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Aside from the unbearably long and food-free flight (really, United… NO vegetarian options? Out of desperate starvation, I paid $5 for a box that contained a “mini meal” of sugar-free applesauce, a watery peppercorn cheese spread, two crackers, milano cookies and untouched salami), everything in Hawaii is extraordinary.

Yesterday’s sights included the airport (the plane lands in a field of lava!) Budget Rental car (we’re rollin’ in a white Mustang convertible), K-Mart (looking for underwater cameras), Wal-Mart (buying snacks for our hotel… Costco was closed) and Safeway (more snacks because the Walmart stocks delicacies such as dried cuttlefish legs in a vacuum-sealed bag, but not popcorn). We discovered a radio station that only plays traditional Hawaiian music, and we loved that (except when they play modern Hawaiian traditional music, which is just kind of like lite reggae with a ukulele). Finally, we visited the open-air, gently shaded hotel bar, which boasts a lovely view of the sea and reasonably priced happy hour drinks containing nutritious pineapples. Nina and I drifted off to welcome sleep listening to the rhythmic lullaby of the ocean.

This morning, I woke well before dawn… 3am, unfortunately, so I edited National Board entries for two hours, then crept back to bed. Nina was awake, and after a little discussion, we decided to leave early for the Volcanoes National Park. After a nutritious breakfast (I devoured half a bag of honey nut chex mix and choked down a cup of lukewarm coffee maker tea), Nina packed up some cokes, we slathered on 30 SPF suntan lotion, and at 6 am, we departed for the south coast (95 miles away), driving under cloudy skies.

Nina navigated the roads, and I napped for about a half hour. When I opened my eyes, Nina excitedly told me she’d seen something, so we turned the car around. The winding road (highway 11) bisects the world of the living and the world of the dead. I don’t know that where we stopped is included in any guidebooks, but we pulled over at the side of the road to see a resurrection: it’s a field of lava, black and brittle, next to it verdant green as the plants flourish. A distinct line bisects the two. We clambered on the lava, learning what probably anyone who has perused a Hawaii guidebook can tell you: scorched earth covered with smooth hardened rock is difficult to maneuver. Fortunately, neither of us cut ourselves, we just slipped around while we practiced for America’s Next Top Model, and we cruised back on our way.

Before we left, Nina had told me a story about Mark Twain’s visit to Hawaii (which I can’t remember right now), except for the part where he planted a monkeypod tree there. Meandering through a speed-trap town on the way to the volcanoes, we spotted a sign reading “Mark Twain’s Monkeypod Tree”… so we pulled over and took photos in that tree.

Since Nina drove, I looked for compelling signs (hence, the monkeypod photo shoot), and I was not disappointed when a gold diamond-shaped “Nene crossing” appeared. In Chicago, those types of signs had children crossing or deer preparing to jump into your car, but in Hawaii, it featured a goose. Naturally, we had to take some shots of Nina crossing the highway, so we screeched to a halt and went for it. Nene look like Canadian geese, and they seem to be some kind of flightless descendent of the ones who plague my parents’ back yard. Only these nene aren’t known for their extraordinary intelligence: they prefer to dine on the side of the highway, feasting on food flying from automobiles, which leads to their frequent squashing. For some reason, the Hawaiians want to preserve this intelligent specimen (I think it’s the state bird), so for the next few hours, we heard radio alerts about not running over nene, and more signs warning us of their presence and commanding, “Don’t feed Nene!” Nina has a new Hawaiian name now.

The guide books told us that the black sand beach (Punalu’lu) was the best on the island, so before we reached the Volcanoes National Park, we had to investigate, especially when we read that the sea turtles loved to hang out there. The black sand itself is painful, probably because it is made from sharp, painful lava that tumbled into the sea, but it looks incredible. I immediately took off my shoes to frolic, but without summer callouses, it just couldn’t happen. The sky was overcast, so we didn’t stay to snorkel or swim, not even when we saw a sea turtle a little ways out, head bobbing over gentle blue waves. Sandals strapped to feet, we wandered around the beach searching for sunning turtles, taking random photos at a fishpond surrounded by coconut trees and climbing onto a government-destroyed concrete barrier that the Japanese might have used in WWII, then went back to the car. Hawaii reminds Nina of when she lived on Guam, and she really wanted to take a coconut, but we forgot.

Of course we stopped at the Volcanoes National Park sign, set the camera on our car and took a picture of the two of us there before we drove in. Nina bought an annual National Parks pass, and I started coughing. This cough was weird, sharp, compelling, lodged in that elusive crevice in my neck where the collarbones meet, and it absolutely refused to leave. “Vog” Nina cried!  Volcanoes belch out an unholy mix of water vapor, carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, and it affects some people more than others, and it can cause death for asthmatics. I could not stop coughing, and I kind of felt like my mom when she goes into a restaurant where someone was smoking, only I wasn’t quite as dramatic about it.

There’s a lot to do in Volcanoes National Park, even if half of the part is closed due to toxic levels of vog in the air, as it was yesterday, so we started to do the outer rim drive. The first stop was the steam vents, where rainwater that seeps into the ground is heated by magma and is released as steam. The result is a lot of weird looking holes in the ground with giant steam columns (think mini chimneys) above them.

After that, we visited the Kilauea overlook… where, from a distance, you can look into the crater of the volcano. It’s not pointy and craggy and vomiting fiery chunks of igneous rock: it’s a fissured, dried out, flattened expanse, and it’s surprisingly awe-inspiring. Back when Mark Twain visited, it was a bubbling molten lava lake of flame, but now it’s brown, vast and thirsty. 

At the Jaggar Museum, we saw another view of Kilauea and the Halema’uma’u Crater (which, I think, is where Pele lived) then read (or glanced at) some information about volcanoes, seismic activity and different things that come from a volcano: two kinds of lava (I’m not even going to pretend to know the names… the difference is in how they flow and dry), mini pebbles of lava called Pele’s tears and something called Pele’s hair, which is strands of volcanic glass that look like HAIR. Sometimes Pele’s tears are attached to the hair.

At that point, we had to turn around because the air was TOO TOXIC to continue the crater rim drive. We went back the way we came and made our way to the Devastation Trail. After a brief hike through rain forest, we emerged in a Salvador Dali painting. Broken, blackened lava, bleached white dead trees, most on the ground, one standing, tiny patches of colorful ground plants where the land has begun to regenerate. I said to Nina repeatedly, “It’s like we’re in an art installation.” The end of the trail has another view of the crater, where you can see people WALKING ACROSS it. With lava only 400 feet beneath that crater, it just doesn’t seem like a good idea, but people do it. Other people do it anyway… we went back to the car (which,  by the way, despite the vog and toxic air, we were driving with the top down).

At the Thurston Lava Tube, we got to see what it would be like to BE lava. The outside of lava hardens first, but the inside keeps flowing, so it creates these little caves (ok, you can walk through them, so they aren’t exactly tiny). They are damp and full of Hawaiian shirt-clad old people who have taken busses to experience this phenomenon. The old people move slowly, and while they are very cute, they all speak in the same clichés, even if they are not in the same tour group. They say, as you descend stairs and stairs and stairs to get to the tube, “What does down has to come up.” We know they don’t like that idea because we actually heard more than one old person say this. We also heard someone talk about how their mother eats fiddlehead ferns, one of the plants that thrives in this rain forest. This spot was a little too crowded for our taste, but it’s worth seeing, and if you bring a flashlight, you can go into the unlit portion of the tube and experience true darkness. (We didn’t have flashlights). There are probably fewer old people in there.

After that, we left the Volcanoes National Park and headed back home. We planned to stop at the South Point: the southernmost part of the United States, but because we needed a bathroom break, we stopped first at the black sand beach we had visited earlier. It was like a different beach: the water was bright blue, the sun was out, people were frolicking (I’m not sure how since the sand HURTS). When Nina was in the bathroom, I got to the beach just in time to catch the sight of a sea turtle heaving himself back into the sea. When Nina came back, I showed her the picture, and she raised her head, scanned the beach and pointed out another one sleeping there. You can’t get within 15-18 feet of them, so we took pictures from a distance. She named him Blackie since he liked that beach.

After that, we caught sight of some little creature. Nina saw him go onto a picnic table and steal something, then back away. I saw him running in and out of the  bathrooms. I asked some strangers what he was (I actually said, “Is that a mink?”), and they told me that he was a mongoose. Because he was too fast, Nina and I didn’t get any pictures, but we saw Rikki Tikki Tavi.

On our way to the southernmost point, we drove over a broken one-lane road and listened to New Order and the Replacements really loudly (my iPod battery was wearing down, but the radio was out. The south point is incredibly windy… Nina’s cap actually flew off of her head (but she snatched it from the air before it escaped into the sea). The views are incredible (think the opposite of the white cliffs of Dover, only with Disneyland blue water). There are structures like cairns there, and people gather white dried coral chunks and rocks to shape into their names on the black lava that comprise those cairns. The waves are tremendous, and it’s a very wild place, despite the fact that we drove through a windmill farm and countless cow/horse farms to arrive there). Fisherman gather along the cliffs, but I’m not sure what they’re after.

The sky got dark, the radio died, and as we drove the 50 miles home, the torrential rain began. We managed to get the top up before the rain, but we were trapped on the windiest road (I was driving at this point), and the rain came down like that stuff in Chicago that takes out trees and houses. The road before me was white foam… scary. Unlike Chicago, the rain stopped after 15 minutes, and a tremendous rainbow emerged.

We’re about to venture out for today, so I’ll sum up the end of the day with a list: Costco, a drive to the Sheraton to view manta rays (failed) and have drinks (nobody would even look at us, so after 15 minutes, we left) and Taco Bell (there was a gecko on the sign.) We were starving…

Today, we’re looking for waterfalls….