Akaka Falls
Happy New Year!!! Yes, that’s two years i’ve fell asleep before midnight. The last year was in Goa, India.
Due to our heli tour cancellation yesterday, we had it re-scheduled for today. Assuming the flight time was the same as yesterday, we believed we had a good hour to spare so we went for breakfast at Ken’s House of Pancakes. This place is open for 24 hours. After ordering our food, I decided I wanted to verify the time of our tour. It turns out we had about 5 minutes before the tour started. We quickly cancelled the order and headed straight to the helicopter place.
Thank goodness the instructors gave us a quick debriefing and we were ready to go. I’m not sure if this was my first ever helicopter tour, but it was quite fun. It is always neat to see a place from above and even better when the helicopter can take you close to the volcano. It was an amazing view to see a lava river. Despite it not being as orange as I wanted or being able to see an volcano eruption, it was fun to get up in the air and see lava for the first time. Amy was getting motion sickness and I was getting hot due to the lack of air. In the end, we had a fun time and I’m willing to go again.
After the helicopter tour, we went home, washed up and hit Ken’s House of Pancakes for the meal we forgot to eat. The servings are huge and unless you were super hungry, you can probably share a meal between two people. They had many different types of syrup. From the regular maple, to blueberry, coconut, guava, and papaya. With my habits, I tried all the different types. Guava was probably my favorite of the exotic types.
After lunch, we started our waterfall tour which consisted of Akaka falls and Rainbow falls.
Our first stop was Akaka falls. There was a short hike required, probably about 500m to get there. The vegetation was lush and quite exotic. With the huge rainfall the last few days, the Akaka falls looked very grand and powerful. It was quite a tall waterfall, but it wasn’t wide. Taking photos around this area was nice since many of the flowers still had water droplets from the rain.
Our next stop was Rainbow falls. This waterfall was very close to the Hilo town. There is practically no hiking required to get to this fall from the parking lot. This falls was a lot smaller, but a tad wider. It doesn’t compare to Akaka falls.
The waterfall tour was shorter than expected. I believe the whole tour ran us two hours in duration. It was about 2pm and I decided that maybe we could take an earlier flight since there wasn’t much left to do or really start in Hilo. We went to the airport and talked to the airline counter. They said we could go on standby and there is a high chance we’d get a spot.
Since the next flight was in about an 1.5h, we went to the mall. I came across a gamestop and found a whole bunch of Guitar Hero III’s for the wii and rockband. I bought the Wii’s version of Guitar Hero III for my sister, but before we left the mall, I decided to return as it wouldn’t fit in our carry one bags and was also worried they woudl want us to check it in.
At the airport, we’d ask if it could of been possible to bring it on the plane and they said it would of been fine. I’ll have to remember that for next time. Going through security, we were brought to the side, as they had to check out all of our bottles for chemicals. The security guard there was watching the big sugar bowl game between the Hawaii Warriors and Georgia Bulldogs.
The Hawaii Warriors lost in the sugar bowl that day and it seemed to be a gloomy day in Honolulu.
