Big Island Fun!

*Disclaimer* Due to shenanigans this blog has been hijacked by Stephen. Please be aware that you will have to read in two different voices. Deanna is normal type, Stephen in italics. If you do not know what we sound like, the normal type will sound like a girl, the italics like a dorky guy.

Aloha again!

We are late again on the update because work gave me a long weekend, and we took advantage of it!  We decided to make our first island hop and go to the Big Island of Hawai'i for 3 1/2 days.

It started with a bang.  On Thursday afternoon, Stephen finally decided that he needed to make the rental car reservation, and when he looked up the flight to confirm what time we were getting in, he realized he booked the flight for the wrong day.  We'd already reserved our room through AirBnB and already reserved a spot for a helicopter ride on Saturday afternoon, and lo and behold, Stephen had accidentally reserved our flight for Saturday night.  When he tried to switch online, there were NO options available, so he ended up calling the airline and getting us switched.

So, in my defense.. I am pretty stupid most the time... Oh, hi there! This is the husband you know as Stephen. You know, that witty, dork-ishly handsome character who blogs from time to time and you see doing all the cool snorkeling. I'm going to invade the blog here as I see fit. Because, I can. So, yes, I jacked up the travel plans. Yes, in order to fix said plans, the ONLY flights available (well, not ONLY, I could have flown a little later in the day for extra $$$.. but I also could have flown even EARLIER for less $$) were the following..

Stephen flew out at 6:30am.

I flew out at 6:30pm.

So, since I had to fly out sooner, I enjoyed a
nice little brekkie all by my lonesome at the
Lava Java cafe. Of course I also got an obligatory
Kona Coffee!

The 4:30am wake-up call to get him to the airport on time was awesome.  So was the workday that followed.  I was so tired by the time we got there that it was physically painful, and we had to get up at a reasonable hour the next day.

All the yellow tangs are at the Big Island
heck, even the trumpetfish think they
are yellow tangs!

But all crying aside, Stephen managed to check out the good snorkel spots on the Kona coast before he picked me up.  Our bed and breakfast reservation was in Captain Cook, HI, a place that got props from me for being as far away from everything as humanly possible.  Want to go to Hilo?  Two hours.  Want to go to the national park?  Two hours.

Some stupid selfie I took when solo
snorkeling Honaunau Bay

Beautiful Hawaiian cleaner wrasse!

It wasn't even really a town.  There was a highway and some side-streets, and our place was on one of them.

The simplest answer to the never asked question of "why did you book a place that is so far from everything?" IS.... Because it was close to the snorkeling! Look, priorities are priorities. Also, staying in Hilo would have been lame, and staying in Volcano village would have been.. well, maybe fairly cool (or hot?, insert bad lava joke).. but NOT CLOSE TO SNORKELZZ!

It was super-cute.  The bed was comfortable, and the sheets were soft and smelled like dryer sheets instead of crunchy chemicals.  The whole place was clean.  It consisted of three bedrooms built on the front of someone's house and was originally designed to be an old-folks home, so the doors were sliding and super-wide and the shower was cavernous.  We got free breakfast the first two days, but plenty of dishes, utensils, and cooking devices were provided so we could cook for ourselves.  There was a common area inside, and there was an outdoor dining area with hotplates, pots and pans, and a refrigerator.  The other two rooms were occupied by a couple from California and one from Germany.

I got woken up at 6:15 the next morning (and the next, and the next) by a chorus of roosters crowing.  Sure, there was the one rooster right outside our window, but then there were all the other roosters along the Kona coast, all of them crowing at 6:15am.  Honestly, it made me laugh, and then I went back to sleep.

A glorious chorus of roosters! From 6:15 until past 7:30 they cock-a-doodle-doo'd their faces off.

Deanna getting prepped for the Helicopter
ride, the stink eye is for me.. I probably did
something or looked at her funny.

Mauna Loa!

Breakfast was yogurt, fresh hardboiled eggs, bagels and muffins with lilikoi butter, and tons of fresh fruit.  They have a
banana tree in their back yard, so there was always a plate full of tree-ripened bananas.  I might have eaten at least two a day.  They provided us with Kona coffee, of course, but since the only coffee machines were Keurigs, we always had a cup at the B&B and then at least another cup from an actual coffeehouse.

Deanna enters the craft!

There were no restaurants in the area, but there were coffee stops.

So that first day, Saturday, we drove the 2+ hours to Hilo so we could do our helicopter tour.  We got lunch and ice cream beforehand and then waited around at the airport.  And waited.  And waited.  They had a movie for us about volcanoes and hula, which was kind of cool, but it took 45 minutes for someone to come talk to us.  It turned out they were delayed that morning, and then right before us, an 11-year-old girl spewed her lunch, breakfast, and probably everything she ate the previous day all over the helicopter, so they were delayed cleaning it up.

I shouldn't be allowed to have a camera!

Thankfully, this chopper doesn't smell like vomit!

The wait at the Hilo airport was kind of a drag.. but sometimes kids just vomit I guess. That being said, the helicopter ride was well worth the wait. The door-less ride was cool, especially when we actually were over the lava flow and could feel some of the heat. However, there were a few moments where I think we were both done squinting. I mean, literally, I was done feeling my eyelashes blowing in the wind. (I didn't even know my eyelashes COULD blow in the wind That being said, I think we are both glad we did it. Just one of those things that was too unique an experience to pass up. Also, our pilot had an awesome New Zealand accent (cause he was from there of course) so that just made the experience even neater!

Pele's hair (type of lava flow that occurs with wind and stuff)

Cheezin' while we soar through the air

Puʻu ʻŌʻō crater

The shinier and more silver the lava, the fresher

So yeah, know where your puke-bags are, and if you gotta spew, TELL SOMEONE!

Apparently the parents also did nothing to help clean up the mess.  They just stood and watched.  Okay, maybe there was nothing they could do, but at least have the courtesy to offer your help.

A lava breakout!

We finally got to take off around 2:30, and it was worth it!  There was a lot of wind, of course, but we got to fly right over the smoking cauldera and got the smallest glimpse of a little bit of flowing lava.  There wasn't very much activity going on.  Oh well.  Still, the pilot showed us the differences between a'a and pahoehoe lava, and then showed us how to tell which were the fresh lava flows.  We could see the glowing red from huge fissures in the dried lava, and then toward the end, we finally spotted a little bit of lava flow.  Since we had no doors, we could feel the heat even from our safe helicopter distance.  It was very cool!

We also got to see some waterfalls.  Not bad for a 45-minute ride.

Picture with the pilot

Tried to take a selfie in front of a steam vent.

When we were done, we were going to scope out Hilo, but for the hour that we had lunch there, we realized there was nothing to scope out.  The girl who was prepping us for the helicopter flight had mentioned that if you go to Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park in the evening, they have a restaurant where you can go and see the glow from Kilauea Cauldera after dark.  We decided to do that.

Steam vents just outside the Kilauea caldera

Sulfur oxide turns things yellow!

The smoking gun! er.. crater

So we headed down from Hilo, found the visitors center, and walked along the Crater Rim Trail until we decided we were hungry enough for dinner.  We called the Volcano House, and they had reservations for 6, 6:15, or 8.  There was NO WAY we were waiting until 8 to eat, so we said 6:15, realized we had about a half hour to 45 minutes, and kinda hoofed it back.

The food at Volcano House is good enough, although overpriced, but you're paying for the view and the view is worth it.  So worth it!  I mean, seeing Kilauea Cauldera was awesome, but holy cow the red glow!  There were clouds overhead, and the red was reflecting off the clouds.  It was surreal!

All the glow at night

Sadly, the cameras (all of them, including the smart phones) really really struggled to capture the amazing glow of the crater. I guess a glowing lake of lava at night is just too amaze-balls for a camera to truly capture in its entirety. Le sigh. Probably more likely, that's the difference between a professional camera and a solid but not professional digital camera. Still, our camera takes some pretty great pictures of da fishies! 

The crater was very cool. The drive back was long and tiring.

The drive back was another two hours, so we stopped along the road for a few minutes to check out the stars.  It was pretty close to being black, but there was some light pollution coming from somewhere.  Still, I could see better depth to the sky than I've seen in a long time.

The next day, we decided that we needed to have a "relaxing" day that didn't involve 4 hours round-trip of driving to and from the park.  We were going to go snorkeling, but it was cloudy and chilly, so as we sought out coffee, we ran across a plantation only about 5 minutes north of us that did plantation tours.  I'd told Stephen I wanted to do a plantation tour, so we just pulled in to see what would happen.

It was actually 11 carafes, but who's counting?

They had 8-10 different carafes of Kona coffee waiting for us to sample.




OMG

These are the original trees planted on the farm
some 100+ years ago! AKA "Grandma trees"

Another couple was already there, and then a fifth person joined us, and we started the tour.  The guide told us a little bit about the history of the island, how it's the youngest of the chain, and how its soil is so rich that pretty much anything will grow here.  If I remember from her talk correctly, Queen Lili'uokalani was touring around Europe and the Americas and received a bunch of plants to bring back and see what grew in Hawai'i.  The coffee plants, along with pretty much everything else, did really well in the climate.  They don't need to use irrigation because it rains enough on the Kona coast, and the clouds actually provide enough shade.  The plants grow from 800ft. to 3,000ft. above sea level there; any closer and it's too hot to grow coffee.  They're Arabica beans, but because the soil has a different composition, the coffee tastes different than the same plants in South America, where Kona coffee originally came from.  This particular farm also hand-picks their coffee berries, so they end up getting picked when they're the ripest (in fact, she said if any of us were interest in living on a coffee-farm for 8 months, they were hiring).  We got to look at the coffee plants, and she also gave us a quick look into how they peel the seeds, dry them, and grade them by size.  There's now a new drink out there called KonaRed, which is made from the coffeeberry fruit, and apparently someone capitalized on using the skin of the coffeeberry to make gluten-free flour.  Okay then.  And apparently in South America, they take the water they use to wash the sugar coating off the fruit and ferment it into alcohol, which the tour guide said was way more exciting than what they do here.

"This is what coffee beans look like"

Chameleon! In the citrus plants/trees. There
were actually quite a few of them.

When we were done, we got to drink a lot more coffee, and Stephen and I eventually decided to buy a small bag of their espresso roast.  They also have citrus trees all over the place, left over from the first Europeans who came and grew them to fight the scurvy they were all getting from ship travel.  They had oranges for us to munch on while we drank our coffee, and then on a bench they had a bunch of freshly-fallen avocados.  Each family could take one, so I took a nice big, something-other-than-Haas avocado.  It wasn't quite ready to eat, so it would wait for another day.

Initially, I was skeptical about enjoying the tour of the coffee farm. Of course, this has a lot more to do with my tendency to every now and then pull out the "stick-in-the-mud" card and play it, than any particular feeling about coffee farms or tours in general. Fortunately, despite my trepidation, the tour was informative and interesting. Let's be honest though, any tour that begins and ends with FREE Kona Coffee though, is going to be a win! This is what I should have realized from the onset. No one ever said I was smart... der...

Deanna preparing to enter via the "2-step" of 2-step beach
Actually slightly more difficult than it should be. Luckily
the surf was MUCH calmer this day than it was the first day
when I snorkeled there alone.

When we were done, the clouds had cleared up and it was time to snorkel.  We went to Honaunau and saw all the awesomeness!  This place made everything on O'ahu kind of sad looking, except maybe Hanauma Bay and Shark's Cove.  I got hungry quickly, though, so we went and got lunch and then decided to see if the snorkel spot in Kailua-Kona was any good.

Success! Now where my fishes at?

Cute li'l yellow tang

Diving down, trying to video all the fishes

So, there were two places that I went snorkeling on Friday. One was Kahalu'u Beach, which apparently is actually classified as a 'dead reef' due to way too much human activity. Certainly, it was not nearly as vibrant a reef. There were plenty of fish though and it was a pleasant snorkel. However, it's just a little beach/bay with an extremely strong current which pulls you out of the bay (or at least constantly tries to) and because of the size, sometimes it feels like there are more people than fish. And there are a lot of fish! So, you get the idea. 

Once again, I should not be allowed to have/own
a camera

2-step beach / Honaunau Bay, on the other hand, has extremely vibrant, beautiful coral, an equally varied and large number of fish, and the rumor of alleged spinner dolphin encounters. Unfortunately, we were not fortunate enough to encounter the lounging spinners (they reportedly come into the bay to relax after a busy evening of hunting), however, we saw many amazing sights which made for a wholly worthwhile experience. 2-step is now my new favorite place to snorkel.

Threadfin butterflyfish

Side-note: I have never seen so many yellow tangs in my life. Then I look it up and yes, the big island is where you see the most yellow tangs.. It's just where they live. Cool.

There was a street fair going on, so we decided to check it out.  What a mistake.  Kailua-Kona is like Virginia Beach.  Ugh.  Nothing but tourist garbage and bad restaurants.  I wonder what Kailua means, because at this point, I'm starting to wonder if it's an even more discreet word for "haole."

Pufferfish

FYI -- Kailua actually means "two seas" or "two currents."  I'm still pretty sure it also means haole.

All the Yellow Tangs

First eel of the day 

So, on "the town of Kailua-Kona"... when I first arrived, due to the aforementioned comedy of errors (aka - being a dummy), alone on Friday I drove through Kailua-Kona figuring I would check out the sights. Scout out the area basically, snorkel a little bit, then check into our BnB and later go pick up Deanna from the airport. Well, fortunately the snorkeling lived up to expectations (as I am sure the pictures more than indicate) because the town of Kailua-Kona was quite the let down. At least with Virginia Beach I get the impression that they unabashedly do not care what you think of the town. They just shamelessly throw street performers, stands for various tours, and marching drumlines at you at every street corner. Kailua-Kona is basically the exact same thing except for two distinct differences. It does not realize it, and it's much, much smaller.

The view of the ocean is pretty though... so there is that.

Lol, not sure if she is giving me stink eye,
but it sure looks like it!

Of course, I wasn't actually able to check into the BnB either. The only "post-flight" snafu of the whole trip. The couple who run the BnB were out of town. Actually, I believe the wife was on the mainland and the husband was probably just out of the house while I was hoping to check in and take a quick nap. Alas, small hiccup, which did not make much of a difference on our enjoyment of our trip.

We decided to go back and snorkel at Honaunau and experience more awesomeness, and then grabbed burgers at Annie's.

These are photos from our second trip to Honaunau. Included is a picture of the most nasty eel we have ever seen! Deanna actually saw him swimming from one reef to another! Note the large school of yellow tangs. Also, first time I have seen a pufferfish just swimming around in the open.

Raccoon Butterflyfish

Fisher's Angelfish

Big nasty eel.

Did you know... Queen Lili'uokalani decreed that the Big Island was going to be a farm island.  At least that's what the coffee tourguide told us.  So that's why it's all farmland.  The beef from Annie's was Big Island grass-fed beef, so that's why I ate it instead of insisting on fish.  It was good stuff!

On Monday, we did one more trek to Hawai'i Volancoes National Park.  We weren't getting free breakfast at the B&B anymore, so we decided to stop at a Kona Coffeehouse and Cafe on the way down.  Sure enough, they were closed on Monday.  Everything is closed on Monday, if it's not closed on Sunday.  What can I say, it's a farm town far enough removed from the tourist hell-hole of Kailua-Kona.  So we just kept driving.

Somewhere close to the southern-most part of the island, we saw a gas station and a market and decided to at least see if we could buy some trail mix.  The market turned out to be an actual grocery store, so we got trail mix and beef jerky.  There was a coffee place next to the gas station, so we walked in, and the heavens must have taken pity on our plight, because it was a whole little cafe that served breakfast and fresh Ka'u coffee (we were no longer in Kona territory).  We both had breakfast sandwiches, but what can I say, mine came with pesto!  Yum!

Lava tubes are big!

Just one of many selfies. This one was taken somewhere
in the Kilauea-Iki crater

When we got to the park, we immediately drove to the Thurston Lava Tube, hiked that, and then continued on to Kilauea Iki Trail.  We did the whole thing, which was nothing short of awesome!  Stephen and I have some reading to do about volcanoes and lava and the Hawaiian islands, because there were so many contrasting landscapes that I'm not even sure what was all going on.  At first, the crater floor is flat, and that makes sense because it used to be a lake of lava.  But once you get a little over halfway across, the terrain changes drastically.  Most of it looks like landslides from the sides of the crater caving in, but some of it also looked like enormous bubbles in the lava that cooled and hardened mid-rise.  The most amazing thing, though, was the plants that were growing in the cracks, trying to create life in such a desolate area.

Panorama!

Life always finds a way!

Just some cool looking hardened lava

More of the same, but different

To the coast! 

Petroglyphs. Can you find the turtle?

Finally made it to the coast

So, there's an island former south
of the big island
It should surface in 10,000+ years,
better start
buying that property up!

After that hike, we got into the car and drove down Chain of Craters Road, then walked the Pu'uloa Petroglyphs, and down to the coast.  The Pu'uloa Petroglyphs were neat, but it was a really warm day for the hike.  I had to wonder, who on earth landed on this desolate, barren wasteland of black lava, and decided it was a good place to try and build a civilization?  I mean, they had to build mounds out of lava rocks to preserve enough soil and water to grow their sweet potatoes.  They could've just gotten into their canoes and traveled farther north toward Hilo and gotten all the rain and soil to grow their sweet potatoes, but no, they decided to tough it out along the Puna coast.  Derp.  I'm sure they had their reasons.

Where's the new island?

We went all the way down to the coast, where we got to see a bunch of nene, and while we were watching the waves beat against the sheer lava cliff face, we saw whales splashing around.  At first, they were just spouting, and then we saw huge flippers waving around in the air and slapping the water.  So cool!  We stayed until we were pretty sure the whales weren't coming back.

Nene

Oh, hey there.. it's a whale.

Once we were done, we grabbed a quick bite at a dive in Volcano Village, and then we drove home.  On the way, we passed the road to South Point, which is just the southern-most point in the United States.  At first we passed it, and then I thought about it and said that since we may never get to the Big Island again, we should just go there to say we did it.

Nene's got an itch

It was 12 miles on a road that eventually became only one lane wide and just wound its way through flat, grassy farmland.  It was so desolate.  But when we got there, it was just about time for sunset, so we decided to walk our way over the lava rocks to the very edge and sit and watch.  Just as the sun finished setting, we saw another whale!   He was huge and close to shore!  He didn't do anything cool except be a whale swimming along the surface, but it was a whale!  In Hawai'i!  At sunset!

So.  Much.  Awesome!

Then we had to drive home again.  We were exhausted.

Sunset at the Southernmost point in the US, just before we started
watching the whale.

Still, we got up at a reasonable hour this morning to go snorkeling one last time at Honaunau.  My avocado was finally ripe, so we cut it open, mashed it up, and ate it with some cheese and a bagel that we saved from a previous B&B breakfast.  Hey, it was free!  I don't ever remember feeling so full from eating avocado before, but I was saying the same thing about the tree-ripened bananas -- I don't ever remember feeling so full from small bananas before.  We snorkeled for an hour, and I'll let the pictures tell the story.

This turtle was down way deep. Easily 20-25 feet, I could barely
dive down deep enough to get a decent picture. Also, couldn't get
all the blue out of the picture either. I maybe was able to dive down
15 feet to capture this one. (still working on being able to dive
deeper and for longer)

'nother eel

Just another school of Yellow Tangs

Juvenile Yellowtail Coris (a type of wrasse that looks nothing
like this)

Actually caught a glimpse of the Achilles Tang changing its
colors so the Hawaii Cleaner Wrasse can find and remove any
parasites. Totes cool.

Sometimes Long-nosed Butterflyfish turn black. Why? Cause
then they look awesome.

This guy was just nommin' before and after we snorkeled.
Just doing his thing, not caring about anything other than the noms

When we were done, we packed up and headed up to Kailua-Kona for lunch and a bit of touristy shopping before we hit the airport.  Oh, right, Kailua-Kona is a horrible, horrible, nasty tourist trap.  I was so over it.  Not fun.  I had good ice cream, and we bought chocolate-covered macadamia nuts that are amazing. (and they are called "Donkey Balls".. so there's that!)  But that's all.  We were so over it that we left for the airport early.

Still, it probably ranks as one of the best trips I've ever taken with Stephen.  There haven't been many yet, but we had so much fun that I already can't wait for our next chance to island hop.  Maybe next time I'll do a synopsis each day, because this was just way too much to fit into one blog post.  But until next time, mahalo for reading!