Volcano Follow Up

We are a few days behind, and getting ready for our last day, but wanted to follow up with our Thursday trip.

We took a plane (Go! Airlines regional jet) through a tour from Robert's Hawaii to the Big Island. Our package was the Volcano National Park tour. The other option was to leave earlier in the day (we left at 11:20), and tour the whole island, but that seemed long, and we weren't sure we wanted to be in a big coach bus the entire day.

Although we picked the shorter tour, we did feel like we were on the bus quite a bit. We were on a mini-bus with about 12-14 others including a family from Northern Iowa that flew through Minneapolis, a 22 yr old girl traveling by herself from Brazil, and a group that spoke French and little to no English. Unfortunately, it rained a large portion of the day, although it did appear to let up at the most important points.

After two obligatory tour stops (one at the Mauna Lau Macademia Nut factory and one unscheduled stop that was probably a friend of the driver's place, we arrive at Volcano National Park. We drove into a viewing spot of the large Halemaumau crater with it's smoking/steaming spout. Cool, but seen from a bit of a distance. The area looked like it might be the surface of the moon. After only spending about 20 minutes there, we made two other stops in the park - 1) at these steam vents where you could feel the hot steam coming up from the earth, and 2) teh Thurston Lava Tube, where you walk through a cave-like tunnel that was created by flowing lava some 50-years ago.

From there, we got back on the bus, and drove almost back to Hilo to go to dinner. By this time, we were wondering why we choose a tour. I'd rather be on my own schedule. However, we had moved to late, and getting plane tickets had been too hard.

Our final stop was the "nightime" lava viewing. We traveled to a spot where lava had destroyed an entire area in the last 5-10 years. We trekked out 10-15 minutes to a "viewing spot." However, there was no flowing lava. In fact, the Park Rangers said they hadn't seen lava in two weeks. Consequently, we "viewed" 1,000 or more acre area of hardened, black lava. Cool, but not exactly what we were hoping for. As seen in the video, there were a couple of hot spots. Normally, you could travel down and see the lava flowing into the ocean. Our tour guide told us (after the fact) that the lava hasn't been flowing into the ocean for over two months. Historically, it had stopped for a day or two, but this is the longest it hasn't flowed. I wish we knew that before booking the tour.

We were taken back to the airport, and in the end, saw maybe 2 - 2 1/2 hours of stuff in aggregate. It was a neat, but an expensive disappointment.