Hawaii 2014, Part 2: Big Island

The second week of our Hawaii stay was on the Big Island (Hawai'i), where we were joined by one of Ken's former work colleagues, Mary, from California. This week felt a little more laid back, as the Big Island is, well, bigger than Maui and not nearly as overrun with tourists and local population (read: much less traffic). There are also fewer beaches than on Maui, making it less of a destination spot. We stayed in Keauhou, just south of Kona-Kialua, on the drier western side of the island.

Mary, co-conspirator and adventurer

The condo rental here was also right in front of the water, but in a gated "surf and tennis" resort that was a lot quieter and more pleasant overall than our place on Maui. We had just a short walk to a grocery store, and another brief walk to small Keauhou Bay, a popular put-out point for outrigger canoes, kayaks, and a manta-ray tour that Mary and I took (more on that later). There were also lots of colorful songbirds all over the grounds. Mary was able to entice many of them to our seawall with bread crumbs and potato chips.

Tidepools were a short walk from the condo. Ken has spotted a bright yellow-and-white striped butterfly fish.

 

Saffron finch

Yellow-billed cardinals

Java finch

Common myna (noisy, noisy and everywhere in groups) and zebra dove

 

I have no idea if this rock near Keauhou Bay is natural or was deliberately sliced off at some time in its life, but it sure looked like a big turtle face to me. (Ken is posing for scale.)

A shy gecko, spotted on a morning walk.

A visit to a farmers market snagged us a pile of fresh passion fruit, papaya, ahi, avocados the size of cannonballs, locally baked bread, and other yummies to get us through the week (supplemented by grocery stores for standard supplies).

Our condo owners provided a lovely basket of fruit, the centerpiece of which became part of a still-life montage before it gave up its sweet juice and pulp to afternoon snacks.

Goofing around with a tiki mask we took down from the condo wall.

Mr. Tiki has had a little too much of the Maui Splash.

Our drives once again took us all over the island, most notably to Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park, Akaka Falls State Park, Pu'uhonua National Historical Park, along roads skirting rocky, inaccessible shoreline or carving through crusty black lava fields, and to a few off-the-beaten-track factory and farm tours.

Getting to the latter often meant winding through narrow, overgrown residential roads that looked like they would dead-end in someone's backyard ravine. Then, boom, you're at a local macadamia nut factory, a bee farm, or a one-acre organic coffee farm. (Kona is known for its coffee, and there are about 600 small farms in a very small 30x1-mile area. Every coffee bean is hand-picked here, which makes 100% of the stuff both uncommon and pricey.) We also tried for a chocolate factory that was just up the road from the condo, but they were closed even during their posted hours.

A fraction of the nuts that Hamakua Macadamia Nut Factory handles each day.

Interactive mac. Crack and eat your own. It takes a vise to break these puppies open.

Making macadamia brittle is a two-person job, done on a marble slab so the hot toffee cools quickly.

Our tour guide, John, pulled out tray after tray of bees from the display hives at Big Island Bees to show us the various stages of honey production. We're behind a screen, and he brought the trays to us for closeup views of the busy bees.

Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park. Lots of hot action way down in the crater. Access to the edge is off limits right now, but people in Twain's time could walk among lava spews.

Closer view of the same crater.

The national park has a lava tube big enough to walk through. It's 1/3 mile, well lit, and very damp. It also fits so well into the rainforest above us that it wasn't discovered (at least by non-native Hawai'ians) until 1913.

Remember I said that nature doesn't do anything small in Hawaii? This fern is a typical specimen.

The hapu'u pulu fern makes big pelts of warm fuzzies (pulu) on its trunk (you might too, if you had a name like that). In the 1800s, local entrepreneurs tried shipping it out as a replacement for pillow and mattress filler, but the stuff disintegrated too easily. Touching it was like petting a llama.

Part of the national park rainforest.

Sugar cane growing on the roadside. The fronds were silvery in the sun. Sugar cane is actually an over-achieving grass, and the fronds are the same kind of plumes you typically see on grass in bloom...just two feet, instead of two inches, long.

Ken used the car key to try to get us a sample of cane to taste. It wasn't very fresh and was at the woody end of the stalk, so it didn't have much sugar.

Akaka Falls, a state park we stumbled upon on a wander drive one day. Thanks to mobile internet access, we looked it up while driving and found out it was worth the stop.

A rare duo photo, care of Mary.

The state park had a half-hour meander through a rainforest that went up, down, and over a creek's ravine, through towering bamboo stands, gnarly root-bound trees, and verdant foliage everywhere we turned.

Bananas ripening on the stalk. Those evil-looking tentacles with the cones on their ends are its flowers. They're edible but apparently not tasty enough to have caught on as part of the current "eat local" culinary craze.

I wanted to take so many of these home...

This plant seems to be creating its own beaded necklaces.

Some kind of orchid, I think.

A young fern starts out.

Ken practices his GQ look at a shore-side stop.

I couldn't tell if this guy was alive or just a shell, but he was pretty.

Ancient lava flows meet sea. There are parts of the central island where all you see are coarse expanses of lava like this on either side of the road.

Mr. Tiki's great-great-grandpa at Pu'uhonua ("place of refuge") National Historical Park.

A city in the clouds? Nope. That's the sun from behind us glinting off a cluster of 15+ observatories at the top of Maunakea, the island's highest mountain at 14,000 feet. The top has the highest number of clear skies year-round than almost any other place on the planet, so is an optimal place to build a bunch of ginormous telescopes for scientific study. Prevailing winds and the area's topography mean that clouds very rarely actually cap the mountain, even though they'll often encase the rest of it as here. We drove to the visitor center at 9,000 feet and couldn't go further because our wussy van rental wouldn't have handled the steep, unpaved, four-wheel drive road to the top very well.

It's December, which of course means Christmas wherever you go. The Hawaiian background music we would typically hear at every public venue (yay) was mostly supplanted by strains of "Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer," "Silver Bells," and other holiday tunes endlessly repeated in classic and contemporary renditions (boo). Santa images abounded (often wearing shorts and riding a surfboard), and most tourist shops had at least one artificial Christmas tree packed with ornaments for sale.

Mary had brought Ken a T-shirt advertising her brother's surfing-related business. We made sure to have him model it on several occasions, so she could send photos to her brother. Ken got very good at those GQ poses, but I think Mannequin Santa stole the scene at the Sheraton photo shoot.

Santa shares a shaved ice with us on a hot day. 

The condo supplied snorkels and masks, so Mary and I did that a couple of times. I preferred staying in the shallows, since I'm still new to this sport and not confident about ocean-swimming without fins or vest. I found plenty of colorful tropical fish to float around with at the reefs, though; it was rather like swimming in an aquarium. At one boat-ramp bay, a 3-foot wide sea turtle hung out with us a bit...swimming toward shore then out a couple of times. One time it was upon us so quickly that it whacked Mary on the leg with a flipper before we had noticed it.

The highlight of the trip for Mary and me was a night-time snorkel with manta rays, care of Eka Canoe Adventures. Ken gets horribly seasick so didn't join us. Fortunately, the sea was very calm that evening, and our boat needed to motor only 5 minutes to get to the manta feeding area in the bay near the Sheraton Resort. This spot is popular with mantas and therefore draws several snorkeling tours each evening. The trick to viewing them is to use lights to attract the plankton that mantas eat, which in turn attracts the mantas themselves.

Two boats doing night snorkels with mantas. The one on the left has its guests already in the water. The one on the right is from Eka Canoe Adventures, the tour Mary and I took two nights later. Other boats accommodated 40 guests or more, making for shorter water visits for each person.

Our small tour boat maxed out at six guests, and we had only four that evening, including two 20-something gals from Canada. There was a two-person crew, one to steer the boat and the other to get into the water with us and talk about mantas while they spiraled beneath us feeding.

These guys are big...easily 8-10 feet across on average, and one (Big Bertha, a no-show at our spot that night) measures 16 feet wide. They are harmless to people, with no stingers or teeth, but it's still startling to have a cavernous, 2- to 3-foot wide gullet coming at your face.

We all floated straight out on the surface of the water, hanging onto ropes attached to a surfboard that had LEDs under it to light the area. We stayed there for 40 minutes while up to seven of these big beautiful creatures spiraled gracefully up and down along a 25-foot deep "feeding column." They'd swim upside down, right-side up, swirl around us and each other, do a corkscrew ballet, and sometimes bump us with their bellies or fins. Two very recognizable females were Lefty and Righty. (You can see these and about 200 other Hawaii mantas at the Manta Pacific Research Foundation.)

Below is a video one of the Canadians took and kindly provided us. It's good, but doesn't quite do justice to the experience of having a mottled expanse of manta-ray underbelly suddenly obscure your vision and then somersault inches beneath your nose. I am now hooked on snorkeling.

Our last day out, while wandering the tourist main drag of Kona-Kialua, we spotted more than 20 spinner dolphins jumping and twirling very close to the local dock. We watched their antics for a good half hour, too far away to photograph with only cellphones, but wonderful to ooh and aah over.

The Eka Canoe sails toward her nightly manta-snorkel trip during one of our last sunsets of the week.