Hilo, Hawaii April 14, 2012

Hilo is the "wet" side of the Big Island with over 200 inches of rainfall per year. Where Kona has a lot of volcanic rock, Hilo is a lush rainforest. We arrived at 7:00 am and the highs today will be in the upper 70's. Although it has threatened rain on our visit to the islands, we never actually had any rain.

Our journey today will be to Volcanoes National Park. We drove through a tropical rainforest and ascended to 4300 feet above sea level to view Kilauea Volcano - home of Pele, the legendary Goddess of Fire.

Part of today's adventure was to drive along the crater rim to see the volcano from more than one perspective but the rim road was partially closed due to recent volcanic activity. A lot of VOG - Volcanic Ash Smog.

Since we couldn't do the rim drive, our guide took us to an another section of the park where there are fields of volcanic rock.

We had the opportunity to walk around and explore the volcanic rock.










After this stop we went to the Thurston Lava Tube and walked through it and the rainforest that surrounds it.

Rusty in Lava Tube

Sheryl at Lava Tube

Walking through Rain Forest

Again Rusty and I would have loved a little more time to hike and explore but we saw some huge craters.  The volcanic craters are miles wide and very deep.

When we left VNP we stopped at the Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut factory and gift shop. They had some beautiful gardens here. We then made a brief stop at a Zoo before we headed into town and had lunch near an ocean side park.

Ocean side park

We drove through downtown Hilo and made a left turn and drove up this hill. Right at the top, still in town, we came across Rainbow Falls. Really quite impressive when you consider it is in town.

All in all we were very pleased with our adventures in Hawaii. The vegetation and flowers are spectacular with hundreds of varieties. The people of Hawaii were very friendly. It was everything we hoped it would be.