So I have a new blog name

I left Scotland almost 3 months ago, and since I decided to continue writing here, I’ve been trying to come up with a new name. Which is awfully difficult. I guess this will be a kind of travel blog, but I don’t want a standard “your-name” travels/travelling/nomadic/similar travel-related word of your choice. Partly because I’m not actually traveling that much at the moment, and because it’s just a little boring. So eventually I went with this one, I will travel the world. Perhaps not the most imaginative, but it fits well, because being back in Norway have just strengthened my wish to travel. There are many good things about Norway, but right now I don’t really feel like living here. Don’t get me wrong, I live in a nice city, it’s great to see friends from uni again, as we’ve all been away on exchange different places, and I’m looking forward to my classes. There’s just the rest I don’t like so much, so then I will travel, even if it takes at least a year before I can travel for a longer time than a weekend or week at the time. Oh, and I also decided to get my own domain name, so my old one will redirect to this one, as well as I’m in the process of trying to find a different/better design.

I’d be cool to go here for example, here being Greenland and this being a view from the plane to USA this summer.

Kilauea, an active volcano

Craterception, a crater within a crater. The outer crater being where the fence is, with the other side of the distance somewhere barely visible in the distance.

The Hawaiian islands are, if you didn’t know already, volcanoes. Huge ones which started forming at the bottom of the sea many thousand years ago (if not longer). Most are inactive today and have been for a long time, especially on the most northern islands like Oahu where you can see the mountains are very different from, say, the Big Island, as the mountains on Oahu has eroded over a long time since the island was formed, while Big Island still has volcanic activity and is a lot more flat. On Big Island there is still an active volcano, Kilauea, which actually is one of the most active volcanoes on Earth. Fortunately that doesn’t mean it has huge eruptions that brings death and destruction to the island, but it does have smaller eruptions regularly, and it’s possible to see the light from the lava in the distance at night. As the area close by is closed, so you have to watch from a distance. Which I’m quite ok with, I have no great wish of going all close and personal with molten rock.

I did however experience the wonderful smell of sulfur and various other volcanic gases, as there is a trail you can walk through some sulfur fields. Which is a completely natural thing to want to do. Who doesn’t want to go through an area of foul-smelling gases which could potentially make you feel ill if you inhale too much of it? It was cool though, to see how the gases had crystallized and the rifts were covered in these yellowish crystals.

It’s seriously huge, the inner crater is to the right of this picture, and the space on the other side of the inner crater was even bigger.

The crater for the original volcano is HUGE…it’s not very high up anymore, like the other volcanoes on the island (4000+ meters/14000+ feet high),  as the top collapsed when the amount of lava decreased, but the crater is still seriously huge. In the middle there’s a “small” one where there is continuous smoke and gases coming up, which is the still active part of the volcano.  The size of it is incredible though, trying to comprehend just how large this volcano was before it collapsed is difficult, it’s simply enormous. Standing on the edge of the larger crater, I couldn’t see the other side, partly because of smoke from the smaller crater in the centre, but also because the opposite edge of the large crater was so far away I probably wouldn’t have seen much of it even if there weren’t any smoke and fog in the way.

Entrance to a lava tube

In another area of the Hawaii national volcanoes park, where Kilauea is, there are also some old lava tunnels, which you can walk through as the lava is long gone. We went there, but I got really claustrophobic even if I could still see the entrance and it was a rather large tunnel. But just the thought of having so much stone and earth over me freaked me out and I ended up going back to the car instead. I wish I’d pushed through anyway, as I don’t like being cowardly, but hey, I tried.

Have you ever been near or on a volcano? 

The most famous dead tree in Hawaii

Does it look familiar? Without looking at the signpost

The most famous dead tree in Hawaii, also known as the dead tree in Jurassic Park, which Dr. Grant and the two children hide behind when all those dinosaurs come running down the hill. It looks a bit different there than the movie now, but then, it’s almost 20 years since that movie was made. This is on Kualoa ranch by the way, on Oahu, you know, the island which Honolulu is on. We went there on a movie tour, as lot of movies and series has filmed scenes here. Like Jurassic Park, 50 first dates, Pearl Harbor, Godzilla (the American version of course), Lost and a bunch of others. Including one called Tyrannosaurus Azteca, which, according to our guide, is so bad it’s funny. I haven’t seen it so I can’t judge, but the name doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Fun fact about the Godzilla footprints:  when they were originally made they were a lot deeper than now, but as the ranch also have cows, the cows kept falling into the footprints and died, so they had to fill them in and make them shallower.

Godzilla was here.. Although it’s a while ago since it’s growing grass in the footprint

The tour was pretty interesting, even though I’ve only seen some of the movies filmed there. Good guide with interesting stories and beautiful nature. Definitely worth going on if you like movies and series and such, but the rest of the ranch didn’t look that interesting. They boast of horse riding and ATV driving, but that’s really only riding/driving in a line the same route, seeing the same things we did from the bus, so really not worth paying 2-3 times as much for. Oh, and in the bay just by the ranch scenes from Pirates of the Caribbean 4 was filmed, and parts of 5 and 6 might be filmed there as well. Or so the rumour goes. Anyway, it was a nice experience. It’s just lacking a tyrannosaurs rex and few velociraptors for it to be great.