The Kilauea Caldera And Other Volcanoes

...Continued from yesterday:
     On Thursday morning we drove a few minutes from Kilauea Military Camp, which is located on the rim of the volcano, to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, which is in the volcano.
     At first I had some trouble visualizing that we were inside an active volcano. 
     In my mind's eye  a volcano looked like a defined mountain with a hole in its top. 
     Like the Nicaraguan volcanoes

       Momotombo,

...or Masaya,

    ...both of which I'd seen while visiting my daughter who was at that time working in Nicaragua in the jungle outside the city of Leon. 
     Through a clearing in the jungle one could see  Momotombo off in the distance.  One could also drive or hike up to the top of the volcano and look into its vast smoking crater.
       In fact on weekends my daughter used to lead groups of adventurous foreign tourists on volcano hikes  to the top of the local volcano craters to raise funds for Las Tias, an organization of women in Leon who cared for street orphans.
      Once during my visit my daughter and I traveled  to the city of Granada from which my daughter hired a taxi driver to take us to the top of the nearby active volcano Masaya. 
     The driver took us right up to the crater. 
     It was hot up there, and the smoke that wafted up from the crater smelled of sulphur, and the crater itself was the size of a lake.

Here's a picture I found on the 'net of the visitors'  section of the Masaya crater. 

     On a ridge overlooking the crater was a cross erected in the 16th Century by Spaniards who believed that the smoking crater was the entrance to Hell.

     In truth, to me the crater did look and feel like the entrance to Hell; it was hot and smokey and sulfuric and creepy, and the day was over-cast and I couldn't lose the paranoia that somebody - possibly me - could stumble over the not-high-enough guard rail into the white-hot crater.
     In truth, having seen one volcano, I didn't feel any burning desire to ever again see another.  But Tom, who'd never seen a volcano, did. 
     And hence we were in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park standing inside the crater of an active volcano.
     But the whole point of my story is this:  to me, where we were didn't look or feel like the inside of a volcano crater. It just seemed as if were in some hilly countryside.

...despite what the signs said.

...and despite the billows of steam that rose up from cracks in the ground called steam vents.

...and despite a smoking hole in a plateau that we could see off in the distance.

     It wasn't until we arrived at the prime look-out point  for that crater, called Halema'um'au Crater,

....located outside of the the Jagger volcano museum,

...that I finally got this volcano,  here as its smoking crater-within-a-crater-within- a- crater appeared from the lookout point,

...after having the read the explanation on the sign post near the lookout that Kilauea is actually a massive collapsed volcano, or a caldera,

....with a not-too-deep outer crater a few square miles in diameter surrounding the smoking and sometimes lava-spouting inner-inner crater.

     In other words, Kilauea is flat, squatty volcano, or a caldera,

...as opposed to Mauna Loa, in the background, which is just kind of  short for a volcano,

...but which apparently can still pack a wallop when it erupts,

...as can Kilauea.*

*At a moment when I caught it spouting some lava.
To be continued...