almost 14,000 feet high. Now when you consider that around Hawaii the Pacific is around 20,000 ft deep, that makes Mauna Kea the world’s highest mountain at about 34,000 feet high, around 5,000 ft more than Everest. However, Mauna Loa slopes more gently, and therefore has a bigger volume, so claims the title of the world’s biggest! It is also suggested by some that it in fact sits in an Ocean trench, so in fact it’s true height is more like 56,000 ft. These are big volcanoes!!

We arrived at the visitor centre at 9,000 ft, and had a quick look around the exhibitions there, before heading up to the summit. At this point it was still cloudy and damp, but as we ascended the summit road we broke through the clouds and into the sunshine! It was an amazing sight, exactly like the view from an aeroplane, but from a minibus!! The guide pointed out the various telescopes at the summit, there are

about a dozen in all, from all sorts of different countries, Japan being the latest country to join in the fun with their Subaru telescope, named after the Japanese word for the Pleiades and not the car!! We also saw the famous Keck pair of telescopes, looking rather like a pair of oversized ping pong balls!!! We parked up at the point where in clear weather there is a great view of Maui, and it’s resident dormant volcano, Haleakala. Alas there was too much cloud on the night we chose, and neither it, nor Mauna Loa could be seen. The summit and the area around it was like the surface of another planet - all the lava and being above the clouds, coupled with the slight dizziness brought on by our old friend altitude sickness!!

The place where the telescopes are was not the actual summit, that was a twenty minute hike up a steep pile of lava - it wasn’t actually that far but the altitude made it