On the second day on Big Island we went to see the volcanoes. We didn’t see any flowing lava which was rather disappointing but the whole thing was so incredibly impressive. The volcanoes in Hawaii are shield volcanoes which means they just keep oozing lava and growing.
Part of the road around the top of the volcano was closed due to high levels of sulphur dioxide but it was still possible to drive part of the way and see the core of the volcano still smoking. It was lying in a sea of solidified lava and diagrams explained how the top of the volcano had collapsed creating the cliffs on which we were standing, with the dried lava below and then in the centre the crater.
It was also possible to walk through a “lava tube” created 500 years ago – literally a long tunnel in the lava. Finally one drives for about 30 minutes over lava fields running from the top of the volcano down to the sea. The scale of the lava fields and the amount of lava produced over thousands of years was incomprehensible.
