Mountain Ascent

Friday, July 11, 2014

We had breakfast outside at 8:00 with the fabulous fruit platter again. There were also little visitors called geckos, small bright green lizards that are plentiful and harmless. 

Steve, the B&B owner, told us about the novel he has written and how he is trying to find a publisher. It is partly autobiographical and sounds very interesting. Steve and Jim talked for quite a while about their common views about American politics and I went for a dip in the pool.  Jim joined me and then we packed up to move into the town of Hilo, just a few miles away.  On our way into town we stopped at a popular surfing spot to take some pictures. 

We drove around Hilo a bit and had lunch at Sombat’s Fresh Thai Cuisine, very delicious food with leftovers packed up for lunch tomorrow. Our guidebook was extremely useful in finding places to eat, etc. and we used it a lot. We had ordered it on the internet and brought it from home. It was called “Hawaii-the Big Island Revealed”...now in its seventh edition.

On our drive around Hilo we saw some cool banyan trees. Then we located our place to stay tonight, right in downtown Hilo, just a block from the market that I wanted to go to tomorrow. Megan was very welcoming and the large room had a unique design. She said it had good acoustics if we wanted to do any chanting. It had an outdoor shower just outside our back door. We had a rest before our big outing up the mountain tonight.

The outdoor shower at our B&B in downtown Hilo

Mauna Kea Mountain is the best place in the world to observe stars. The finest telescopes in the world are up at the summit (about 14,000 feet) but not for use by the public. We will go as far as the Visitor’s Centre, which is 9,200 ft. above sea level. We were a little nervous about going up. Jim was concerned about the thin air and altitude sickness, but I was more worried about the actual drive—road conditions, visibility, descent after dark. Fill up the gas tank! – there’s no gas stations up there. Anyway, it all turned out fine.

We saw the moon rise on one side of the mountain...

and watched the sun set on the other side

We had to do a short uphill hike off the road to see the sunset. Let’s just say we didn’t break any speed records. You really felt like you were in a plane looking down on the clouds. After the sun went down it started to get cold. There was a bright full moon, beautiful, but actually a disadvantage because we could only see 400 stars instead of 4000 on a moonless night. Guides set up telescopes outside and trained them on certain objects. My favourite was Saturn -- you could actually see the rings around it. One guide gave a talk with a laser pointed to the sky. We saw constellations, stars, planets, and of course, that super big moon. The moon was amazing to look at through the high-powered telescopes.We left at 9:30. It was really cold by then. You could buy gloves and other warm clothing but we just bought a cup-of-soup to warm us up.