Rain is the first fact about Hilo. The town gets well over a hundred inches a year, making it one of the wettest cities in the United States, and the rain is what turned this side of the Big Island into a lush tangle of ferns, orchids, bamboo and waterfalls. Hilo is a low, tidy, slightly faded town of forty thousand people curved around a bay, with old wooden shopfronts, a farmers market that sprawls across several blocks, and the vast shoulder of Mauna Kea rising unseen behind its cloud.
It has been rebuilt more than once. Tsunamis hit the bay in 1946 and 1960, killing many people and wiping out the waterfront, and the old bayfront district is now a park, with a museum recalling the disasters. The town is a good place to eat, with Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese and Hawaiian influences all in the kitchen: saimin noodle soup, loco moco, malasadas, poke. Nearby, Rainbow Falls drops into a pool under a lava rock arch, and, when sun slants through the mist, they live up to their name.
Saddle Road begins here. Officially renamed for a late senator, it crosses the high saddle between the two giant volcanoes, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, both rising above thirteen thousand feet. For years it was a rough, narrow track that rental car companies banned, but modern rebuilding has turned it into a fast, smooth road with long bends and wide views. The road climbs from the wet tropics through ranchland and into a high lava desert, passing the turn for the Mauna Kea visitor station, and the climate changes with every few miles.
Prepare for the swing. Hilo can be warm and drizzly, and up on the saddle it can be cold, windy and foggy, so carry layers and a rain jacket. The road is also busy with trucks and has convoys from the military training area at Pohakuloa, and clouds can obscure the road in a flash. Early morning is usually the clearest time, before cloud builds up over the volcanoes.