A week later, we spent Sunday evening waiting for our flight out of Kona Airport. (After a disastrous experience at LAX in which we arrived 2 hours ahead and got to the gate with maybe 15 minutes to spare, we showed up early for the flight home. But Kona’s much smaller and better organized, so it took us maybe 15 minutes to check in. There wasn’t even a line to go through security!)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on our Hawaiian vacation. I’m sorry it took so long to finish it, but hey, I managed (just barely) to beat the 6-month marker!

Usually it looked more like this:

Note: Our stay in Kona was April 4-10, 2005

It didn’t look nearly so blue to us, of course, since our eyes were adjusted to it. Each window had a pair of cards with pictures of different types of local fish labeled with their names, and the entire trip was narrated by a guide familiar with the local marine life. They did a good job of steering so that people on both sides could see everything.

You can’t see it in this photo, but in a lot of places you could still see the wrinkles of long-cooled a‘a lava beneath the coral.

By the end of the dive, we’d gotten out to where there was mostly sand, and very little exposed rock, so there was hardly any coral (and not many fish, either).

Here’s a view of the submarine from the ferry after we disembarked:

The view of the shore was, as most views were, fantastic. Note the clouds blocking any chance of seeing Hualalai!

This last photo should probably have gone in with the post about exploring Kona: it’s the ‘Ahu‘ena Heiau, King Kamehameha’s personal heiau dedicated to the god Lono. This shot was taken from the pier as we waited to board the boat.

Note: This tour was Wednesday, April 6, 2005.

What I didn’t mention was that that shot was carefully cropped. The view really looked like this:

Well, hey, we got the cheap rooms, so you kind of expect that. Still, there was a lot to see right on the hotel grounds. First of all, we stayed at the Outrigger Keauhou Beach Resort. Outrigger had recently taken over the hotel, and they were in the midst of remodelling. They had to block off part of the parking lot for a couple of days in order to bring in a crane and replace the air conditioner. So I expect any review of the facilities themselves is going to be outdated within a couple of months.

The hotel grounds include a couple of heiau ruins, some tide pools, and a small garden area. The lounge/bar is open air and looks out on the tide pools. They light up the pools at night so that you can see the fish and sea turtles. Here’s a view from near the hotel lobby, at low tide.

Like everything else on the island, these tide pools are remnants of an ancient lava flow. You can still see the rippled pahoehoe patterns:

Beyond this area were the tennis courts and a path out to a bridge. Unfortunately the bridge was labeled “kapu” so I figured I’d be better off skipping it. I later found out that there used to be another resort nearby. I assume the bridge leads onto that property.

By this time the tree trimmers had finished their break and blocked off the path back to the hotel grounds, so I went behind the tennis courts and found this gem.

They were actually trimming the palm trees most of the time we were there. You might expect this to mean a couple of guys in hard hats with a crane go up with a chainsaw and hack off the limbs. No, there was a guy with a rope climbing up the tree trunks, hacking away at the fronds with a machete!

The hotel gardens themselves aren’t huge, but they did have some interesting trees and plants.

On Monday we spotted a squirrel in the hotel parking lot. Then we looked closer, and realized it wasn’t a squirrel. A mongoose? Yes, as it turns out, there are mongooses all over the Hawaiian islands. They were imported to cut down on the rat problem, having worked well in Jamaica(?). Only one problem: the polynesian rat is nocturnal and tends to nest above ground, while the mongoose is diurnal. So they never come into direct contact, and the mongooses never encounter rats’ nests, either. Now the islands have a rat problem and a mongoose problem!

Later in the week we wandered over to Kahalu‘u Beach (right next to the hotel) and finally got a mongoose to hold still long enough to get pictures.

Note: We stayed in Kona during the week of April 4-10, 2005. Most of the photos of the grounds were taken on Tuesday, April 5.

That’s not dirt, that’s rock! You may be wondering about the white bits. They’re a sort of temporary graffiti. All through this area, people have dragged out bits of coral to spell out messages ranging from “Hi Mom” and “Aloha Dolly” to “In Memory Of…” For some reason it’s almost universally good-natured. Katie’s got some interesting pictures. that we’ll be posting later.

Here’s a view of the coast itself. Our guide on the Mauna Kea tour told us what was in that stand of palms, but I can’t remember:

(This is also the area where you’ll see the Donkey Crossing signs.)

Here’s another picture that shows a pahoehoe flow (a‘a comes out cooler and chunkier, leaving behind jagged rocks, while pahoehoe is hotter and more liquid, so it flows smoothly and often cools with ripples still visible).

Because of the rain shadow, this side of the island gets a lot more sun, so people have been building resorts along the coast. One of the biggest, Waikoloa, has its own shopping center with its own Macy’s. It was also where our catamaran cruise launched, so we visited their beach. This is probably more what you were expecting from Hawaii:

It was very windy that day. Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa are roughly straight north-south from each other, so the trade winds just go up and over the saddle in between and hit, well, Waikoloa. And with so few trees in the lava flows, there’s not much to slow them down.

We were very familiar with this stretch of road by the end of the week. Our first trip along it also brought us our first view (from the ground, anyway) of Mauna Kea:

You can actually see some of the observatories up on the peak:

Continuing north you come to the Kohala peninsula and mountain. The oldest of the island’s volcanoes, depending on who you talk to it’s either extinct or very, very dormant. (It’s been thousands of years.) It’s the only area we saw that showed more signs of erosion than vulcanism. Like the island as a whole, it has a wet side and a dry side. The highway runs up along the west side of the ridge to the tip, then along the west coast back to the main part of the island. A lot of the land is current or former ranch land, and you see cows all over the place. The east side doesn’t have a highway, and as near as we can tell is mostly undeveloped. The closest we got was the lookout above Waipio Valley on the east coast. (I’ll also explain why we didn’t get any closer than the lookout!)

These next few pictures are from a turnout up along the ridge of Kohala, looking south toward the coast and the bay.

Oh, yes, about that rain shadow? It explains why Hawaii puts rainbows on its license plates. With full-on rain right next to clear skies, rainbows are incredibly common. Here in southern California we hardly ever see rainbows. I don’t think a day passed in Hawaii that we didn’t see one!

Oh, yeah, rental car trivia: Because Hertz was backed up so badly (Four flights arrived at once, and even spread across several rental agencies, it kept us in line for about an hour), they handed us the first car they had available instead of waiting to get the economy car I’d reserved. They gave us a Buick LeSabre. While it has a lot of nice features, it tries too hard to be a “smart” car. If it can be done automatically, it’ll do it. Light sensors trigger the headlights, moisture sensors trigger the windshield wipers, the air conditioning and heater are handled thermostat-style. If you want to do things on your own terms, you can’t. Definitely not the right car for a Linux user.

One last photo for today. Our first time up this coast we noticed some rather sharply defined dark cloud banks, one out to sea and one across the bay. As we drove north, one of them resolved into the mountain of Kohala, which left us wondering whether the other one might be the next island over. It turns out that yes, you can see Maui from here. Between clouds and haze we never got a clear view, but we at least managed to get a better view than that first day:

Note: Most of these photos were taken on Wednesday, April 6, 2005. A few were earlier or later in that week.

On our first full day, we just headed south to see what we could find. We randomly turned down Napo‘opo‘o Road, which while acceptable by rental-car standards, was a very winding road with lots of drop-offs. The road leads to Kaleakekua Bay, a major kayak launching point, where we stopped and got a view across the bay.

This shot quickly became my new desktop background on the laptop. Way off to the left (not visible in this photo) is the obelisk marking the spot where Captain Cook was killed by Hawaiians in 1779. Right by the road are the remains of the Hikiau Heiau (a heiau is a Hawaiian temple), where Cook read the burial rites for one of his sailors.

According to guidebooks, this was also the site of Napo‘opo‘o Beach until Hurricane ‘Iniki washed away all the sand in 1992.

Back closer to town, there’s a great scenic point off of Kamehameha III road (which connects Ali‘i drive along the coast to Highway 11 a few miles in and up). We caught a sunset here the first evening, and we stopped by to check out the city lights (such as they were) on the drive back from Volcano and interrupted a couple having a midnight rendezvous.

There are a lot of great views along the shoreline in Kailua itself. At one point we stopped in Hale Hulawai Park, and I caught these photos of Oneo Bay and Kailua Bay:

This is a view from the Kailua pier. The water’s so clear you can actually see features beneath it. I’m not sure exactly what the park is, but it’s next to the ‘Ahu‘ena Heiau, which was apparently King Kamehameha’s personal heiau dedicated to the god Lono—yes, the one Captain Cook was mistaken for when he showed up.

Edit: And here’s the heiau:

We didn’t actually make it to any of the historical sites in town. Something for the next trip, whenever it may be…

These photos were taken from April 4-6, 2005

After coffee companies stopped using donkeys for transportation, they turned them loose, and a herd of wild donkeys roamed the fields. They apparently picked up the nickname “Kona nightingales” from their, uh, “singing.” They’ve since been moved up to greener—and less traveled— pastures on the lower slopes of Mauna Kea, but the signs remain.

One can only assume the Kona nightingales were the inspiration for Surfin’ Ass Coffee Company and their signature island confection:

For the record: 1-inch macadamia nuts dipped in chocolate.

We stayed in Kailua-Kona, and ended up spending most of our time on that side of the island. Part of it was that, since it was basically a long-delayed honeymoon, we figured we’d splurge on a few tours. So one morning was taken up by a submarine tour through the bay outside Kona, an afternoon was taken up by a whale watching cruise on a catamaran, and an entire afternoon and evening was spent on a trip to the Mauna Kea summit.

Highly recommended guidebook: Hawaii: The Big Island Revealed. It’s written by people who actually live on the islands and just explore them constantly, and they have a very engaging style that will have you reading sections about places you aren’t even planning to go.

We did decide that if we were to stay in Kona again, we’d try to stay closer to town. While the Keauhou Beach Resort has a lot on its grounds—a restaurant, tide pools with sea turtles, a beach, some shops, and even a couple of historical sites including some heiau (temple) ruins—it was too far from Kailua proper. Kailua-Kona (the names seem to be interchangable) is a classic beach town—only in Hawaii—and parking is cramped, expensive, and limited, so you want to walk as much as possible without having to get back to the lot and move your car every two hours.

We didn’t get to see much of the Hilo side, partly because of the tours, and partly because we got back so late from Volcano National Park one night that we couldn’t wake up in time to go anywhere the next day. (Tip: Drive to Volcano Village, fill up the tank, and then enter the park. Otherwise you’ll be searching for an open gas station in the middle of the night, and there really isn’t much between Volcano and Kona, unless it’s off the main highway.)

Diner: I was here thirty years ago and had the best beer I’ve ever tasted, anywhere in the world. <pause> This is the worst.

Waiter: I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do anything about that. It’s Budweiser.