Month: February 2023

A Visit to Madame Pele

We visited Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park today; it’s about a two-hour drive from our hotel. Well, more like three hours when you add stops for lunch, gasoline, and other necessities of life, so we got to the Visitor Station about 1:30pm. It was raining with occasional breaks, which would continue throughout our visit to the park.

We waited for the 2pm guided walk to the nearby eruption viewing area; it was led by an intern who mostly talked about birds, but we did get our first view of Kilauea crater.

This part of the crater wasn’t affected by the current eruption, though it had been remade by the eruptions a few years ago; plants were already beginning to re-colonize it.

After the walk, we went to Volcano House to look at their gift shop (much more enticing than the one in the Visitor Center, but we managed to leave empty-handed anyway) and take advantage of the crater view there.

We returned to the car and set out on Crater Rim Drive, westbound. The Kilauea Overlook was our first stop; we enjoyed the warmth of the steam vents and a better view of the crater.

Crater Rim Drive used to go all the way around the crater, but that changed with the 2018 eruptions; we had to turn around and drive the eastern half of the road. We stopped at the Kilauea Ski parking area and walked the trail to the Thurston Lava Tube.

There were lots of holes along the way – we gave them a wide berth.

You can go a few hundred yards into the tube, but we had other plans in mind, so we only saw the first twenty feet.

We’d been told that the best viewing of the current eruption in Halemaʻumaʻu crater was from the Old Crater Rim Road (now a trail), so we drove to the parking lot and took the 3/4-mile walk to the viewing area. We saw nene on the lava field next to the trail; it’s their nesting season and there were signs posted reminding you to keep your distance – nene can get aggressive.

Finally, we reached the viewing area. It was easy to see the plumes of steam from the crater, but we couldn’t see any glowing lava. The photo at the top of the page shows offerings that previous visitors had left for Pele, the volcano goddess – and they seemed to be working, because the eruption had diminished significantly today.

We decided against driving Chain of Craters Road because of the late hour; we headed for our hotel, with a dinner stop at the Dimple Cheek Cafe, where the food was tasty and the portions generous – Diane and I split a salad and an entrée and that filled us up nicely.

It was a long day but well worth the trip; I wish we’d been able to see the lava glowing, but I guess that’s why there’s a webcam!

Plans, meet reality

The day dawned bright and sunny.

We took a short walk around the property and enjoyed the frangipani we encountered along the way.

I wanted to visit a coffee farm and Diane wanted to visit a botanical garden, and it looked like we were in luck – there were two very near each other in South Kona, and both were named “Greenwell” (Greenwell Farms) and the Amy B. H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden.

We got in the car and turned on the “Big Island Driving Guide” app I’d just bought (a companion to the guidebook we’d bought yesterday) so it could tell us about the things we were seeing along the way. We learned about lava, lava tubes, beaches and much more. Then it suggested we consider making a brief visit to the Kaloko-Honokōhau National Historical Park and we did.

After a brief stop at the park store, we set out on the Ala Mauka Makai trail, a short, easy one-mile trail that would take us to the ocean.

We stopped at the petrograph loop.

When we got to the ocean, the honu (green sea turtles) were resting near the shoreline.

We explored the area around the Aiopio Fish Trap (no longer in use except by swimmers).

Two hours after we’d arrived, we finally got back into our car to continue on our journey.

I’d found the Greenwell garden in an article on Love Big Island and I realized it didn’t give the hours of operation, so I opened the garden’s website. I couldn’t find hours of operation there, either! And when I tried to call them, the number had been disconnected. Oops.

Fortunately, there was another Kona garden listed in the article, the Sadie Seymour Botanical Gardens and it was right on our way, so we drove there instead. It wasn’t the best time to see the gardens, but there were enough flowers to make us happy, like this yellow hibiscus.

Then it was off to Greenwell Farms – we got there just after the last tour of the day had started, but we were able to join it in progress. They’ve been growing coffee for more than a century. They don’t just have coffee trees, though; I liked this orchid that was growing near the entrance to the coffee field.

They are one of the biggest coffee farms in Kona; they buy from other farmers in the area, too. Not all of the coffee cherries they buy (or grow, for that matter) meet their standards; the rejects go into a cart for disposal (there is a coffee boring beetle which is causing problems).

Our guide opened a cherry and showed us the actual beans inside – there should have been two, but this particular cherry had three; it would have been filtered out during processing.

They grow other fruit on the farm, too, like white pineapples and apple bananas.

They are responding to the coffee beetle by grafting – here are some coffee plants that they’ve grafted onto a resistant rootstock, much as Old World grapevines were saved by grafting them onto New World rootstock.

The tour ended with a tasting, of course, and I left with twelve ounces of pure Kona coffee to grind and brew at home.

And then it was back to the hotel, where I had to battle the TV to force it to let me use my Fire Stick…but that’s a story for another time.