So, those of you who spoke to me before I left will know that I was really excited to see lava on Hawaii. In fact, it's basically the whole reason we came. The whole falling-in-love-with-this-tropical-island-paradise thing has really just been a sideline. So - in lava hunting terms - yesterday was the big day...

I don't want to build this up like that joke about the ping-pong ball with the black spot on it, so I'm just going to come out and say it. We didn't see any lava. I know, unbelievable. We go to the most active volcano in the world, and don't see any red-hot boiling lava at all. Actually not a single drop. We barely even smelled any sulphur.

The thing is I already knew that was likely because the USGS daily reports had told me so. You see the classic thing to see is lava pouring into the ocean. By all accounts it's life-changingly amazing. But party-spoling USGS had already told me that was going to be impossible. There was this tantalising bit of the report that gave me a glimmer of hope, however - "active surface flows to the southeast were visible high on the pali". So all we had to do was find out what a pali was and then from there, find the lava.

But in fact all we found was absolutely bucketloads of rain. We had expected rain in Hilo where we're staying, but thought it would be clear at the volcano. We were wrong. Couple that with the fact that we were a bit slow off the mark with our waterproofs and you have yourself someone who is wet down to their pants and can barely see their hand in front of their face, let along a lava flow high on the pali.

So that was that. But we still had a good day in the Volcano National Park. We played a bit on the old lava flow (before the rain set in) saw some Hawaiian rock carvings called petroglyphs (which have a surprising link with umbilical cords), walked through a massive steamy crater and a tourist-geared lava tube when it was totally deserted and saw the faint glow of actual lava above the main crater of Kilauea. So not bad really all things considered.

And there's always Stromboli...