After our wonderful lunch at the sunny beach, we drove to the other side of the island via the Saddle Road, with Mauna Loa on the one side and Mauna Kea on the other. Mauna Loa is the world’s largest active volcano while Mauna Kea is now extinct, and it is spectacular to drive between the two of them, with the fantastic, otherworldly scenery of black lava flows and cinder cones sticking out of the bare landscape. And once you get closer to the rainy side of the island, the vegetation starts to sprout up until it’s a lush rainforest when you descend down into Hilo. And then we arrived in true paradise. We were staying in the same place I had stayed in before, and it is simply such a beautiful and relaxing place with a pool in the middle of the tropical forest, with so many birds around.

Lava in your backyard

The next day we had signed up for a tour of Fissure 8, the largest of 24 fissures opening up in the middle of a neighbourhood in 2018, when the Kīlauea volcano erupted. The lava lake at the top of the volcano had suddenly dropped, and the lava travelled underground until it came out lower on the flanks – and in the middle of people’s backyards... Approximately 2.000 people were evacuated and half of Leilani Estates as well as the beach town of Kapoho was wiped off the map (again!). Some beautiful parts that I visited back in 2016 were now gone, such as the lava tidal pools and the beautiful Champagne pond with turtles. Very strange to now only have those places in photos and in my memory. And even more impactful to realise what this has meant for the people living there...

When all is left is the shape of a tree in lava

The tour was absolutely fascinating. Our tour guide was living in Leilani Estates and showed us where his house used to be – the only visible remainder was the big tree they had in the backyard, around which the lava had wrapped itself and then the tree burned away. So we could descend a few meters in what used to be the trunk of the tree... Our tour guide also showed us the top of Fissure 8 which was a few hundred meters away, with steam still coming out of some vents (it rains a lot on this side of the island, and there is still hot lava underground). Standing on this fissure, we could also see the remains of the lava river flowing from this fissure towards the sea in the great distance, covering the neighbourhood and cutting a highway close to where we were staying (the highway was reestablished a few months later). And next to that black devastation you could see lush rainforest with intact houses, such as the one where we were staying, at only 1km or so from that lava river. Imagine if this was your backyard... That was really the most impressive part, to really see how this eruption influenced people’s lives. We also visited the National Park, of course, to see the Kīlauea volcano itself, which is also impressive and strangely beautiful and fascinating, but not as impressive as hearing this tour guide’s stories about how he experienced getting evacuated and eventually losing their house – from the first cracks appearing in the roads to the evacuation order coming, and then regularly checking up on the house until it finally was covered by lava as well. And then when you looked the other way, only a few hundred meters further you could see the lucky people whose house was saved because the lava flowed the other way. There are a lot of stories there...