24/11/06 DIAMOND HEAD and Pearls

Today we went into a dormant volcano, called Diamond Head. We got the bus there and walked up this hill and then through a tunnel and Simon commented to me that i needed to look around me and actually appreciate that i was standing in the volcano there and then. It was a park in a big area that if you looked around you, you could see that yes we seem to be in some sort of crater. It made us laugh that in the middle of a volcano there was telephones and toilets. The next part of this journey was to climb up one of the sides of the volcano to the highest point so you can have a panaramic view of o'ahu (this is the hawaii island we are on). This involved steep rocky paths and lots of stairs. We seemed to be in sync with a family climbing up whereby the women was as knackered as me, which made me feel better until i found out she was pregnant so no wonder she was tired. Shows how unfit i am. The view at the top was (using one of simons words) - breathtaking, but to be honest not really worth the climb up for me anyway i think Simon was woooed by it though.

The wooo factor for both of us though today was when we walked down to the harbour. It wasnt the boats either it was the water around the boats. Now it looked pretty manky and really uninviting, but when we started to look closer we could see beautiful fishes in it and then we started to walk futher into the harbour we realised that there was tons of jelly fish in the water each about the size of my head. i was amazed by this until we say the best bit. It was 2 stingrays white and black dotted they were. Ive seen stingrays lots of times and even touched them but they have always been in captivity so to see them in the sea was fantastic.
After leaving the harbour we walked along the beach (walking like an african - mum will understand) and watched the sunset from some rocks that Simon said were big chunks of volcanic rock. The sunset was beautiful we sat there with our DietCoke with Lime and Diet Dr Pepper bikkering about what the rocks were made of. Ah heaven :-)
and then the cherry on the cake was going to CHILIS. I had my buffalo wings that i have wanted for the past 3 weeks and to be honest i was defeated. I left 1 and Simon just laughed at me cause they were so hot, but thats another thing i can tick of my list of things ive done. Got to find an arbys next though.
We booked the Big Island trip today as well, which makes me happy as i really wanted to go over on to another island and see a different park of hawaii. Wakkiki is nice but its very high rise hotels and very populated and we want to see somewher that looks a little like 'LOST'