On the 5th November, we had just one activity planned for the day, albeit one that would last for nearly 12 hours! A night time volcano tour of the island, that started in the late morning.  This gave us time for a gym session in the morning. The tour worked by picking up all the participants in a mini-bus from their hotels, driving us to places around the island, and then dropping us all back home again.  We started by going up to the Mauna Kea Volcano National Park, stopping part way there for a packed lunch that they provided.  We all had pre-selected food in our own lunch boxes, and many cans of tropical fruit flavoured juice drinks.

The first tour stop was at the Kaumana Caves, where there is a publicly accessible opening into a lava tube.  A lava tube is where hot high-speed flowing lava has poured down the volcano, like a creek, but around the top and bottom of the lava creek it is cool, so a hard crust is formed.  The hot high-speed flowing lava continues to flow through the tube until no more is left, with the result being an empty tube.  Lava can then continue to flow through the tube from time to time, and it rarely gets clogged up because the lava is so hot and flows so readily that it flows like water.

The photo below shows where over time, the roof of the lava tube has collapsed, leaving a natural opening into the tube, with 100 or so metres of jaggered rocks and head-ducking before you can walk easily into the undisturbed tube.  The stairs were not naturally occuring though, they were man-made for convenience.

Morven was keeping up really well with Tom on this occasion, such that Tom really had to scramble ahead to be able to stop and get a photo of Morven.  Tom’s fitness was no advantage for the first 100 m as it was more about not cracking your head open by accidentally standing up in a low point of the entrance to the tube.

Once we had got past that first 100 m, there is kilometres upon kilometres up tube that looks like this.  We only went about 50 m further into the tube.  We (the group) noticed a particular aromatic herbal smoke left behind by a group of teenagers that were coming out as we were going in.

From memory, the guide said that lava last flowed through the tube 40 years ago.  You can see various lines along the tube where the lava has flowed at different temperatures at different heights.

The occasional tree root has worked its way through the thick hardened lava rock on the surface, into the lava tube.  This is how openings into lava tubes can occur over the centuries.

The photo below shows a shiny smooth surface on the side of the tube.  Apparently this occurs when ultra hot lava has flowed through, leaving a hot gas behind that melts the walls and roof of the lava tube.

We (the group) experimented with turning off all of our torches and lights.  It was absolutely pitch black, because although we were only 200m into the winding lava tube, the jaggered black rocks on the floor, walls, and ceiling are the perfect blockers of light.  We were instructed to wave our hands in front of our own faces, to observe the effect of the brain knowing what out hands are doing, and creating a shadow image of our hand, even though we can’t actually see it. (proprioception) After doing this experiment, our eyes had completely adjusted to the dark.  Then, we had a photo taken of us.  Do you see any similarity to this photo?

We continued up further into the National Park, although the weather was extremely cloudy and drizzly, so we got to a point where there was literally no point in going to the top of Mauna Kea Volcano because we wouldn’t have been able to see anything.  This made us a little sad because we were really wanting to get up there, but that is how the weather rolls at the top of Mauna Kea Volcano on the Big Island of Hawai’i!

Instead, we went to a lookout over a steaming volcano crater which due to the four month delay in blogging we cannot recall the name of.  It was quite a beautiful view, although I don’t think there was any possible way a pocket-sized camera could capture how beautiful it was.  We tried anyway!

Stopping off for a break from the long drive, we went for a walk on the side of the road in a lava field.  It seemed like a suitable location for NASA to be testing their space vehicles, and it did indeed feel like we were on another planet.  The eery landscape of deformed rocks and vegetation regrowth, with steam clouds and rainbows. Morven realised that day that the warm clothes she brought didn’t really go together at all and would like to be forgiven for the following fashion faux pas.

A different lava tube to the one we walked in earlier goes all the way down the island and hits the sea, with lava still flowing today.  This is the lava tube that we saw on the helicopter tour, and you can see the steam vent in the middle of the photo below.  As a result of this lava tube, the radius of the island at this point is growing daily by something considerable.  We can’t remember how much exactly, but it might have been something like 30cm a day?

On the right hand side of the photo below you’ll notice a protruding rock that has been eroded by the sea to form a lava-rock archway.  Everyone on the tour thought this was quite spectacular, although we didn’t think it was very spectacular considering what we had seen in Australia along the Great Ocean Road.  Nevertheless, the others in the tour group were very impressed, so we hung around for half an hour taking photos.  Morven looks particularly attractive squinting into the sun as she couldn’t see.

Eventually we left the lava arch and started to head in the direction of home (the West side of the island).  Close to sunset, we stopped off and walked on an old lava field where a lot of vegetation re-growth has occurred.

It was interesting to see where trees stood proud when the lava first flowed, and the lava wrapped around the tree, cooling at first contact, forming a thick crust around the tree.  Some trees remained today (although very much dead) and others had completely rotted.  The ones that had completely rotted left rock towers behind, with holes where the trunk and tree roots once were, going deep into the ground.

The goddess of volcanos, Pele, is said to have shed tears from the sky when the volcano erupts.  These are actually drops of molten lava that had been shot high into the sky, and set into tear drop rock on the way down.  These tears can be quite long, although in relatively high foot-traffic area area close to the road where we were, they were all broken and short.

Seemingly less common than her tears, Pele’s hair as shown in the photo below, forms from gas vapour expanding in the hot lava whilst in the air, resulting in a glassy sponge.  Pele’s hair can also form long strands, up to 2m in length, of glassy rock that looks like hair.  Maybe the thing in the photo below should be called ‘Pele’s dish sponge’?

We got back in the mini-bus and kept going, with the next destination being a lookout of where the flowing lava tube meets the ocean.  This was not particularly exciting to us given that we’d already seen it by helicopter.  It was now cold, windy, and raining as we drove through the night.  We were quite glad to be driven by a tour guide that actually knew where we were, because we were actually in quite a remote area.  Tom got saturated as he left the shelter to try and capture a photo of the red glow that came from the distance in the night sky.  Tom also tried to explain to fellow tourists that having their camera flash on was actually going to be deterimental to their photo, as they’d end up taking a photo of the rain drops rather than the object ten kilometres away, as the flash only works for a few metres.

After we were all cold and wet, we stopped in a shelter part way down the mountain and enjoyed some cake and hot chocolate.  Further down the mountain, we stopped at a cute little gift shop and restaurant, and enjoyed tasty but also healthy, food.  This was a rare event on our honeymoon!  Tom bought a good-luck Honu (Green Sea Turtle) for his desk at work, and a good-luck Honu bracelet.

Late that night we got home, and were completely exhausted.  There were no cocktails in the bar, it was straight to bed.  More honeymoon blogging to come!