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| Hot Lava! |
Today we took a
helicopter ride around the island,
talk about seeing some cool stuff. We took off from the Kona Airport and
made our way to the other side of the island to view the volcano from
above. Since it was spewing a lot of gas there
was a 6 mile no fly zone around the crater…boo. But we headed on to
see…
LAVA!!! We started flying in the area north of where Chain of
Craters Road ends and this is where we saw same trees on fire and some
lava seeping out of the ground. We also got to see
Jack's House, the last surviving house in the Royal Gardens subdivision
that was taken over lava from Kilauea (75 homes were destroyed when the
eruptions began in 1983). You can tell by the picture that the lava is
getting dangerously close to his house. After
we saw all this we headed towards Hilo and got to view the coastline
and MANY waterfalls! It had rained the night before so the valleys and
rivers were flowin'! We made our way to the Kohala Forest and we landed
in one of the valleys (our pilot was quite inredible!).
We got walk around here and pick some fresh fruit right off the trees.
We got back in the helicopter and followed the coastline all the way
back to airport, and we got to see our hotel along the way too!
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this is Jack's house. The lava has gotten so close but its still standing in March 2012 Pele destroyed his home |
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| some trees on fire |
After we were done with this we decided to rent
some snorkel equipment from Snorkel Bob's and head to Kekaha Kai State
Park…we drove our rented sports car on an "unimproved" lava road to get
there! (Unimproved is the word they used on the
sign…why not just say unpaved or something because it looked like there
was never any maintenance done to this road.) We stayed there for a few
minutes but the waves were pretty strong due to the VERY windy weather
that day. So we opted to head to the Mauna
Kea resort to see their beach. (Mauna Kea is the sister hotel to ours,
Hapuna Prince.) Matt went snorkeling around the rocks while I just
relaxed on the beach, I was a little nervous to snorkel without someone
making sure we weren’t going too far or if there
was a shark or something near..eeekk!) After that we cleaned up and got
ready for dinner at Hapuna's Coast Grill. The food was amazing! But
what was better was watching the sun set and then see a shooting star
while we ate dinner; a truly wonderful night!
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| no room for error |
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