We drove into Hilo town this morning, parking at Mokuola (Coconut Island) and admiring the views across the bay to the town centre and Mauna Kea in the back ground.
We then walked the coastal route into downtown, passing many of the town’s famous heritage buildings; including the S. Hata building (left), and the Federal building (right).
Hilo is the 2nd biggest town in the state of Hawaii, Honolulu being the first. In its day, it was a busy hub for cattle and sugarcane export, when these industries slowly faded it focused it’s economy on diversified agriculture.
Perhaps the most impressive building architecturally was the Hawaiian Telephone Company Building, which was designed and built in the 1920s with Spanish, Italian and Californian mission influences.
Stopping for an iced coffee at a popular little Hilo cafe, we then visited the Salvation Army Thrift Store so Ben could peruse their extensive collection of vintage Hawaiian shirts. After all, an original is best!
And, yes we are pleased to announce that Ben is now the proud owner of an ‘Aloha shirt’…pictures of which will be on a future blog.
This afternoon we took a tour with Arnott’s Lodge, leaving town at 2pm we would be ascending the summit of Mauna Kea.
As we made our way out of town we stopped for a quick look at one of Hilo’s beautiful waterfalls. As the climate on this side of the island is so wet and humid waterfalls are plentiful. Rainbow Falls is one of the more accessible and visually stunning, with it’s soft cascade of water, rainbows can often be seen.
As there was substantial cloud cover today we weren’t lucky enough to see a rainbow.
We continued on our journey away from the coast, joining the Saddle Road (a road that all 2 wheel drive rental cars are banned from using) we slowly began to climb into the clouds. As we turned onto the Mauna Kea summit road we had to watch out for invisible cows!
As we neared 9000ft the van broke through the cloud cover, and what lay below us was a thick layer of cloud carpeting the horizon. We pulled over at the Onizuka Visitor Information Station, which sits at 9200ft, it was here that we would have 1 hour to adjust to the altitude.
It was also here that we had some strange experiences; we sighted the rare silversword (below left), a Japanese Big Bird, and Ben recharged with a ‘Big Hunk’ bar!
After an hour, and both feeling okay we jumped back in the van for the final drive up to the summit. On the way up we had a quick stop at ‘Moon Valley’, where the lunar rover was tested before it’s mission into space, and also caught sight of our first observatory of the tour – the Very Long Baseline Array. Can you spot our very long shadows below right?!
As we drove the last couple of miles up to the summit the large white and silver observatories came into view.
At 13,796ft the summit was a barren place, it stands above 40% of the earth’s atmosphere, so altitude sickness and loss of breath is common. Our guide described the difficulty of breathing up here like breathing only using one lung!
Mauna Kea is a former active volcano, which is sacred to the ancient Hawaiian’s; in modern times however, it holds the greatest collection of state of the art infrared, optical and millimetre/sub millimetre telescopes on earth.
As the summit is so dry, dark, high and pollution free it is a prime spot to stare into space. This is why 11 countries man 13 observatories on the summit.
As the sun started to drop the shadows and golden glow that were cast across the red earth peak were incredible. It was then like some scene from a sci-fi movie, these buildings started to open up to the night sky.
As the sun disappeared the already freezing temperature dropped dramatically lower, so we took flight to the van and enjoyed a cup of hot chocolate. We watched on as the sky kept transitioning through all shades of red, orange and yellow.
As every vehicle has to leave the summit within 30 minutes of the sun setting, we made our way back down, stopping at 10,000ft to have a tour of our solar system. We learnt how the ancient Hawaiians used the night sky to navigate their boats from Tahiti to first find the islands hundreds of years ago. We also could clearly see many constellations, and Mars, Venus and Jupiter.
The final event on the tour was to descend to the Visitor Centre and look through their long range telescopes, through which we could see a distant galaxy and Jupiter.
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