Day/Night 40

I only say night because at about 2am I realize my earplugs have fallen out and I hear a muffled coughing like someone is puking or hacking up their lungs, I think oh no, great, Jeremiah is sick. I look at the bed next to me (we were so tired we didn’t even wanna sleep next to each other) and Jeremiah is sound asleep. I listen and it’s the neighbors. I don’t know what was wrong with this guy but I woke up several times and early to the sounds of coughing, puking, cursing, it was quite strange and concerning. Oh when we checked in the hotel lady was so nice and cute and helpful, I love when you’re in a new odd situation and people can just make you feel so at eases and welcome. So we get up and go have the breakfast, which is in the bar. It’s a really cool room because it’s a big square, normal area, but there is a circle opening on the ceiling as big as the room that opens up to like a big old barn, rafters type looking roof, the space between the normal ceiling and the big high opening is separated by a false grass roof, it was just neat. Breakfast was unripe papaya, tiny muffins, English muffins, toast, guava juice and real Kona coffee, we stuffed ourselves best we could. We go pack up our room and check out and we are off. I decide that we should make a sign because just thumbing it isn’t working so we rummage through a dumpster and I have a sharpie and I scribble VOLCANO on it with a Sharpie. A guy in a silver PT cruiser takes us 2/3s of the way. He had a crazy, probably 3G’s, metal grill that made him very hard to understand as well as his heavy Hawaiian accent, but he was cool. We get dropped off at a gas station diner and then picked up by a sweet old man with a dirty white pick-up. I am so cold only having brought shorts my legs are permanently resembling plucked chicken : ) He drops us off at this little Volcano village and we walk back to the highway and walk a ways, passing a very disemboweled pig road kill display and get picked up by a guy in a silver Jeep. He is so funny and talks very much like a hippie stoner, “alright man, dude, you know, totally, yeeahhhh”, but he is so excited for us to go to the volcano and tells us everything. When we get there he even takes us around to places and lets us get out and look so don’t have to walk everywhere, he was so nice. The frist stop was a lookout onto this vast black crater with a smoking vent in the middle, amazing! When we part ways we say something about going to “Captain Cook” and the last thing we hear him says to us as he drives off is “Captain Crunch”. We had a good laugh about that. So now we go down down down a trail that reminds me of silver creek falls, no joke the air here is moist, the vegetation smells and looks familiar, earlier we said it felt like a misty day at the coast. The path breaks open to a vast black crater that looks huge, like Crater lake without water, just broken asphalt. However it takes only fifteen, twenty minutes to walk across. Its amazing. By that time we have seen the Awing sights and are in a time crunch. We end up going up very steep railed steps and quiet moist trails over and over, following different signs, crossing another Crater, until we finally get to the main visitor center, exhausted from walking. I think in our little less then 48 hour trip we walked about seven or eight of it, it was intense, I am so tired and sore, in the best way possible. So we wait forever trying to hitch a ride back. I am about to give up and say we are gonna miss our Hilo bus and have to hitch all the way home, what a drag! Then the sweetest middle-aged couple from South Carolina in an silver PT Cruiser picks us up. Usually when you hitch in a car its hard to fill the silence and not have it be awkward but by the time they had to drop us off I didn’t want to get out. We got along so well and talked abou tall sorts of things and the guy was so interesting, it was the best. We made it to the bus station about ten minutes before it left, cutting it close, but I guess deep down I knew we would make it. They really saved our butts though. The guy had been everywhere, but one of the most inspiring things he talked about was when he went to Japan and taught English for a year. I got all the information I could and am so seriously considering it now. So we are back on the freezing bus and this time keep to ourselves and listen to music and enjoy the scenery. I cant believe I slept all the way there because it was gorgeous I realized on the way back. We were along the coast line and we would pass these valleys just off the road railing that had steams and waterfalls running through them and the trees and flowers and vines were so lush and breathtaking, it was like a chunk of tropical rainforest. It was like a poster, a foreign world, it was just awesome. The drive from Hilo overwhelmed my eyes. Sadly, I couldn’t get any good pictures, fast moving bus with dirty windows, not so good. This time when we stopped in Waimea I first off got some pizza and drink and we stuffed our mouths, then we saw the bus driver get on so we carefully place our bus illegal food in our bag and sit in the back and secretly consume. We were so covert and sneaky, it was fun, and hey we were starving, hadn’t eaten for like seven hours and all that walking. The drive continued to be amazing with rolling yellow hills of wind blown grass that Jeremiah said looked like thousands of running bunny rabbits, I agree : ) Now we are home. Its crazy that the time it would take to drive around this entire “Big Island” Is probably just a little longer then it would take to drive from Portland to the California border, makes Oregon seem so big. Also once coming home I realize after looking at a map the “volcano” we went to was just a little steam vent, caldera are, the actual volcano hole, summit thing is much further away, but I kind of think it may not be accessible to just anyone. It was so weird to come back to the Rainbow plantation after all of that and I realize the feeling I will have coming back to Dallas will be like that times a thousand, bittersweet.