This is, in fact, my last day before starting my term at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. I was still so tired and sore after the two-tank dusk/night dive and the Dolphin snorkel that I got up late and some ancillaries done – buy a few things I need up at HAVO, get my hair cut, clean out the underwater casing for the camera, let it dry and put it back into the boxes etc.

Then took the time to stroll down along Ali’i Drive in Kona and visited the Lava Light Galleries – I had seen a photograph of the Kilauea volcano earlier at the Humpy’s Bar & Restaurant, and in fact it was also the photographer I was recommended to visit during my trip with Blue Wilderness Divers. An interesting guy and really good talking to him – it just confirmed to me, however, that it is not necessarily the picture speaking for itself that makes it interesting, but the background story that the photographer can tell how it came together. People usually buy (I assume – as I don’t buy but shoot myself) pictures because they like it, because they speak for themselves. But oftentimes the really interesting pictures are overlooked because you just cannot appreciate how difficult and professional high-level they were to get, because you don’t see it in the picture. These circumstances made for an interesting conversation, also about places that I had visited, e.g. Yosemite, where one of his best pictures including the story were shot probably just days before I was there, the wave in Arizona, see earlier (that we both haven’t covered yet and where he agreed that a lottery system is a strange system for a “free land”), and ultimately the lava flow and ocean entry of Kilauea in 2008, where I actually think I got one picture (the one with the lightning, see here) that he didn’t get, although he has many incredible shots and some I wouldn’t even dare taking (like one where he swims in the surf up to the lava ocean entry to get both the wave and the lava…).

So I was hanging out a little between the tourists and the locals, won a bar quiz price (“what is Big Ben?” was the question) and headed back to the Hotel to get packed up for an early start tomorrow towards the park. Work’s waitin’!