Owl Abroad

You should always go to bed each day having learned something new. That’s a maxim I’ve held all my adult life. Not always possible, of course, to actually have the opportunity of learning something new every day and, sadly, these days I tend to forget something I’ve just learned about two seconds later. But it is a great principle to follow.

There is one unusual day when I learn three new things – and, what is more, have managed to retain the learnings. It is Christmas Eve among the lava flows of Hawaii’s Big Island.

First learning. It comes as a surprise to learn that human beings have been in Hawaii only 1,700 years, or thereabouts. A bee’s knee in historical time. In historic terms, people arrived only yesterday. Nothing like the long human habitation of other Pacific islands – 3,000 years in Fiji, slightly less in Tahiti – though much longer than in New Zealand (around only 800 years).

The first humans came to Hawaii from the Marquesas, around 300 AD, followed by more settler arrivals, from Tahiti this time, around 700-800 years ago. What a great feat to travel so far in whatever “primitive” craft the used: 4,000 kilometres from the Marquesas and 3,200 kilometres from Tahiti.

Second learning. Until this day I am totally unaware – and astonished to discover – that Hawaii sits on a moving plate. It moves somewhat like a conveyor belt, in a roughly easterly (or even south easterly?) direction. As it does so, it crosses a “stationary hot spot of magma” which “has been occurring for 70 million years”.

Magma flows up into the sea where the conveyor sits over the hot spot, building lava upon lava, slowly over long centuries, until eventually it breaks the surface of the sea and gradually builds an island. Each island in the Hawaii archipelago, starting from the most westerly island, was formed in this way, one after the other.

Big Island is the last island formed. I guess, given its continuing volcanic activity, it is still, at least in part, sitting over the hot spot. The volcanoes on the other Hawaiian islands, now moved along the conveyor, are dead.

Thirty-five kilometres out to sea off Big Island, the newest Hawaiian island is already being formed, deep beneath the ocean surface. It will be anything up to 100,000 years, or more, before it breaks the surface and goodness knows how many more hundreds of thousands of years before an island is fully formed. Yet it already has a name: Lo’ihi.

I suspect that by the time Lo’ihi sees the light of day, mankind will have long gone from the earth.

Big Island has three active volcanoes (Hualalai, Mauna Loa, and Kilauea), one dormant volcano, and one extinct. Kilauea is the volcano we visit this Christmas Eve, while Mauna Loa is right next to it.

At a mere 200,000 years old, Kilauea is the youngest of all the state’s volcanoes. Its current activity began in 1983, since when its lava flows have created an extra five square kilometres of land. In the 1960s and then in the 1990s, lava from Kilauea destroyed three towns and in 2014 it cut across the road going around the coast of the island on this side, severing the link so it can no longer be driven its full length.

Another learning with a surprise. When the Hawaiian islands emerged above the sea, they were simply solidified lava rocks, without any flora or fauna. Over vast periods of time, fauna and flora were blown, or drifted, here from other parts of the world, across thousands of kilometres of ocean. Once here, they developed their own evolutionary process in which some species of animals, birds, and plants evolved differently to their original state. For example, Hawaiian mint doesn’t have the characteristic smell or taste other parts of the world associate with mint. Another example: holly here has lost its prickles over time.

After viewing an excellent documentary film on Hawaii’s development at the Volcanic National Park information centre, we drive down to the sea edge, though heavy rain at first then in increasingly fine conditions. The Chain of Craters Road, around 30 kilometres in length, falls quite steeply in places, dropping down the mountain side to a ridge overlooking the flat lands at the very edge of the island, with the sea beyond, and then to the sea edge itself. An excellent, paved, well-maintained road.

We see warnings everywhere to be alert to highly toxic sulfur dioxide gas, and a side road going right round the actual Kilauea caldera is closed because of the high levels of gas.

We don’t stop to view various sights requiring walking, such as the Thurston lava tube or Devastation Trail or any one of a number of other trails, because of my bad foot. However, we do stop at various points beside the road, one or two of them with viewing platforms, to look at the after-effects of volcanic activity.

Chain of Craters Road cuts across the solidified rock of the lava flow of the 1970s, a moonscape with trees starting to grow. Eventually, and startlingly quickly – a matter of decades only – nature claims the rocks and puts up trees and scrub. The more vegetation, the older the flow. More recent flows than the 1970s are still mostly bare, only just starting to show sparse bits of growth.

The solidified lava flows have fascinating patterns of swirls, lines, holes, upthrusts, sometimes smooth, sometimes rocky and broken. These are the patterns of the lava as it flowed and cooled, and you can imagine from the cold remains the glowing red-hot lava creeping forward. The rock is mostly grey or black in colour, a somber sight, and everywhere, even where vegetation is reclaiming the land, it has a desolate appearance, with the grey/black expanses seeming to go on forever across vast areas. A strange, eerie, oddly unsettling sight.

After a while, we see the sea in the distance, whipped into wild white horses by a strong wind. At the bottom of the road, over the escarpment, the land is flat for some distance beside the sea, a landscape of totally grey lava, totally smooth, much smoother than anything up the road. It looks rather like grey chocolate icing (not that I’ve ever seen grey chocolate).

From the side of the escarpment, we see a plume of white smoke in the distance, the point at which the current lava flow, molten and red-hot, falls into the sea. A distinctive white plume rising into the sky. You can’t see the lava itself from this point and have to be much closer, almost on top of it, before you can.

Many cars are parked at the end of the driveable road and there are crowds of people over on the cliff edge or walking along what used to be the connecting road round the island to see the lava close-up (a long walk). Instead, we go to the sea cliff edge and look down on the choppy sea and across to the lava-meets-sea plume in the distance. Great waves crash against, and are flung high up, the cliffs. Although the sun is now out, the wind off the sea is strong and bitingly cold.

There is a spectacular rock arch, Holei Sea Arch, jutting out from the cliff, with the pounding sea surging through it in wild, chaotic, foaming waves. The arch is 18 metres high, “formed by wave erosion”. At some point in the future, the continuing erosion will lead to the arch’s total collapse and the loss of a truly beautiful piece of landscape.

In the distance, towards the other side of the island away from the lava plume, we see a thin band of snow on the highest ridge. It snows on those peaks four or five times a year, not exactly something you associate with Hawaii.

Over that way, too, a light cloud drifts from a fold in a distant slope, a hidden valley, and we think it might be the smoke off another lava flow rather than ordinary cloud.

A park ranger sternly tells-off two young men who have gone beyond the guard fence, and warning signs, and too close to the cliff edge. Young men are idiots the world over.

This is not a safe place. A nearby notice warns about not coming into contact with sea spray that might be heated by the lava flow. I don’t think it’s an issue this far from the actual flow, but when you get closer to it, the sea affected by the lava is highly acidic. Two people were severely burned in 1994 when they came into contact with such spray, and in 2000 two people died after contact with sea spray.

After a pee in the longest long drop toilet I’ve ever been in, cut down through solid lava rock to a chamber so far down I can only hear but cannot see the bottom, we drive back up the Chain of Craters Road and on to the road back to Hilo. We lunch at Keaau, a small town close to Hilo, and branch off the main road and along the road that used, before the 2014 lava flow, to go around the coastline and connect up with the Chain of Craters Road.

Just where lava flows have destroyed the road, we come to a large carpark, busy with people. Stalls hire out bikes. It is possible to walk or bike from here to the point where the lava hits the sea, about four hours return if walking. The broad pathway is carved through the grey lava rock. I would love to walk it, but walking that distance is impossible for me now with bad feet and I suspect biking would push my physical capability beyond its limit as well. We content ourselves with a short walk along the path and back.

Again, though less prominently than before because of the obscuring of the view by lava rock rising into a hill, we can see the plume where the molten lava meets the sea, so we are now looking at it from the opposite side to where we were an hour or two ago.

This too is a moonscape of grey, almost bare lava flow, sparse vegetation only just coming through. It is only a few years since the lava came down here. A truly bleak desolation. To our astonishment, a number of houses stand among the rocks. Some look older, set in small well-vegetated areas, oases completely surround by rock as though the molten lava flowed around them, leaving islands of how it used to be.

Other houses in the unremitting greyness are clearly new and several are still being built. Who would want to build in this ugly place, surrounded by grey rock – indeed on top of it – and possibly in peril of further lava flows? We learn later that “land” on recently formed rock is very cheap to buy.

Reluctantly saying goodbye to volcanoes, we head back to our lodgings in Hilo. A day on which three new things are learned and many new sights are experienced, a day that will stick in my mind forever.

Hawaii, December 2016

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