Trip to the South

This trip took us south of our condo.  The ultimate destination was the lava flows and but we had several interesting stops on the way. 

We took a very winding road down to Kealakekua Bay.

One of the first was Pu'uhonaua o Honaunau was nicknamed City of Refuge where the losers of a battle could go to live.  The Tsunami had whacked it pretty hard, but it was open.  The interesting bit was that since a lot of the sand was pushed away, many new artifacts were uncovered.

There was a beautiful bay there along with a sacred temple.

The next stop was the Painted Church.  It was facinating.  This is an active Catholic Church but it had all of the walls painted with murals.  The cemtary was also interesting and there were statues of Saint Mary covered in puka shell rosaries.  A slide show can be found here.

Then it was off to the Punalu'u Black Sands Beach. 

The next stop was the Volcano and that was impressive.  On the way, we stopped by some interesting sites to see some holes in the lava left by big trees. 

I put this slide show together of the trip to volcano crater and the lava fields (the trip to the lava fields was actuallly the next day.  Here is also a movie showing the whole caldera.  Sorry for the wind noise.