Day 16 - Island Circle Tour

We did a lot of driving today!  It takes about 5 hours without any stops to drive completely around the island.  Since we like to stop a lot, we started out after breakfast and our goal was to be back before dark.  Driving around the curvy mountain is not easy at night.

The scenery in Big Island is so different than the others.  It's referred as the youngest island and the landscape proves it.  Unlike the other island, the landscape is not lush. Instead you see black lava all over.  There are spots that greenery is starting to grow, but it'll take hundreds of years before green growth will cover the lava (if there are no more eruptions).

We drove to the southern most tip of the United States.  At the edge, locals (and some daring tourists) were jumping off the cliff into the ocean.  

We stopped by a valley where a village once stood.  The valley was hit by an earthquake, tsunami, and eventually a volcano eruption totally wiped it out.  All that we could see was flat black land.

To build the highway or roads, construction had to dig up the lava.  When you are driving, you can see spots of hollow tunnels on the sides of the road.  These were lava tubes that formed when the lava on top cooled as the bottom of the lava continued to flow.

We also stopped to see Rainbow Falls which was a waterfall that a rainbow appears every morning.

We finished the circle just as the sun was setting.