go and see the lava flowing into the ocean the next day.

The point where the lava flows into the sea is a seven mile round trip. Doesn't sound like far, but walking over lava is not very easy, so it takes a lot longer than walking along paths. We needed to time it so that we arrived at the viewing point just before sunset, so that we saw the lava in both daylight and darkness. This meant setting off at around 4pm from the end of the chain of craters road, a twenty mile drive to the ocean. It seemed a little quieter today, so we stopped at most of the sights along the way. There were sulphur pools, and steam vents, a walk along the Southwest rift, a seemingly endless crack in the ground about 15 feet deep, and a look at the viewpoint over Halema'uma'u crater, a huge hole within the main Kilauea Caldera which not so long ago was a boiling lake of fire, as described by Mark Twain when he

visited. The drive down the chain of craters road drops almost 4000ft, and is punctuated along the way by all sorts of volcanic phenomena, including craters, lava flows, and vents. About half way down was the second free campsite in the park, which we had considered moving to at some point for a little variety, but when we decided to check it out and we found an empty desert type place with dodgy pit toilets, no water, and warnings of rats!! Needless to say we gave it a miss, given how nice our site was!! Further down the road we got our first view of the ocean - and what a magnificent sight!! The land seemed to literally fall away and was covered in huge lava flows, and it was once we reached the bottom that we realised just how huge these flows were. It must have been a truly amazing sight to see these enormous rivers of fire flowing down the mountain!! We got our first glimpse of the steam plume far away to our right as well, the feelings of anticipation were almost too much!! It still wasn’t time though,