Tuesday, July 23, 2013

SOUTH TOWARDS THE VOLCANO

Tuesday July 23, 2013
We ran a couple of errands this morning before heading out to the volcano. We headed down to Pu'uhonua o Honaunau-the place of refuge. There were huge stone walls surrounding this area of royal grounds. Numerous carved figures also guard this refuge.








South Point was our next visit. We needed to go off of the road a considerable distance to get to it. It is now a paved road, which was nice. In some spots it is still single but at least you are not on a dirt trail where your tires mind the ruts. The wind blows very, very hard in this area. Definitely a bad hair area of the country. We got some fantastic photos of some gigantic waves that just boiled their way into shore. Hopefully they look as strong as they actually were.












"Broken Road" was also at South Point. Needless to say, the road was in awful condition and no longer driveable or very walkable.




It was getting later in the afternoon and we hadn't had lunch yet, so the Punaluu Bakery in Naalehu was the perfect spot to take a break. The only problem was that some cute but annoying birds seemed to think they could also participate. We ate and headed to the black sand beach.








This stupid bird is eyeing up what tidbits it wants to steal from some visitor, mainly us at the moment.
The black sand beach of Punalu'u was a neat site to see where the waves crashed in against the pristine black lava sand. We did not see any turtles today. This area tends to have turtles in the area. The sand also was not hot. It can be quite hot when the sun is beating down. Today with the cool rain, the sand was tepid.




"Need to get some of that lava out of my shoes"




Just a little wind blown from South Point.




The trees at South Point are pretty bent due to the very strong winds.
We finally got to The Volcano House where we will spendthrift the night. Parts of the crater rim road are closed due to fumes from the eruptions. That could limit our access to various areas of this national park. We shall see what happens tomorrow. Hopefully some of this clears up a bit.






We did see the glow from the Jaggar Museum. It showed up very nicely in the dark. Pretty neat.

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