Adventure Day, Flying Over the Volcano!

The last two days have been packed with lots of adventure. On Wednesday morning we headed over the mountain, Mauna Kea, to get to Hilo. It is 13,796 feet above ground but the full size of the mountain is 32,000 feet when measured from the ocean floor! Hilo is where we would take our volcano tour and also zipline. It was about a two hour drive that was just stunning. Stunning from the breathtaking views to the diversity in landscape to the change in weather all in a very short period of time. The weather didn’t surprise me as much as Washington and New England weather can change in an instant, but the varying landscapes caught me off guard.

As we drove to the top we caught glimpses of amazing sea views with the mountain in the background towering high in the sky.

View heading to the top

The further we climbed the more things changed. About three quarters of the way up it was as if we had entered the desert but the hills made it look like the moon. I’m not sure if they are craters from previous eruptions as there wasn’t a soul in sight except for the handful of cars that were also heading to the other side.

As we got further up everything turned black. The rocks were very jagged and at the same time eerily still as if frozen in time. The weather, quite the opposite. The temperature dropped to 58 degrees at one point (we started at about 88 degrees on the water). It became very foggy with limited visibility and started raining pretty hard. With the rain, fog and the dark color of the landscape, it felt a bit creepy!! But, at the top is also where you can keep climbing and head up to the observatory to catch stellar views of the stars. We were also told that it snows up at the top too. This is when we learned that the Big Island has 11 of the world’s 12 climates on one island. The only one they don’t have is sub-arctic.

We successfully made it to the other side and headed to the airport for our volcano tour. The pilot, Steve, was a really nice guy. He showed us many different areas including the lava fields from previous eruptions. It’s startling how much ground is covered by the fields and essentially unusable. If you look closely at the pictures, you can see how the lava spilled into the ocean, it is a softer edge that some of the cliffs. One of the flow actually cut of the road completely.

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We then went and flew over the crater into what the locals call the heartbeat of the island. You can see the large round opening and how steep the edges are. Then within you can see the smoke clouds and if you look closely you’ll see red patches of hot lava. Not quite the cool picture they show everywhere on the island, but proof that the volcano is still very much awake and active.

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We completed this little adventure with a fly-by of Rainbow Falls which is just outside of Hilo Bay!

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Kicking It In Kona, HI With A Little Caffeine From The Local Beans

It’s been a little bit since my last post but a lot has been going on, unfortunately it’s been a little more work than play. I did get some travel in to Atlanta, Georgia and Washington, D.C. but because it was work related there was little time to spend checking things out. All work and no play makes for an unsatisfied explorer!  So, I hopped a plane with my Mom for our birthday’s (both this week!) and we are hanging out in Hawaii.

On Sunday we headed up to one of the coffee plantations, then hung out at the local arts market, and hit the local farmer’s market. Let’s get to it and see what little nugget we learned yesterday!

We drove just a bit North from Kona into the hills above arriving at the Ueshima Coffee Company.

Lemons

Funky Tree

Artichokes

Turkeys

Once we finished walking around the plantation, taking in views of the many different trees including avocados and lemons, sampling a couple of beans that were not yet ripe (I liked the Costa Rican ones better at this stage), we headed back to roast our own beans.

Here we met our new friend Tada who would teach us a little bit about coffee. Tada is a really nice guy and well educated. He has a Master’s in Chemical Engineering from Japan and he’s been applying that knowledge as he learns more about the process of producing great coffee. Although successful in his career, he decided to volunteer for many months to learn the process of growing coffee beans and ultimately the process of making coffee.

Tada started telling us about the process. An interesting tidbit for me was that there is a process by which you remove the skins and expose the bean, they are soaked in water where they go through a fermentation process and then spread out to dry in the sun. The whole process is done manually – handpicking the fruit, placing them in a machine to skin and split them, then laying them out on a giant bed and raking them so that they dry in the sun. He expressed that it’s very hard work, especially in the hot Hawaiian sun, but then smiled and noted the beans produced in Kona are well worth it.

Listening to him talk reminded me a bit of the process for making wine. And ironically, you see a lot of engineers and Dentist’s turn to winemaking because of their schooling in Chemistry. Tada decided to do the same but apply it to coffee.

We were shown a bowl of beans and this is what they look like after they have been dried. At this stage they are not yet roasted.

He showed us a couple of picture of different types of roasts and explained that the lighter the roast the more caffeine it contains. I did not know this I always thought that it was the opposite. He also noted that if you want your coffee to be less acidic don’t put cream and sugar in it. It actually causes a chemical reaction with the coffee that can make you feel crappy. If you drink good coffee straight, you’ll rarely feel heartburn or acid.

  

We decided to go between Medium and City Roast. From there Tada took us over to a small roasting machine. It looks like cast iron and had a propane flan under it that heated it up. We dumped our beans inside to roast for about 11 minutes, checking along the way.

Once complete, we pulled them out and they were smoking hot! We moved them over to an area where they could cool off and mixed them around to let the air flow. You can see below how tey looked when they first came out.

We then put them into our little bags with the cute picture that Tada took of us. It was a fun excursion that was educational and we got to try a few samples of coffee that gave us the energy we needed to tackle the Art and Farmer’s Markets!