Day 13 A Piece of Nostalgia and Pie, the Nut House, and a Spectacular Scene

This morning I woke up with a little bit of tension, there is still so much to see and do and time is fleeting.  Our agenda for today was to spend the day at Volcano National Park.  From all I’ve read and heard, it takes a whole day.  We got on the road about 8:30.  The park is about 100 miles south and around to the east side of the island from Kona and 28 miles south of Hilo.  The drive was starting to seem familiar, as a portion of it is the same drive we took for the coffee tour and the southernmost point tour a few days ago.    We had a pit stop planned for a small town called Naalehu.   My friend Sarah P. emailed me a couple times to say that we really needed to stop at a little café called Hana Hou, which is the southernmost place in the US where you can eat, and they have great pie.  We had looked for the place while down that way the other day, but couldn’t find it.  Turns out we didn’t travel far enough.  This one stop town’s claim to fame is that it is the southernmost city in the US.  We pulled into the little café’s parking lot at 10 am. Too early for lunch, and too late for breakfast, since we all ate before we left, so that left pie.  The outside of the place looked like a little joint you would find in the Caribbean.   It was painted a bright, garish yellow, and on the building there was a hand painted   name-of-the-café placard (for lack of a better term) and an old fashioned EAT sign on a pole in the parking lot. 

 As soon as we arrived to the front screen door, I was transported back to my childhood.  The smells emanating from the inside were just like those that I would encounter coming home from school with my mom working on dinner.  She was an old fashioned cook, the kind whose meals took all day to make.  This cook at Hana Hou comes from the same stock and the garlicky pork roast that was cooking smelled just like mom's and made my mouth water!  We walked in and were transported back in time again, to the late 1930’s or 40’s.  Red Formica tabletops edged with metal bands, turquoise blue naugahyde chairs with metal legs, all well-worn, yet gleaming.  The whole room had the feel of my grandma’s kitchen.  There was an ocean scene mural painted on the back wall, a shelf lined with ceramic roosters and other kitsch, bamboo screen wainscoting, and lovely fabric panels cleverly draped on the ceiling to soften the hard fluorescent light bars.  Jalousie windows lined two sides of the 15x30 dining area. 

 

 

 There were a few patrons, all locals, with which the waitress/owner carried on a familiar banter as she milled about taking care of business.  We ordered banana cream pie and while we waited the kids decided they had to use the restroom, I mean will there ever be a time that we can go to a restaurant without everyone needing to check out the john a couple of times?  However, I was just as curious because there was a screened door with a sign that said “restrooms out back”, and I wanted to see more of this place.  So out the door we went, with a slam of the screen door and a call of apology, oops, it’s been along time since I’ve gone through a wooden screen door.  We had to walk along the back of the building and off to the side, to a little shed, painted a kelly green with white trim, which housed a separate men’s (Kane) and women’s (Wahine) room.  There were also two little cabins (painted the same color green) that ran parallel behind the café and the small courtyard separating the cabins and café housed a sweet little Japanese fish pond complete with a bridge and a koi fish.  The whole feel was definitely 1940’s and I was in my nostalgia heaven, drinking it in and taking pictures of it all.  I’m sure the owner and anyone else who might have seen me thought I was nuts taking pictures of bathroom shed and cabins, clothes lines and such, but I couldn’t help myself.  By the time I got back in to our table the pie had arrived.  The pie filling was about 4 inches high with lots of banana slices and topped with another couple inches of whipped cream.  It was heavenly! Our time in my "grandma's kitchen" was nearing an end, and with a pang of homesickness and a flood of fond memories, I bid the place farewell.

 

 

On down the road we passed more quaint churches, rows of hardwood trees behind lava rock walls lining the highway, passing into beautiful landscapes of rolling hills, bright spring green fields meeting deep blue-raspberry-snowcone-syrup colored ocean and some looming white puffs of cloud off in the distance.  Finally, we arrived at Volcano National Park and made a stop at the visitor center.  I’d like to have that as my house too….do you notice a theme with me, anything with an ounce of a past history, rustic, and bungalow-ish makes my heart sing, maybe that’s why I like Paul, he’s old and rustic.  Anyway, we arrived just in time to view a film, circa 1960, about the Kileaua Iki eruption in 1959.  That was a little nostalgia as well, because the narrator was the same stern, deep voiced, no nonsense guy that seemed to narrate every science film I ever saw in school. Kileaua Iki is a smaller crater that is just to the east of huge Kilauea Caldera.  Inside the caldera is the Halema’uma’u Crater, which some believed and still do, that this is the home of the goddess Pele.   From the film, we learned that Kilauea Iki had been asleep for about a century before erupting.  The eruption lasted 36 days with lava fountains shooting 1,900 feet in the air.  A 400 foot cinder cone was created off to the side and the crater floor was a huge cooled lava lake bed.  After the film we headed out for a hike to see the gas plumes escaping from the Halema’uma’u Crater (that sits within Kilauea Cauldera) and on then to the Thurston lava tube.  The hike was mostly through a dense, damp jungle that rimmed the crater.  The canopy covered the trail and it was a jumble of ferns, palms, and other native trees and plants.  The floor was littered with sodden leaves and the tree trunks and fallen logs were carpeted with a blanket of thick, saturated moss.   Although this was a tropical rainforest, it was not as I had expected.  The air was dank and had a faint odd odor, and as soon as we reached a lookout, it was easy to see why….a huge plume of dangerous gasses were chugging out of the crater.  (I wonder what Al Gore would think of this things carbon footprint). 

Halema'uma'u Crater

Because of these gases, this forest did not seem to be a lush, vibrant, blooming forest, but a tangle of plants and vines, faded, some sickly, and unkempt like an aging woman whose beauty has been robbed from  living a difficult life.  We finally arrived at the Thurston lava tube, 2.5 miles later and that was interesting and eerie.   A lava tube is an underground passage that the lava takes as it is escaping the earth.  We traveled down into a gash in the earth, overgrown with more ferns and palms until we came to a huge opening in the ground, like a giant lava lined cave.  Instead of stalagtites, there were tree roots swinging from the ceiling.  It was damp and there were large cracks in the walls. The opening was about 20x15ft and it gradually narrowed in height as we made our way through, to about 6 ft and then it opened back up and where we exited the other side.  The whole length was about 300 yards.  After completing the circle back to the visitor center, we were all starved.  We wanted to see the crater at night, because we were told it is something to see, but needed to find a place to eat. 

A wild jungle native...giving us a hearty welcome
(I told you the place was a little creepy)

Mossy tree trunks

Down into the tube

 We decided to go into Hilo, since this would be our only chance on this trip.  What a shock that was.  I was expecting another quaint town and more tropical, since that side gets more rain.  But as we followed Hwy 11 into town, it looked like any other college town and government seat with suburban sprawl. 

There was a nice park on the picturesque Hilo Bay and a cute Main Street USA, reminiscent of many others in small town America.  It appeared to be in stages of redevelopment.  We just grabbed a quick bite at McDonalds and decided to get in a quick tour of the Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Factory since we were so close.  We had just enough time to learn a bit about the factory before it closed for the day.  Mauna Loa Corporation has an orchard of 250,000 trees on 2,500 acres and they produce 40 million pounds of nuts a year.  After stopping in the gift shop for a free sample, we got back on the road to Volcano National  Park. 

Nuts at the Nut Factory

 It was raining now and the two-laned highway took on a creepy  feeling.  This stretch of highway appeared abandoned, desolate and overgrown with a jungle of plants.  Small hardwood trees scraping and straining toward the open sky while what looked like villainous vines overtook everything in their path.  It looked like any road through the deep south that has been overrun by kudzu.  But on closer inspection these vines were not vines at all, but ferns that looked claw-like and prehistoric.  Back in the park we passed a field of steam vents where plumes of steam rose out of seemingly nowhere.   

We went to the museum that was located near the crater to get a good look at it in the darkness.  Words cannot express the spectacular sight before us.  Halema’uma’u Crater looked like a glowing cauldron or an immense campfire.  The crater itself is so large, that the Edward Jones Dome Football stadium could fit inside it with lots of room to spare.  It was surrounded by a lake of lava, cooled and frozen in time, even having the appearance of whitecaps.  Red and orange glowed as smoke billowed and one could imagine how the native peoples developed their legends about their volcano  goddess Pele.   Mark Twain visited this same crater, able to get up close to the rim and described it as “viewing the fiery pits of hell.”   I also read that in 1824, Princess Kapiolani walked out on Byron Ledge (a trail that leads between Kilauea Iki and Kilauea Cauldera) and publicly denied the goddess Pele and embraced Christianity.  She ate ‘oheo berries without making an offering to Pele, it was thought she would then be struck dead, and when she didn’t die, Christianity became more accepted by her people.   After taking tons of pictures and admiring the strange and awesome beauty, we piled in the car and headed home. 

 

Another fruitful day....