Trip back in time over. After this entry, my journaling turned into photography and is now scattered over the internet and on the warm Hawaiian wind
24 November 2009 @ 10:31 pm
Lava Flow!
It's hard to find a time to write entries when you're dividing up your time between work, food, sleep, beaches, laundry, meditation, marimba classes, and socializing. Now I have to add LAVA to that. Yesterday I woke up at 4 am and went to see the flowing lava. It's a 25 minute drive from Polestar, and then a half-hour hike in the DARK toward the mouth of the INFERNO.
When we were planning this trip, I couldn't understand why you have to go at such an inconvenient time, but now I see that it can be no other way. Official lava vieweing time is 5-8pm, that is sunset time, and that is when there are guards there, and a crowd of tourists. However, in the early morning there is noone to stop you from leaving the "lava viewing parking lot", and walking straight into "Hell - The Disney Ride"
In the dark, with headlamps, we walked right into the flow area, there was a strange warm wind coming from the rocks below us, and it smelled a bit of sulfur. Freshly hardened lava is silver and covered with flaky crunchy crust. ("Fresh Lava" is usually anything less than 20 years, but in this case it's more like months)
While walking, there are cracks and fissures everywhere. In the darkness, you can see glowing red in some of them. Finally we came to a place with a small Lava-Fall (think waterfall) in front of us, and a steaming cliff where lava was colliding with the sea to the side of us. There we sat, ate starfruit, liliko'i (passionfruit), and bananas, and watched the show. Before departing, we left some fruits as offering to the goddess Pele.
On the way back we were treated to an amazing sunrise. We got home just in time for breakfast and the start of the work day - 7am.
See more photos and comments at my Flickr page
where I have a lot more photos now, and will be putting up even more soon, since I've been to a few more beaches over the weekend.
This is Viki, Signing out, till the next time I can get some solid "Computer time".
Current Mood: enthralled
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