Saturday morning was spent exploring volcano’s national park. I had heard during my first trip to Big Island you could spend days here… and it’s absolutely true. We started with the Kilauea Iki Trail and Crater Rim Trail, which is a trail that brings you around the crater rim and down into the floor of a (hopefully) inactive crater. We went counter clockwise as advised by reviews, so we went along the rim of the crater and toward the back. It’s mostly wooded and had some peek a boo spots of the crater.
To give you an idea of how huge this is, you can see two tiny people if you use a magnifying glass in the next picture.
So we journey our way down to the crater floor, crossed it, and then made our way back up to the rim.
We eventually made our way back up the other side and through the jungle again to get to the Thurston Lava Tube. A lava tube is formed when the top and bottom layers of lava cool enough to harden but the middle keeps flowing. Eventually the middle drains out and leaves a tube.
Next we took a drive down chain of craters road, which is exactly as it sounds… a road with craters on the left and right. We stopped at a couple craters, one I showed them a tree casting (when a tree gets surrounded by lava it turns to ash but not before leaving a mold).
We ended up with a Mustang rental car… 10/10 do not recommend. But it makes for photogenic photos! Here we’re still on chain of craters road approaching the sea. The surroundings are all lava rocks.
Here you can see strips of newer lava over miles of old lava flows.
Our final destination was the coast where we saw a sea arch.
We saw all different type of lava flow geometric patterns along the way.
We also saw an oasis popping up and a nene, the Hawaii state bird.
We decided we had time to take a walk to the Petroglyphs (a stop along the way we bypassed). They were really neat.
We could’ve spent a whole other day exploring around volcanoes… but instead we went back to our AirBnB and relaxed for a short few minutes and then went on our way to another adventure.
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