The Banyan Tree

This is an amazing Banyan tree in the courtyard of the Moana Surfrider hotel at Waikiki Beach.  It was planted in 1904 as a seven foot tree.  It is astounding to see in person.  We stopped here for hamburgers one night. It is not a bad location.  The beach is on the far side of the tree, and this is the perfect place to watch the sunset as you eat.

Hawaiian Mountains

We were unable to schedule renting ATV's at Kualoa Ranch, where this photograph was taken.  They didn't have five of them, then they didn't have four of them.  We were driving to the north shore to the surfing beaches and saw these amazing mountains.  Turns out it was the ranch.  We stopped to photograph this scene just because of the mountains.  I have no idea about how they formed, but mountains like this with deep cuts back into the main body are something that I have only seen in Hawaii.  I will have to do some research and report back to you.

New Growth

I am in love with all the lava flows we have driven through on more than one of the Hawaiian islands.  I love the feeling that you are living on the moon.  But this is a completely different landscape. I think it is so beautiful, and I love the subtlety of the colors, and the bleached trees.  There is a lava flow under all this green, and I am guessing that it happened at least hundreds of years ago,, if not thousands, but I don't know for sure.  In the top of the photograph you can see a more recent lava flow - everything is gray.

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.