Fear the Crab

Had a strange dream the other night, of horses and camels at my high school. Most definitely a result of the memorable ride yesterday.

I keep hitting my fingers in the hotel ceiling fan.

Well, today was the day of the cave tour. The rain from yesterday prompted a flash flood warning, so we decided to call the tour to see if everything was still a go. No news was good news in this case. Still feeling sore from yesterday, we took some aspirin to ease the pain and started the 3 hour drive to Hana. I decided that I’d rather walk the lava tube in a bit of soreness than wimp out and skip the whole thing. Plus I might regret it later.

Damn, I hate Hana highway as much as I hate the Kula highway. Too many winding turns, and each one reminded me of a desert; every time you think that the end is just after the next turn, but it ends up going forever. 3 hours and 31 miles (!) later, we arrived at the Ka’eleku Caverns in Hana. Met up with the guide and got set up for our part of the tour.

Seems there are two parts of the tour. The “walking” tour which everyone goes on is a 1-hour journey down the lava tube, with the guide describing the various features and geological trivia associated with molten rock. The “wild” tour then starts where the walking tour ends, as the first group turns around and exits while the rest of us continue on down the tube. Turned out that Maile and I were the only ones on the wild tour.

That tour certainly is wild. We had to climb over boulders, shimmy up small crevices lined with jagged lava, crawl into tiny passages lined with ice-smooth lava, and all the while wearing bump hats and carrying large flashlights. Thankfully we had kevlar gloves to protect our hands, but my elbows and knees got scratched up. We really got a workout from all the climbing, but it was worth it.

This lava tube wasn’t like others I had seen, and I actually learned more about lava here than in school. For example, the lava in the tube had “frozen” so quickly that splash marks could be seen where rock from the ceiling fell. There was a “lava pearl,” a perfectly formed sphere of molten rock that fell from the ceiling, hardened, then stuck to still-soft lava on the wall. And I had no idea that lava could harden so smoothly that it was like running your hand over ice. There’s more, but I’m so caught up in the whole experience that I can’t explain it all. I mean, Sara Lee cupcakes, corncob stalagmites, lava layers, the Devil’s Mask, lava pearls, upflows and cave-ins make for some pretty intense excitement.

I can’t even remember where we ate dinner afterward.