I guess you all spotted my error in the title of my #54 Lahaina is on Maui, not Hilo which isn’t even an island. Yikes!!
6106 The Boiling Pots. It’s hard to see in the picture but that white area extending down and out from the falls is a mass of small bubbles that rise to the surface.
6115 The entrance to Kaumana Caves lava tube. This is the area where the tubes top has collapsed.
6127 Looking back toward the entrance to the tube. You can see the smooth floor of the tube at this point. Well, it’s not all smooth but it does have smooth parts.
6128 This is the point where the tube under the main tube has collapsed leaving the resulting rocks strewn across the path. You can see the girl at the left standing on a subsequent flow that came down the already empty tube. That’s what produced the smooth parts of the floor.
6135 Please excuse this poorly shot picture that required extensive rotation to get the stairs in proper perspective. It’s actually not rotated far enough. You can tell because the stair treads are not yet parallel to the bottom of the frame. But the further I rotated the less of the picture left in the frame. Let’s just say that the stairs were steep.
Nov 29 - Hilo, Hawaii, Hawaii. Today, once again, Diana and I are on separate tours. She’s going on another helicopter flight and I’m going to see some of the islands lesser visited sites, local surf beaches, the ‘boiling pots’ and the Kaumana Caves, actually a lava tube.
Our tour will be in a van as there are only 7 of us going. Our driver/guide looks the part of the ex-hippie, moved to the islands in the ‘80s sort. He’s tall and thin but we would soon learn that he’s a student of Hawaiian culture and the local folklore.
On the way out of town we took a little tour of Hilo. We drove through the park on a road lined with Banyan trees. Apparently in the past it was common for a celebrity passing through Hilo to plant a Banyan tree along this parkway. We saw trees planted by Emilia Earhart, George Herman ‘Babe’ Ruth and Leo Carrillo (Pancho on the Cisco Kid) and others I don’t remember.
Our first stop was on the grounds of an old sugar mill. Some of the infrastructure was still intact. The old railroad bridge, the aqueduct that brought sugar cane to the plant like logs were floated down a river. The railroad was a neat operation. The cars of cane would park on the bridge and a crane would scoop the cane up and drop it onto ha hopper to be processed. Most of the buildings have been demolished but the foundations and footings are still there. They had a beautiful location right on the bay just outside Hilo. The main building has been converted into office space and is still in use.
We drove up from the sea level mill on a winding blacktop road that was only just wide enough for two cars to pass. It rose up through rain forest, with vines, ferns, various flowering plants and trees. On one side we could look down on the ocean on the other up at the forest. We stopped several times to view surfers in the water and near bridges to look at the streams underneath. A very pleasant start to the tour.
Our guide told us about local customs and some of the history of Hilo, big sugar mill center at one time. The road we were on was built in the 1800s to give access to the sugar mill.
We’re stopping at Rainbow Falls but we are not going to the parking lot for the viewing platform. Instead we are going to park uphill from the falls and approach it through a banyan tree forest dotted with mango trees. The path down the hill was easy to negotiate. Every now and then there were natural lava rock stairs. You had to pay attention to these because each stair was a different height and some had sizable gaps in the stones. They have installed railings at the trickier parts. The falls themselves were just a trickle. They’re just coming out of dry season and the last part of it has been particularly dry.
From Rainbow Falls we drove to a small site just in the hills above Hilo. We were the only people in the parking lot. The overlook is above the Wailuku River where it cascades over old lava rocks and through several pools known as the ‘Boiling Pots’. The water isn’t hot but the speed with which in enters the pool creates bubbles that make it look like the water is boiling. Since it’s pretty dry the volume and speed of the water is reduced but the bubbling effect was still visible right were the cascade entered the pool. It was a very peaceful and beautiful view. If there’d been more water it would have been spectacular.
Our guide laid out a snack for us on one of the picnic tables. Drinks and nuts, macadamia of course. While we munched he gave us additional insight to the traditional Hawaiian religion and culture including a little history of the Kingdom of Hawaii and its conversion to statehood.
Once we returned to the van we discovered that our guide had place a large flashlight on each of our seats. We’re headed from the Boiling Pots to the Kaumana Caves. They’re not really caves at all but lava tubes. Lava tubes are formed when a large volume of molted lava makes its way downhill. The outside of the lava flow cool and forms a hard crust while the still molten center keeps flowing. When the flow is very large and deep, like when it’s concentrated by flowing down a valley this can create a lava tube of impressive size.
We are entering a section of the tube where the ceiling has collapsed providing access to the tube itself. The first sign we encountered said, “Kaumana Caves, Dept. of Parks and Recreation, County of Hawaii”. The second sign said, “Danger Keep Out”. Nothing like a warning sign to perk up your situational awareness. I’m always on Status Yellow anyway so mine didn’t bump up much.
Years ago someone had built a very steep and narrow set of small concrete stairs down into the collapsed tube. I don’t think anyone would have built them this way in the last 40 years. Once down the stairs you had to walk on an uneven and narrow path through the undergrowth to reach the entrance to the cave. Once you’re in the tube itself there are no improvements so you are on your own to scramble across the broken lava to reach the smooth bottom of the tube’s smooth bottom. This easy part is soon disrupted when you find that you are actually in a large tube that contains a smaller tube. As it has crumbled the bottom becomes very uneven and rough.
Everyone on the tour seems capable of getting across the obstacles. This is one tour where the Shorex staff’s description of the trip’s conditions was accurate and intimidating.
There are some inscribed into the smooth parts of the floor. The oldest one I saw was from 1925. Most of the early inscriptions were Japanese names but spelled with English characters. We didn’t go to deeply into the cave as the floor became very uneven and strewn with large rocks that would have necessitated some rock scrambling skills that many of us don’t have or are no longer willing to risk. I had heard some people saying they were leaving their hats in the van because they were not going to be in the sun. Advice is often not taken well by older people so I kept my trap shut. I’ll just say that I’m glad I had mine because, as I suspected, it’s constantly raining inside the tube. At the ceiling you could see the roots of banyan trees coming down from the top. These provide a great water course and the droplets were coming down pretty heavily.
Going out was easier than coming in because you were facing the light source and as you ascend you naturally lean into the slope. Going down your natural stance leans away from the slope decreasing your ability to recover from small slips on the wet uneven surface.
Our next stop was at a black sand beach known mostly to local surfers and, much to our surprise, sea turtles. A large one was sunning him or herself on the lava rocks just off the shore and another smaller one was in the water.
After reaching the entrance to the area we parked and I walked back to get some photos of the turtles. The one sunning himself posed for quite a while but then slipped off the rocks into the water. I thought we were bothering him so he was moving on. Exactly the opposite was true. In about 5 minutes he surfaced directly down the lava rock from where I was standing. It took about five of the larger waves to boost him far enough out of the water where he felt he could start crawling. He was coming straight up the beach towards us. Two of my fellow travelers had joined me in that area.
Sea turtles are a protected species here, and almost everywhere else, and you’re not supposed to approach too near them. As I stood there the turtle was approaching me. Again, as when I was in the water with one, I didn’t know if it was my responsibility to retreat. He crawled up fairly close before I figured I’d move further up from the water.
I walked over to the beach area and found that there were people on the black sand, some families with children as well as adults. In the area adjacent to the beach two snorkelers were spear fishing.
It was a nice relaxing day of touring to some spots where we were the only tourists.
Diana had a great helicopter tour today. She sat in the front of the helicopter between the pilot and a man from Canada. She had a great view through the windshield and also to both sides.
They flew over the Kilauea Volcano and she got some great pictures. This volcano has been continuously erupting since 1983, making it one of the most active geological environments on earth. She got some great shots of a lava plume in the caldera, some inundated roads and isolated spots that the lava missed on its migration to the sea. Really nice.
We were going to try to meet again on the pier but we’re docked in the container port and there wasn’t any place to wait comfortably. We met back on the ship and had lunch there. After lunch Diana and three other ladies went back downtown to Wal-Mart to see what they had in the way of Hawaiian clothing. She found that they had some nice clothes and some made it back to the ship.
We both had a good day. Now we just have five days at sea and we’re back in San Diego. Easy duty.
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