Your Japanese word of the week is...

"kazan" 火山 or volcano. Yes indeed, despite having just come back from across the Pacific, on July 17-26, I headed back out across the Pacific to Hawaii for a one week vacation with my family.

We started with a night's stay in Honolulu just up from Waikiki beach. The next morning I tried my hand at surfing and, I must say, it's not really my thing. I dunno if it's just me, but it seems like it's a lot of paddle in exchange for a short ride back. I'll stick to my motorized ski lifts thanks =P... Anyway, later that day, we boarded our boat, the conveniently named "Pride Of America".

NCL is Norwegian Cruise Lines although, since the cruise only goes to American ports, the boat itself is registered as an American vessel. As cruise ships go, it wasn't the best nor was it the worst. The ship was a decent size though a bit lacking in things to do... luckily there were ports of call everyday so that kept the trip interesting.

The first port of call was Maui. We had a rental car book so we headed off to a beach for the morning (Sunday the 18th). I really don't remember the name of the beach but I suppose they all look like this haha......

For the afternoon we headed up the Haleakela, a dormant volcano on the eastern side of Maui. Maui's actually made of up to overlapping volcanos and Haleakela is the taller of the two at 10,000ft. While the upper panoramic shot is a bit small, the second shot does a better job of showing off the iron-rich redness of the crater on Haleakela. It truly is a magnificent place mostly because it looks like nothing else. In fact, it's special enough that NASA uses it to test Mars probes and such.... They also recommend walking slowly at 10,000ft because the air is thin, but I really found no problems up there.....

As might be expected from such a high place, it's a popular vantage to watch the sunset from. It's also popular with the military, universities, and other sky-watchers as near the summit look-out are observatories constantly scanning the skies and beyond. Maui's western mountain, Pu'u Kukui, can be see in the second picture above. It stands a measley 5800ft compared to Haleakela =P...

Our second day of Maui included some other sights on the island such as the Needle (some geological mountainy feature that pales in comparison to Haleakela) and a fruit plantation. The plantation was actually quite neat since it has a flower garden filled with neat flowers and duckies (see above). The neat flower in the first picture is the Bird Of Paradise. Another interesthing plant to note was the Miracle Fruit Tree. This rather unassuming looking plant produces Miracle Fruit, which has the ability to, after eating the seeds, make anything eaten afterwards taste extraordinarily sweet. It's likely to do with something about blocking off the other taste receptors. I tried it in Japan and it made grapefruit (!!) incredibly sweet tasting heh..... water, however, doesn't work =P....

Day 3 of the cruise saw us visit Hilo's Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. As its name suggests, it's a huge park with active volcanoes (unlike Haleakela) as its focal point. Lava flows have and are still occurring and while they're a bit hard to spot (since the volcanoes aren't erupting), the energies involved do manifest themselves in other ways, like this steam vent.

The main road leads through the park and down to sea level with various look-outs and points-of-interest along the way. Some main ones include the road cutting across old lava flows. Interestingly, while the lava had destroyed whatever life it came in contact with and rendered the landscape bare, life has managed to find its way back there as seen in the first picture. Other interesting things include the world's largest Hawaiian petroglyph (rock carving) site in the world (second picture). It's really amazing just how harsh the volcanic activity can be to the landscape and yet how alive it can still be....... nature sure is resilient...

One of the ship's big "events" is the watching of the lava flows at night. As the ship circles around the island to its next port, it slows down near some known lava flows so everyone can admire the burning hot lava pouring into the ocean. Unfortunately, despite how the picture look, there isn't that much to see. I expected rivers of lava like strings of red Christmas lights draped over the mountain side and giant pools of cooling lava in the ocean. Instead, the not-so-active night only showed a couple of lava dribbles. Consistent as they were, I think I built myself up a bit too much haha.......

Day 5 was spent at the port of Kona. Kona is essentially a tourist town and goes to great lengths to play up the importance of whatever buildings it has, including its shopping mall (read: two and a half stores in one building). After a short walk around the town, we decided to turn the day into a boat day, so I just chilled out on the deck, did some karate in the aerobics studio, etc. And also took this shot of the setting sun while the boat was out at sea =).

Day 6 was the final port before returning to Honolulu and we spent it on Kauai. Our main destination was Waimea Canyon but on the way there we stopped at a tiny little town called Hanapepe. It really was one of those "one street" towns and its claim to fame appeared to be this wooden swinging bridge in the picture. Oddly, if you look closely at where the "swinging" section meets the supports, it looks like it doesn't have to swing at all... as if they modified it to let it swing so that it'd be more interesting....

Waimea Canyon itself is very interesting because, like most of Hawaii, it was created by volcanoes but this time its unique looks have been due to Waimea River and the frequent rainfall on the island. Indeed, this is one of the wettest parts of Hawaii and, living up to its reputation, it poured on and off and threateningly hung clouds in the sky for most of the day. But when it did clear up slightly, the canyon was quite the sight to behold.

Overall, the trip was rather interesting mostly because these volcanically derived areas are a bit hard to come by and thus by nature (no pun intended heh) unique to behold. On the other hand, most people go to Hawaii to sit on the beach and relax and we didn't do much of that, so it was quite a tiring trip as well. But in the end, it was a good way for me to see lots of Hawaii on my first trip around it =P.

Stay tuned next week as we return to our regularly scheduled "regular" Canadian programming =P.

Oh, and because of the boat's height or certain craters' depth, I got to take some more tilt-shift pics. Enjoy =).