trees!
The tunnel was lit up but at some parts really low so you had to walk carefully as to not bang your head on the rock. After we got out it was almost sunset and time to drive back to the airport for our return flight to Honolulu. But not before I had a little photoshoot with some Kalij Pheasants, some of which were remarkably unphased by me and my camera. This fellow wasn't as happy, but the ones we saw later let me come within two meters of them to snap pictures.
And that was it for my pictures for now, next up, a just as belated post about Lanikai again.
