When volcanoes erupt most people run away as fast as they possibly can. Volcanologist John Seach does the opposite: he runs towards the 2000 degree lava flows.
For Seach, a self confessed “volcano chaser” who owns an adventure tour company, Volcano Live, there’s nothing better than liquid rock, steaming earth and the sulphurous smell of freshly made land. It turns out he’s not alone. A growing number of travelers are actively seeking out the drama of volcanic landscapes for some seriously hot holidays.
Dr. Tom Pfeiffer, a fellow volcanologist who has turned his love of lava into an adventure tour outfit called Volcano Discovery, thinks the appeal is in the immediacy of the experience. “Most geological processes are so slow that you can’t see them. With volcanoes you’re actually watching the land being made. The geological formations that result can be understood by people with no training at all in geology.” Each volcano is distinctly different and, according to Dr. Pfeiffer, each exhibits a unique personality. “I love Hawaii because it’s very gentle and powerful,” he says. “It’s like a whale: it rarely harms anything. It doesn’t need to be immediately spectacular. I also love Mount Etna because it’s very capricious - like the Italian character.”
In many cultures volcanoes are revered as Gods. Warren Costa, a native Hawaiian guide who conducts personal tours of Volcano National Park and surrounding areas, makes a point of schooling his guests in native culture as well as geology. “We consider the lava to be the actual body of the God Pele. You don’t want to mess with lava in a disrespectful way like throwing quarters or roasting marshmallow,” he warns. It’s a case of look, touch but take absolutely nothing (lest you want some bad luck courtesy of Pele). “Every day The National Parks and the hotels get packages from tourists returning rocks they took on vacation,” adds Costa.
Even benevolent Gods have bad moods so it pays to be aware of the dangers inherit in volcanic zones. “The most common injury is cuts where people fall on the razor sharp pahoehoe lava,” says Costa, adding that the most hazardous place in Volcano National Park is where the lava meets the sea. “The steam cloud is made up of hydrochloric and sulfuric acid with little bits of volcanic glass in it,” he explains. It’s a nasty cocktail to inhale.
“I’ve been hit by flying rocks a couple of times,” says volcanologist John Seach cheerfully. “We were filming a documentary for Discovery Channel and took shelter in an abandoned building on Mount Etna. I was speaking to camera and a chunk of lava the size of a golf ball hit me. It had cooled down on its journey from the vent about two miles away but it still knocked me to the ground,” he says adding, “I also melted my boots on Lopevi Volcano in Vanuatu.”
If this sounds like just your kind of vacation then read on. Our list of ten great volcano adventures was compiled by consulting tourism experts around the Pacific Ring of Fire, Africa and beyond. It includes expedition style adventures reminiscent of Journey to the Center of the Earth where campers gaze in awe at boiling lakes of lava under the moonlight. Some volcanoes, like those on the edge of the Arctic Circle, are best appreciated by plane, taking in four sleeping giants in the course of one day. Others like Kilimanjaro, we find, can be conquered on foot via a goat-track far less traveled. We discover new ways to learn about the cultures that thrived and perished at the hands of the volcano Gods and discover places to eat food cooked in the hot belly of the earth. On the flanks of a conical volcano we discover whimsical activities in the form of one of New Zealand’s newest and zaniest sports, dam dropping.
No matter how wild or mild the adventure, the added presence of a volcano is always a humbling force. “Gazing into the colder,” says volcanologist Tom Pfeiffer, ” It feels like you’re looking into the mouth of hell.” And if that won’t get your adrenaline flowing then nothing will.
SLIDESHOW
- THE VOLCANO:
Kilauea, Hawaii (4091 feet). A gently sloping shield volcano, Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii has been erupting continuously since 1983.
THE ADVENTURE:
A great tourism infrastructure, constant eruptions and wonderful climate make Volcano National Park a popular destination. Hawaiian native guide Warren Costa, who conducts exclusive by-appointment tours of many little known areas, has some advice for budding volcanologists: “The trick is to know what to know what to look for. It’s a six-mile round trip to the hot lava and many people come back without really seeing anything. I watch for the way the air distorts but a lot of the times you can hear lava before you see it. Imagine taking a handful of broken windscreen glass and dropping it a few at a time onto a concrete floor”. Costa shows clients Pele’s tears and Pele’s hair, two unique geological formations. He also leads groups to naturally heated steam baths and ventures more than one thousand feet into an un-touristed and unlit section of Nahuku Lava Tube to see lava stalactites.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
2. THE VOLCANO:
Mt Kilimanjaro, Tanzania (19340 feet). The largest mountain in Africa, Mt Kilimanjaro is not active but consider this: hot magma lies just 1300 feet below the crater summit.
THE ADVENTURE:
Lindsay Duxbury, an expedition leader with Geographical Expeditions, conducts hiking tours up the lesser-known Barranco-Barafu Route. It’s a path less traveled and takes a week instead of the usual five days. The solitude of jungle hiking with just the company of colubus monkeys makes it worth the extra miles. “Around 90 percent of our hikers make it to the summit,” says Duxbury, compared to 50 percent for walkers hiking more traditional trails. The main problem is altitude sickness. “On day five, once you hit 14,000 feet everyone’s feeling pretty ordinary and it’s difficult to hike long distances. On the final day we camp just two hours from the summit so for us it’s a much easier ascent. Other groups camp lower down and have to leave at midnight to make it by dawn. The cloud comes in pretty quickly too so if you’re slow to get to the summit, you miss the view completely,” she says.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.geoex.com
3. THE VOLCANO:
Mt Vesuvius, Italy (4202 feet). The eruption of Vesuvius on August 24th, 79 AD may have demolished the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum but it enriched the lives of thousands of archeologists and tourists who visit the site each year.
THE ADVENTURE:
“Pompeii and Herculaneum are very well touristed but they’re not a theme park,” says Ilsa Higgins, a tour manager with Smithsonian Journeys who will be conducting a specialty tour of Pompeii this Summer. “It’s very well done and it’s so much more than just geology”. Firstly she suggests a leisurely visit to the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. “That’s where some of the best frescoes are including the famously pornographic ones. Our guides explained that many of the phallic themes commonly misperceived as erotic actually represented fertility”, she says. Smithsonian Journeys’ high guide-to-guest ratio is the key to understanding the site in context. “There were only ten of us on our last trip and we had three guides: an art historian who taught at the John Cabot Museum in Rome, and two Neopolitan art historians with Ph.D.s from the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. They gave us exclusive access to parts of Pompeii that regular visitors don’t go.”
FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.smithsonianjourneys.com
4. THE VOLCANO:
Augustine (4134 feet), Douglas (7021 feet), Illiamna (3053 feet) and Redoubt volcanoes (10,197 feet) Alaska. This chain of volcanic peaks along the east coast of Katamai National Park and Lake Clark National Park are just four of Alaska’s 80 potentially active volcanoes.
THE ADVENTURE:
Homer Air Service, a flight-seeing company base in Homer Alaska, conduct a Ring of Fire Tour which visits these four dramatic peaks in the course of a day’s tour.
From the air you’ll see the Augustine Volcano which recently came back to life; the turquoise crater lake in Douglas Volcano and the steaming vents of Illiamna Volcano, as well as landing on a glacier at the foot of Mt Douglas for lunch in the Alaskan wilderness where the grizzly bear grow ten feet tall. Alaska also has the dubious honor of having witnessed one of the largest eruptions in the 20th century. Part of the thrill is the lurking sense of danger. The Novarupta Volcano (another of Homer Air’s flight-seeing destinations) blew its top in 1912, the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century.
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5. THE VOLCANO:
Niyragongo Volcano, Zaire (11384 feet).
This giant volcano is anything but dormant; a lake of boiling lava can be seen in the caldera.
THE ADVENTURE:
Dr. Tom Pfeiffer takes ten-day expeditions to Zaire culminating in a three-day odyssey to the crater rim. “We camp on the rim and for three days and nights and we just look at the volcano. It is really captivating,” says Dr. Pfeiffer. “The volcano boiling, the hissing and splashing of the lava sounds like a washing machine. There’s also loud explosions when the stromboli are ejected, then the hissing of escaping gas, then the blocks falling on the ground like strong hail.”
With all that activity he can’t guarantee his clients a good night’s sleep but that’s not what they’re after. “We try to give people the same experience that the [volcano] scientists get,” he says.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: volcanodiscovery.com
- THE VOLCANO:
Mount Liamuiga Volcano,
St Kitts (3792 feet). Fought over by the French and British, this off-the-radar volcano is about to be hot again.
THE ADVENTURE:
Around 1624 the British and French claimed St Kitts and it remains to this day one of the smallest, oldest and least developed luxury destinations in the Caribbean volcanic chain. On the volcano’s western flank a precipitous drive brings you to an isolated fort knows as Brimstone Hill, a UNESCO world heritage fort dating back to 1690. On a six hour round trip hike to the crater, 70 year old native guide Oliver (no last name necessary – St Kitts is that small) take guests through giant bamboo rain forests and treats the jungle like a greengrocer, picking wild fruits and berries for your gastronomical delight. At the summit guests take a cooling dip in the crater lake which is home to many steaming fumaroles. It’s a pure Jurassic Park experience.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.stkittstourism.kn
7. THE VOLCANO:
Yellowstone, USA (8000 feet). It may not have the classic shape of its conical cousins but the park’s status as the largest super-caldera on earth (if it blew human life would cease to exist) makes it a must-see volcanic landscape.
THE ADVENTURE:
“Most of the 900,000 people who visit the park don’t even leave the road,” says National Park guide Lee Ramella. There’s snow mobiling, kayaking and even llama tracking to be enjoyed. Ramella is a seasoned back-country hiker who rarely changes out of his moccasins unless he intends to hike for more than three days. “Old Faithful isn’t the only geyser. Steamboat erupts higher — to around 300 feet — but it’s not very frequent”. Even so, Yellowstone has half the geysers on earth and many unique geological formations including valleys of volcanic hoodoos (eroded towers of rock).
“The spring water is full of fluoride which is great in small doses but drink it all the time like the animals do and it makes their teeth brittle. Some of these deer don’t live long. There’s also some mighty strange organisms living in hot spring water.” Scientists have used them to map the human genome and make stonewash jeans.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.yellowstonenationalpark.com
8. THE VOLCANO:
Shiga volcanic complex, Japan (6696 feet). This mountain range hasn’t erupted for 10,000 years but that doesn’t stop it from being an active geothermal attraction par-excellence.
THE ADVENTURE:
The largest ski resort in Japan (with 21 resorts linked by one ticket) this colossal mountain range has seventy lifts servicing 750 acres of pristine hiking and skiing trails. Set among Johshinetsu Kogen National Park so it pays to watch for fox and bear from the chairlift. Skiing and hiking are relatively new activities. Warriors first began visiting the nearby town of Shibu nearly 400 years ago to recover from their injuries in one of the many geothermal bathhouses located in the main street. The narrow lanes are abuzz with kimono-clad locals in wooden sandals shuffling from onsen to onsen seeking the best mineral water elixir to ease for todays less onerous ailments.
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9. THE VOLCANO:
Ambrym Volcano, Vanuatu (4377 feet). A lush rainforest and a near permanent lake of boiling lava make this volcano a hotspot for volcanologists and botanists alike.
THE ADVENTURE:
Adventure travel operator, John Seach prefers to keep the exact destination of his volcano tours flexible so he can take his clients to the hottest hotspots in a given region. “We go to wherever the eruption is happening at the time,” he says. “We’ll camp or stay in traditional bungalows in villages – whatever it takes. Once we climbed up one side of Ambrym Volcano and went down the other and found ourselves in a village called Endu, which had a population of about 200 people. They’d never seen a tourist group. Sometimes on these random adventures we’re treated to lunch cooked in the hot volcanic ground – things like eggs, sweet potato, taro, yams, chicken,” he says.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: volcanolive.com
10. THE VOLCANO:
Mt. Taranaki, New Zealand (Elevation 8,261 feet). This dormant volcano is so symmetrical in shape, it was convincingly used as a stand-in for Mount Fuji in The Last Samurai.
THE ADVENTURE:
Adventure sport and volcanoes are a match made in heaven. On the slopes of the near perfect cone of Mt Taranaki the Waingongoro River plummets down steep ravines then winds its way through bush and farmland before reaching the seas at Ohawe beach. It’s the location for New Zealand’s more recent zany extreme sport, known as dam dropping or river sledging. It’s similar to white water rafting but with one crucial piece of equipment missing: the raft. Devotees hurl down the river over rocks, dams, and weirs wearing fins, helmets and grasping small paddleboards. The steep volcanic landscape makes for a rapid descent with very few stretches of flat water.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Words by Adam McCulloch. Originally published on Forbestraveler.com. The format has been altered to suit Tumblr.
