Day 4 - Volcano National Park

Today we travelled over the island and south to the Volcano National Park which is where Hawaii gets bigger every day.

The National Park covers a huge 333,000 acres of land at the south of Big Island and is home to the Kilauea Volcano which has been actively erupting since 1983.

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We drove into the park and saw the Kilauea Volcano firstly from above the massive crater and then walked down through the rain forrest to the crater floor which once we were on it felt like some strange planet surface as the crust was broken and cracked for miles up to the smouldering mouth of the volcano. An amazing experience.

Here are some of the pictures from the trip.

There are steam vents which are all over the park and when you stand close to them, feel like standing in a sauna - this heat on top of already hot Hawaiian temperatures!

The main crater is 6km x 6km and so is absolutely huge - and although it spurts out thousands of cubic metres of lava every day, the main lava flow at the moment comes from another vent some 11km from the main crater shown in these pictures.

However as you can see from the gases coming out of the crater this is very much an active volcano.

The whole National Park sits on a mountain (or actually the volcano is the mountain) and after hiking and walking around the main crater we followed the road (and the lava) down the mountain side.

On the way we passed huge craters formed by previous eruptions and miles of cooled lava flow that had been formed from the various events over the past 100 years.

The mouth of the crater is 4,000 feet above sea level and so on the edge of the cliffs there were some spectacular views along the newly made coastline which now forms the southern tip of Big Island.

The other thing we noticed in descending to the coast was the rapid temperature change - it was 77ºC at 4,000 feet, by the time we were walking on the coast it had risen to 90ºC!

Once we had driven down the final 3,000 feet to the Pacific coastline - the road abruptly ends. The lava flow had closed Route 130 completely and previously completely destroyed 2 coastal towns .

And so all we could do from here was climb the lava to get a view of where the current flow is pouring into the Pacific Ocean every minute of every day.

You can see the huge plumes of steam in the distance in this picture. This is where the lava flow is currently falling into the ocean.

After our day here, in the evening we drove to see the lava flow into the ocean which we were told was most spectacular in the evening because the red lava flow was easy to see in the dark.

This was an incredible sight and as promised was best viewed in the darkness.

To reach the site we had to walk for about 20 minutes over a dried up lava field by torchlight which was hazardous to say the least - but once we were there the view was spectacular.

We could see the lava glowing red as it slowly came down the mountainside and then finally the explosive reaction as it hit the cold water of the Pacific.

It was impossible to get very good photographs without a tripod because it was completely dark when we were there - but I did take some video to remind us of the amazing view.

What you can see here is not great quality or very clear - but it is the red hot lava flowing off the edge of the land and exploding into the Pacific causing huge plumes of gas, silicon and steam - and eventually new land for Hawaii.

I hope it gives you a flavour of the spectacle that we saw.

All the pictures above can be enlarged if you double click them.