A family watches their house catch fire, and then blaze, popping and spitting, windows crashing out. They are ready, have removed their furniture, have known, in fact, for days that it would burn. And yet their foreknowledge has really gained them very little, as the house of their dreams becomes smoke and ash, a ghost caught on waiting videotape. Such is the devastation in the wake of The Big Island of Hawaii's Kilauea Volcano. And it is but an introduction to the raw power of this amazing island.
Superlatives abound when describing Hawaii.
It is the largest of the islands by far, so big that each of its five districts is bigger than any of the other islands in the chain. Its climate is certainly the most diverse of any area of its size. Every climate on earth is represented, save only one. From the air, one sees the rainforest in Puna, and arid Waikoloa, fertile grasslands in Kohala, the Ka'u Desert and mighty snow-capped Mauna Kea. Mauna Kea has been reckoned as the tallest mountain in the world.