Island Hoping
From 2007 World Tour in Hawaiian Beaches, United States on Sep 17 '07
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Today it was up and packed for our short inter-island flight to "The Big Island" - the true Hawaii. With all the security precautions in the US now you have to be at the airport 2hrs beforehand for domestic flights as well, so we had time to spare once we cleared security for a Starbucks coffee and travel blog updates.
On arrival into Hawaii, we connected with our airport transfer driver to take us to our hotel. We had an entertaining trip with our driver recouting his travel experiences on the QEII, the Australian Ghan train, backpacking through NZ etc. Before we knew it we were at our hotel about 25mins from the airport. The atmosphere here is so different to Oahu - this is what we hoped Hawaii would be like. The view from our room was fantastic and the feeling of the resort was relaxing and peaceful.
That's damn hot stuff!!
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After a nice lunch in the hotel cafe, we were picked up by our Blue Hawaiian Helicopter transfer bus to take us just 1 mile to the heliport. We were given the regulatory safety demonstration, then it was up, up and away..
The view on take-off was something like a barren moonscape, with this side of the island not getting much rain, and thus nothing much growing in the thousand year old lava fields. As we moved toward the mountains the terrain changed into lush green forests. It was amazing to witness the marked difference in landscapes in such a short distance. It was then on towards the active Volcano, where we witnessed the venting of sulphur steam from a crater, and watched the incredible hot bubbling lava running down the mountainside. Seeing this red-hot glowing magma flowing was just amazing.
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The pilot then took us out to the coastline (which expands by 70 acres each year due to volcano activity), then past and into lush vertical valleys with running waterfalls too many to count. We finally returned back to the heliport - just in time to save me puking my lunch!!
At the hotel we walked over to the beach, where the sand was quite shelly and decided that cocktails by the pool was a much better idea. We imbibed our two complimentary cocktails - mai-tai and a lava-lava, then headed back to our room to relax for the night.
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