Day 6: Church, Falls, and Fire

Far too early on Sunday morning, we we woke up and got ready for church. For some unfathomable reason, a lot of Mormon congregations meet at 8am in Hawaii. Luckily, the church building was not too far from where we were staying. We really enjoyed our first church service in Hawaii. The building was partly open to the outside air--I wonder how they keep animals out? Some of the men wear lava-lavas instead of suit pants (with a white shirt and tie on top), and the Bishopric all wore black leis. And, of course, they start every meeting and class by saying "AloHA!" and then everyone responds back the same way. Everyone was very friendly and came up and talked to us. And it's always great to go to Church! The Gospel is universally true. :)

The plan for the day was to go to church and keep things restful by taking a scenic drive up the the Hamakua coast (which is the east side of the island). The Big Island of Hawaii is, well, big--and has lots of different types of terrain to see. We mostly came there for the volcano (the island of Hawaii is the only of the Hawaiian islands with active volcanoes), but we wanted to see some of the waterfalls and coastline too.

However, we couldn't bring ourselves to do the drive without first taking a hefty nap back at the rental. We finally roused ourselves from that, we first drove through Hilo, where we saw a HUGE banyan tree (the picture is through the car window--sorry.) By the way, our car was not a convertible this time, but we *did* luck out and get one with a sunroof! It was pretty sweet too--and actually more comfortable than the Mustang. It even had heated seats--not that anyone really needs them in Hawaii, though. Man, I could sure use those seats right about now in Illinois!

Anyways, our next stop was Akaka falls, which is just a little walk down from the parking lot through exotic, lush jungle foliage. (The picture at the beginning of this post is Akaka falls). The next picture is a place on the coast where a sad thing happened--a bunch of school kids ran out to see why the water had receded in the 1940's and got swept out to sea when the tsunami came back in. I think they have some sort of memorial there, but we just saw it from above.

The final destination was Waipio Valley. We didn't hike down to the bottom, but we definitely enjoyed the view from the top and thought it was very cool that the beach is black sand.

From there, we drove back to Hilo, had dinner in our rental place, and headed out again, this time driving south towards the volcano to see the place where the lava enters the water. I'd heard it was really spectacular to view it at night, and since we didn't get to do it on Saturday, it was our only chance to get down there in the dark. You park in this parking lot and walk a ways on the lava rock (we had to use head lamps since it was dark by now) until you get to the coast. They don't let you get very close to the actual lava, but you can see this huge red glow and watch the lava hit the ocean. We had binoculars and sat there in total awe watching new land forming. (The pictures didn't turn out well, though.) We stayed until just before it started to POUR again--we did bring umbrellas, but the wind blew the rain at us anyway. At least we didn't have 11 miles to walk back to the car this time, though.