The BIG Island of Hawaii

Aloha!

We have just spent 4 days on the BIG Island and I have only 2 words for it - tropical paradise. We arrived Monday lunchtime, picked up our hire car and headed straight for the volcano national park. It contains Hawaii's only remaining active volcano and it was pretty active for us, but I'll get to that in a minute.
We sorted out a wooden cabin with no heating just outside of the national park, to spend the night. Its warm but raining at this time. We saw it had a brick BBQ, so in true Sam and Alan style we headed straight for the shops for firelighters, food and beer (just for the record we don't drink that much and its very weak in strength compared to the UK). It was absolutely freezing in the cabin that night - our sleeping bags had there first outing.

It was about 5pm by this point so it was time to explore the volcano national park and get to the bottom of the chain of craters as the sun was setting. We have a million pictures of different craters, lava trails and scenery. When we got to the bottom of the chain of craters, we still had to walk about a mile to the lava and then it was a short(ish) walk over the lava to get to the point where you can see the HOT lava dropping into the ocean. Walking over lava is not easy either, if you fall you will cut yourself really badly as the top layer of lava is silicon based ( glass). However, it was so worth doing because as the sun set and it went dark, the side of the hill/volcano glowed red. It was awesome!!!!!!!!!

We drove around the rest of the park the next day and walked to the Thurston Lava Tube, which is a tunnel you walk through. We had to walk through the rainforest to get to it and again it was raining.
After we left the national park we headed for Punululu beach, its a very nice black lava sand beach. But we saw giant turtles basking on the beach.

We stayed in a very nice hostel near the Captain Cook monument on our second night and we had the the loudest thunderstorm I had ever heard.

On our third day we went hawaiian ale tasting in Kailua-Kona. Alan was driving so he did alot of sipping and sniffing, I, however did alot of swigging and it was quite strong stuff 6%. It was free through which was great!

On our last full day, we stopped in Hilo and visited Rainbow falls and boiling pots. This waterfall was the biggest I seen so far but the water looked yellowy. In the evening we went to the other side of the lava flow and trekked for about a mile trying to view the red lava from a different angle. We didn't get to see it this time, but we did have fun driving our rental car over the old lava - its bumpy!