After our late night, we wake up too late for an early morning Steam Vents/Sulphur Banks walk. Gordon says it's best done in at dawn when it's, well, full steam. Well, we get up at 7am and join a Swiss couple at the breakfast table. They are in Volcano to acclimatise for a 2-day hike to Mauna Loa's summit. The girl says she has to carry 5-6 litres of water and is apprehensive about the trek.
We are at Volcano Winery - "the southernmost winery in the USA" - to start on our first multi-cache. The winery isn't opened yet, so we start working out the various waypoints of the cache. We stop to chat with an elderly woman who is walking her dog. He lets us pet him. Our last waypoint takes us right into a golf course. Try as we might, we can't find the cache. A man on a mower keeps circling about and we try not to look too hard when he comes our way. Then HB realises she has miscalculated. Ah well, if we were in SICC, we would have been chased out. We regroup and quickly find the camouflaged cache.
It's back to the winery for free tasting. The woman at the counter is patient and explains which are wines and which are blends, tells us she uses them in desserts. We buy three bottles. But we double back for another bottle.
It's only 10.30am but the sun is already blazing hot as we turn south away from HVNP's entrance. We are heading for Footprints in the Kau Desert. This is the site of an ancient tragedy. A Hawaiian chieftain, Keoua, planning to snatch power from his cousin Kamehameha while he was away, sent his army to the Kilauea area just as the caldera erupted. Some 80 people - warriors and their families - were smothered by toxic gases emitted during the eruption. The footprints in the sand are said to be of those who found the slumbering bodies. Preserved by the solidifying lava, the imprints are vulnerable to weather conditions. One funny anecdote in BI: Hidden Secrets Revealed narrated how some well-meaning HVNP officials decided to protect the footprints under glass casings. Alas, they didn't count on water condensation washing away precious fragments of history.
We pull up under some trees at the trail head and hope the shadows don't move. There is only one other car there. A girl and her granny emerge from the trail - they're from the car, we presume. Aargh, it's so uncomfortably hot. But we walk in the unforgiving heat - it's 1 mile to a hut we can see in the distance. All for what? To see what looks like something left behind by careless construction workers on wet cement. And to claim a virtual geocache! OK... and for its historical significance. But really, look at the pictures below. Yes, the footprints on the right are ours.
Time to head for lunch. And the unfriendly Puna region.
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