Aloha

Welcome, almost certainly not Hawaiian reader, as I take you through our visit to our first stop in exploring Polynesia.

Now, our first piece of education here was defining what exactly constitutes Polynesia. Well, for those of you that aren't now despairing at our ignorance, Polynesia is roughly defined as the islands within a triangle with Hawaii at one corner, Easter Island at another, and New Zealand at the third. That covers most of the area of the Southern Pacific, which is frankly mind-bogglingly large. Anthropologists believe the early Polynesians came from South East Asia, and then were able to sail the thousands of miles between these islands navigating using little more than the stars. To say it's astonishing would be a massive understatement.

In Hawaii we visited Hilo, which is on the "big island" (confusingly also called Hawai'i) with the active volcanoes, and Honolulu, the state capital, which is on the island of O'ahu. Yes, state capital: we haven't quite escaped the US yet, as Hawaii is of course the most recent state to join the Union. And quite proud of that they are.

Everyone in the US loves Hawaii and goes a bit misty-eyed when it's mentioned (in California there's two places that will make just about anyone go misty-eyed: Lake Tahoe and Hawaii). It's a frequent holiday destination for those on the West Coast, despite it being an awful long way - you're roughly 2000 miles West of San Francisco here, and a lot further South. In the US, Hawaii is typically seen as a place of great natural beauty where you go to drink cocktails and lie on a beach, unless you happen to be in the Navy or Air Force, in which case it's a pretty big military base so quite likely to be your place of work.

The big island of Hawai'i is dominated by huge volcanoes, two of which are active: Mauna Loa and Kilauea. These are not the explosive, pyroclastic flow type of eruptions which created the landscape we saw back at Mount St Helens; instead, they're usually (with notable exceptions) relatively gentle eruptions which are responsible for building the Hawaiian island chain. There's a national park around the summits of Mauna Loa and Kilauea, and the good news was that Kilauea was erupting when we visited:

You can get pretty close to the crater, or caldera, of Kilauea. It has gently sloping sides, and inside is a big lava lake with a fairly solid crust on the top. Every now and then across the surface you can see where the molten lava is breaking through and bubbling up, and there's sulphur vapour and steam rising across the lava lake too. Kilauea has been bubbling away like this for decades. Mauna Loa, however, has had some more aggressive eruptions of late, and as such the summit was closed; ah well. Both volcanoes are colossal - by volume, Mauna Loa is the biggest mountain on the planet. Round about the landscape is dotted with steam vents (literally holes in the ground where geothermally-heated steam constantly pours out) and sulphur deposits from the volcanoes.

Over in Honolulu, we spent a bit more time looking at the historical sites of the city, exploring Hawaii's recent political history in the process. And perhaps unsurprisingly, it's a little on the shady side, with the Hawaiian monarchy more-or-less constructively dismissed by the Americans towards the end of the 1800s, when the islands became an American territory. It seems like the Hawaiians are a bit unhappy about that, but they're a lot more comfortable with the US eventually granting them full statehood in 1959. In fact, they seem to have embraced the USA incredibly enthusiastically: Honolulu could easily pass for a medium-sized city in California, although I suspect that playing the "50 states of plates" game is quite a lot harder here. That said, we did see a South Dakota plate somewhere, and a California plate on what the Americans lovingly call a Mazda Miata, so it's clearly not impossible.

We avoided the beaches and Pearl Harbo(u)r here in Hawaii, which seems to be what most folks come for, but we didn't avoid Chick-fil-a or Jamba Juice, both of which were in evidence at the shopping mall we visited to pick up a couple of things which we'd missed from our packing. Oh, and Helen felt the need to drop into Honolulu's main library, where she found a highly appropriate book:

Overall, we enjoyed a great introduction to Polynesia - onwards!