Beer with subtitles

There’s a couple of Irish guys outside, they’ve never seen a tangelo!

He hollers to the household before stepping outside to pick us some tangeloes (a cross between a tangerine and an orange). We’d called here after seeing an unmanned fruit stand advertising limes, grapefruit and tangeloes; we were most interested in whatever a tangelo was, however, and went looking for the owner. A few moments later we’ve seen his coffee plants, learnt he’d just eaten his last mango (damn) and marched off with an enormous bag of tangeloes. We’ve met nice people here.

The rest of the day was similiarly eventful; what started out as a coffee tour and then – when it became clear our tolerance for coffee wasn’t up to it – an aimless sight seeing tour of south Kailua-Kona:

• First stop is Kona Joe’s coffee farm (where the coffee is grown like wine!); Dr. Joe’s patented process trains the coffee plant to grow along a trellis, maximising exposure to light and freeing more space for coffee “berries”.
• A stop at Kealakekua Bay, where Captain Cook first landed in Hawaii and where he was later killed, in some sort of misunderstanding that has never really been entirely clarified. A monument to Cook is located a three kilometer hike away; we don’t bother taking it but do take some pictures of the Bay, regarded as one of the most scenic on the Big Island (when it’s not cloudy).
• A lady at Kona Pacific Farmers Cooperative points us towards Pu’uhonua O Honaunau (Place of Refuge), a former royal garden and place of refuge in times of war. This is a beach garden with royal family-era wooden buildings and tons and tons of coconut trees. Here I pick up Mark Twain’s “Letters from Hawaii”; we’ve seen quotes from this book at every single sight we’ve visited – he even stayed at Volcano House – and I’m keen to read the full thing.

  

  
  

• Lastly, we stop quickly at the Painted Church. It’s called so for the painted scenes on the wooden interior. Here we see another honour system-based stall, this one selling some nice hand-made souveneirs. It looks fantastic bathed in the evening light.

  

  

We leave Volcano House early bound for Kona, our final city of the holiday, where we hope to spend 3 or 4 days before the (long) flight home. Along the way, Highway 11 brings us past a couple of unusual natural features that might make up, in some small way, for the departure from Volcano National Park. First is Punalu’u Beach Park.

Punalu’u is a black sand beach, well known for its population of sea turtles…and its black sand. This is my first opportunity to experience a non-sandy coloured sandy beach. Before this morning it hadn’t even occurred to me that sand may not always be, well, sandy. It’s a very small beach and very crowded: a stall rents scuba diving gear and a horde of signs implore you not to bother the turtles while they’re “basking” (the turtles are okay – they will return to the sea when they want to!).

Though crowded, hardly anybody is actually here for the day: a line of coconut trees shelter a handful of sunbathers while a coach-load of holiday makers shuffle back onto their bus. We stroll up and down admiring the sight of it all while pondering the meaning of “turtle etiquette” but return before very long to the Highway 11 and what we hope will be the day’s real highlight: a green sand beach.

Legend has it that, in anticipation of their flights, the Apollo missions trained in this landscape, the closest to that of the moon on earth. I don’t know if that’s true or not but this is the most unusual landscape I’ve ever seen: a huge crater just a few kilometres in the distance in the ground belches out volcanic gas across a barren rock landscape before it wafts over Mauna Lea mountain/volcano. The air here, at over 3000ft, is the coldest we’ve yet felt on Hawaii; all around us, steam rises from every pore in the ground.

We’ve arrived at Volcano National Park, home to night-time lava flow watching, moon landscapes, observatories and the largest active volcano on earth, Mauna Lea. We stop by the visitor center to discover that the “crater rim trail” (an 11km drive around the smoking crater) is partially closed but that many of the other trails remain open.

On the way up to Jaggar Museum we pause to view the sulphur banks and get up close to the (scaldingly hot) steam emanating from the ground around. At the museum, we’re afforded a better view of the Kilauea Crater while the sun sets. Following that, a friendly park ranger has a telescope setup for some quick astronomy: we gaze at the moon and Saturn’s rings before driving back to the Volcano Lodge and a hearty meal in anticipation of tomorrow’s hikes.

We took an early afternoon flight from Honolulu to Hilo, on the “big island”; here, we’re promised scenic coastal roads, Kona coffee plantations and – most importantly – volcanoes, at Volcano National Park. If we’re very lucky, we’ll get some astronomy time in at Mauna Lea, too.

Once we’re landed, it’s amazing how quiet Hilo is: the airport (an international airport, allegedly) is deserted; our fellow ~40 passengers have quickly evaporated in the Big Island air, leaving us alone to travel out to Banyan Drive and our hotel.

The hotel, although in the midst of renovations (detailed on the front cover of the local paper), is very nice: a huge and bright open air reception area welcomes us before we check out the room and its “partial ocean view”. Outside the hotel, we can see all of Hilo Bay and that wedding preparations are underway. Later in the afternoon we spot an altar outside and witness a real-life Pacific island wedding. Not a bad way to go.

Before the evening is out we inspect “Uncle Billy’s General Store” next door to the hotel and an apparent one-off shop with an unlikely amount of own-brand goods, including t-shirts, bread and ice-cream. Afterwards, Uncle Billy’s Restaurant (he must own this town) provides local music to accompany an excellent seafood meal. On the way home, we notice the town is so quiet you can hear the local bird life singing at night – and it’s wonderful.

We’re not in Waikiki anymore!