Molten Lava on the Big Island!

I'm visiting the big island for the second time and, finally, Pele kept the lava flowing so I could see it!  It was quite exciting!  Tony and I looked at various alternatives and decided that a boat tour would probably not be a good idea since we both get seasick and the videos I saw on the web showed a LOT of bobbing around.  Instead I found a group, Kalapana Cultural Tours,  that does escorted tours over the lava bed to the areas where lava is flowing.  The publicly accessible viewing area is nowhere near where the lava is currently flowing so the only way to legally see the lava is with a guided tour.  All the folks who run the Kalapana Cultural Tours live or lived in Kalapana.  Our guides were brothers, Paul and Primo.  We hiked over raw lava fields (no groomed trails here!) - climbing up lumps of lava, jumping over large and small cracks, slipping/sliding on rough a'a lava, ...  Quite an adventure!  Paul and Primo would tell us about the various plants now growing in some parts of the flow, they described the various neighborhood areas that we crossed (houses burned and the original land is now under 90+ feet of lava).  At the start of tour they have pictures of their land before the lava came - a gorgeous black sand beach with groves of coconut trees, and how it looks now - 90' cliff and just a few plants starting the cycle of rebirth.  Here are a few of the pictures we took.  I'll upload more as I can to my flickr pictures Hawaii set.

Lava flow on 7/28/2013

Tony (yes it was a hot, sweaty hike!) in front of the lava flow

Beautiful blue water along highway 137 on Hawai'i (and a handsome hubby too!)