Day 7 - Hilo, Hawaii

Sailing into Hilo this morning we saw our first whales right off of our balcony.  We arrived in Hilo right on time and were docked by about 9:00am.  We went to Constellation Theatre to exchange our tickets for bus assignments and that didn’t take very long.  However, there was some delay in getting the buses ready so we didn’t leave quite on time. 

We had selected the visit to the Imiloa Astronomy Center on the campus of the University of Hawaii.  Our group wasn’t very large so the bus was not crowded and the short 15 minute ridge was comfortable.   On arrival we were met by a volunteer at the center who would be our guide.  He informed us that we had reservations for the 2:00pm show and so we would take a short walk through the gardens.   The gardens are really just the landscaping around the parking lot but it was interesting as he focused on telling which plants had come by www – wind, wave or wings – and which were “canoe” plants, i.e. brought by man.  The garden tour took 40 minutes and most of us where a bit unhappy that much time was spent on the garden and not inside the center.  When we did go inside, we only had 15 minutes before we had to line up for the show…not near enough time to visit any of the exhibits which looked very interesting.

The show was “Amazing Light” which talked about the three (3) major observatories on the Mauna Kea, i.e. Keck, Canada-France-Hawaii and Suburu (Japan), and what projects they were working on right now.  That was quite interesting and it was in 3-D which gave the sense of being inside the telescope buildings and of flying through space to see the celestial bodies being investigated.  Since two of the three had been clients of FundWare at one time, Fred and I had actually been able to visit the CFW telescope on one of our previous visits to Hawaii.

We sailed about 5:00pm on our way to Honolulu.  The Captain had scheduled the sailing earlier than planned because he wanted to take us the long way around the Island in hopes we could see some of the lava flows.  Unfortunately, when we got to the area around 9:00pm the clouds had lowered so much that even with strong binoculars, the bridge couldn’t see anything.