Ahihi-Kinau Natural Area Reserve

OK, so after all the people we are back to the landscape.  And you might get bored seeing lava flows.  They are all over the Hawaiian Islands, because volcanoes are what formed the islands in the first place.  Do you remember my photographs of the fishers - the two young men and a woman?  Well, this lava flow was on the west side of the island of Maui on the road we took to get to the fishers.  What a stunning landscape!  This lava flowed down the Haleakala volcano all the way to the sea. I am having trouble coming up with the date of this lava flow.  It is between 500 and 1000 years old, as best as I can determine.

People Pictures

I have been posting so many landscape photographs that I realized that I need to show some people photographs.  So here are various photographs from the trip.  This is everyone eating shrimp from a food truck.  

Here we go again, more shrimp from a truck!  This time I ate shrimp and it was astounding!  Louisana style, and hot!  Yummm...

Photograph of the women on a balcony at our hotel in Honolulu.

Amy and Gus doing a selfie.  Amy is the master of the selfie!

Amy and Liz and Sarah in the swimming pool at the hotel in Kona.

A Drive to the Sea

There is a winding road that makes its way down from the visitor center at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, all the way to the sea.  It is called Chain of Craters Road.  I will show more photographs along the route in another post, but today I wanted to show you what you will find at the end of the road.  What we see in this photograph are lava flows that have come down this hill.  Older flows have had new vegetation grow on them, thus the green.

This the impressive Holei Sea Arch which  was formed from sea water eroding part of the lava flow that makes up this sea coast.  The top of the arch is fenced off, but because people do stupid things, there are signs and explanations warning people not to walk out on the arch!

This gives a sense of the cliffs made from lava flows.  What an incredibly rugged coast.  You sure would not want to be shipwrecked and then wash up on this coast!  Yikes!

This is another view of the different lava flows that came down the hill, and then made their way to the sea.

I took this photograph because I loved the triangular-shaped cloud above a small rise in the lava.

Wai'anapanapa

This is Pa'iloa Beach at Wai'anapanapa State Park.  Don't you love the Hawaiian names?  It is so hard to figure out how to pronounce them.  This is a view off the cliff of the lava flows that make up the coast.  You can see eroded openings underneath some of the lava.  What's really cool is that there is an ocean cave under where I am standing.

This is a view of the cave, looking back toward the entrance from the beach.  The cave is an opening hollowed out of the lava.  It was a really cool place to photograph.  You have to crouch down to make it through the small opening from the beach in the distance.

This is a view of the cave looking the other way.  A lot of people came and went in the cave, and I sat there photographing silhouettes of the visitors.  This was the most interesting silhouette - there were two young women in bathing suits, photographing each other with their cellphone cameras.

Rainbow Falls

When we left the town of Volcano, on the big island, right near Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, we drove to the town of Hilo on the east side of the island.  There we found Rainbow Falls which is 80 feet tall and pours into a pool below.  It is surrounded by vegetation that strangely enough, is not tropical, according to Wikipedia. It is a beautiful falls, but there was no sign of any rainbows.  We were there in the afternoon, and I am thinking that you would have to be there in the morning when the sun was shining on the falls.  Man, there are photographs at every turn in this landscape.

Along the South Shore of Oahau

We spent much of one day visiting sites and beaches on the southeast coast of the island of Oahau, which is the island that Honolulu is located on.  This first photograph shows the magnificent landscape and the two kinds of coast there, as seen from Halona Cove..  In the foreground is the coastline formed by lava flows.  In the distance is a beautiful sand beach at Sandy Beach Park.  Sandy Beach Park is a well known body surfing beach because of the waves there.  The waves, however, are really tricky, and dangerous.  That beach is informally known as "Break Neck Beach" and people have been disabled and even killed there, when they were dumped on their heads on the beach, by a wave.

This is a view of an area at Halona Blowhole Lookout.  At first I thought these towers of rocks were some kind of natural erosion, but then I realized that they are cairns - stones piled like this by people.  This is an area where waves crash all the time, so  I am not sure how long the cairns last.  It is such a strange kind of landscape to see these towers on the edge of the lava.

And this is the main attraction - the blowhole.  You can watch this for a long time, waiting for the perfect wave pattern to arrive so that water and wind is forced up through the blowhole and you are rewarded with this really cool effect!

In the Mist and Fog

On the day we visited Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, we had mist and drizzle and rain off and on all day.  We had bought some clear plastic raincoats to wear to keep us dry.   We were driving on Chain of Craters Road (more on that later) and we would stop and investigate craters and lava flows along the way.  I happened to be following Amy as she made it along this pathway to investigate a cinder cone and photograph it.  I love how she almost blends into the fog in the distance.