back from a soggy but exciting trip to volcano

so we just got back from hawai'i volcanoes national park. that's about 2 or 3 hours away from waimea so we camped there since monday night. we were basically on the southeastern tip of the island, near kilauea volcano. that's the rainy side of the island so we expected it to be rainy but it was a little bit moreso than usual... we spent tuesday exploring kilauea caldera, which is a big crater where a number of eruptions occurred over the past century. we spent most of the day trekking across the caldera on different transects with our partners , surveying the vegetation so that we could see the differences between what was growing on the newer flows and the older lava flows. it was pretty crazy going across the 1982 flow because you would crack through and sometimes fall a foot all the time because the flow is newer and still has lots of air pockets under it. there's also a huge crater in the caldera called halema'uma'u where there's lots of steam vents and old flows, and it used to have a lava lake til 1924. it seriously looks like what the world must have looked like at the very beginning. pele, the goddess of fire and of volcanoes, lives in the crater and so you find offerings of leis and gin at the edges of the crater. we also were lucky enough to see some nene (hawaiian geese),which are endangered and there only happen to be 400 on the island now. yesterday night, we went to a newer black sand beach that is actually from such a recent flow that the sand is more like odd black pebbles. a few of us crazier ones went swimming in the water which was really cold and haha, we managed to beat ourselves up pretty well on the rocks. as we were swimming in and making our way across the rocky bottom, i also happened to make friends with a sea turtle that i mistook for a rock in the murky wavey water. that made for some excitement ;) we ate some amazing pesto pasta to some ukelele music..played by ben and dan and sung some retardedly funny camp songs to entertain ourselves. after only a week and a half, we know each other way too welll...
last night it pourrrrred like crazy and so our tent got incredibly soaked... all the more interesting.
we were supposed to hike out to the active lava flow, but we decided to postpone it and head home because of some blistery feet and persistent rain.
man it feels good to be under a roof again at the moment :)