Day 10 of our vacation, and as I mentioned yesterday, it was time to leave the Big Island (Hawaii) and head off to the second island of our honeymoon: Kauai. We flew through Honolulu, past the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor, and then on to Lihue.
The island’s settlements are laid out a bit like a backward C…the West side of the island is entirely wild (and we’ll discuss later!), while the South, East and North are settled. We had decided to go to the northern part of the island for a couple of days, but before we headed North, we decided to check out Opaekae Falls. It was listed in all the guidebooks as a great waterfall, and we love our waterfalls. Apparently, it shows up in a bunch of movies and TV shows too, although mostly older stuff. It was worth a visit, although I was disappointed we couldn’t get a better direct view of it and with more water volume.
We headed up the East Coast of the island afterwards, grabbed some food somewhere along the way, as I recall, maybe Subway (I don’t know why that is sticking in my head), and made it to Princeville. We were staying in an AirBNB-equivalent style rental which was my first time doing so. It was a condo next to a golf course, a nice, simple structure for the two of us for a couple of nights. Princeville is the local “town” although more of a village. The terrain was mixed, with hills starting to show in the background and some flat agriculture. Felt very different from Big Island, more lush.
I’m including a postcard of the beach we went to called Ke’e Beach which is basically the end of the road when you go to the North West corner of the island. We didn’t get great shots the first day, mostly we just drove around to get the lay of the land, although we saw this really cool tree root system at the beach.
Later, as the sun started to set, we went to Hanalei Pier, which is on a large bay that was made famous in the movie South Pacific. It was a nice place to watch some of the sunset.
As a small spoiler alert, we were also starting to see the mountains of the island, and the forms that would occupy our attention later in the visit.
It’s hard to get a sense of the majesty of the place. But this postcard of the area shows what we starting to realize was an amazing island.
A busy day but we saw Pearl Harbor (from a distance), a waterfall, the pier, a nice beach, and an interesting sunset. Not a bad day overall.
Up until this point in our visit to Big Island, we had driven across the Northern part of the island, gone down the eastern coast to Hilo and explored the surrounding area, moved back along the southern coast to Black Sand Beach, and worked our way back up the western coast to Kona and the surrounding area. We had, in fact, gone around the whole island. We were starting to wind down our time on Big Island, and we wanted to do a few more things. First and foremost, we wanted a beach somewhere. And we wanted to see another waterfall, perhaps where we could go swimming.
For Day 9, we headed back to the northern coast. We booked an excursion with a local company that promised us views of Waimea Valley. It’s advertised as stunning in all the guidebooks, but when you look a little more closely, it is clear that there is a big limitation. The road down into the valley is super steep, and just as with limitations that you do not go to the top of the summit road, most car rentals are NOT rated for this hill. Heck, even hiking on the northern coast comes with multiple signs of a dangerous shorebreak, hazardous cliffs, strong currents, falling rocks, and even the dangers of monk seals on the shore.
The excursion started past the Valley, at a small office overlooking the ocean. Almost like a small cottage village, not the heavy loads of the rest of the island. Looked more like where locals might go, except for the entrances to golf courses and country clubs down the road. A short bus ride later, and we were hiking along an access road, before diverting onto a trail. It basically took us along the ridge of the valley, so you didn’t have to go all the way to the bottom and all the way back up. Fine with me. Some parts of the trail were pretty close to the edge of a long slide to the bottom. Not particularly dangerous, and Andrea and I had proper footwear for the hike. But still, a bit more rugged in places than what we had done earlier, before opening up into wider fields. The views were awesome.
There were lots of cool trees and canopies. The only real challenge in hiking was not to trip over really complex root systems.
Eventually, we got near the end of the valley to a waterfall. Most of the waterfalls in the area were not particularly “running” right then, a bit drier than normal, but we found a working waterfall and pond. And we got to swim.
After the swim, we headed back to the bus and then drove around a bit on our own to get pics of the entrance to the valley. I find it a bit odd on my Apple TV that there are a series of screensavers, one of which is a drone flying out of this valley towards the ocean.
I think I mentioned back on Day 1 that we found the Northern part of the Island kind of odd. While we expected lots of lush green tropical land, there are parts that are almost desert or tundra.
We had done our hike on the eastern side of Waimea Valley, and if you continued west past the valley (as per a shot above of the mouth of the valley), there’s a long unbroken coast. Quite spectacular and totally inaccessible. Well, mostly. You can go all the way around and come at it from the west, which is where there were all the signs about danger. Decent view, though.
We hiked part of the way down (the Pololu Trail), but it was a bit more rugged and tiring than I wanted. Instead, we headed across the rest of the northern coast and then down the western coast back towards Kona. Andrea really wanted a nice beach to visit but the views were pretty great along the way.
Eventually we came to one along the Kohalo Coast.
But we got to walk on a real beach with nice sand.
Unfortunately, we were still a fair distance from Kona, looking forward to a late dinner, and then we would leave this island the next day. We drove more across the northern and western coasts, and finally pulled over to watch a very nice sunset for our last night on Big Island.
Writing up the summary for Day 09, I realize that I have forgotten some stuff. I don’t have our travel diary handy, and I relied heavily on our pictures to remind me of the story. Some things I never covered:
On the day where I referenced the Ironman starting point, we drove up the side of the mountain into some smaller switchbacks and towns. There was an “artist” village where a bunch of local artists or mainland transports have set up little buildings and we could walk from store to store seeing some of their products.
Somewhere around Day 07, it was Andrea’s birthday and we went to a really nice restaurant a minute or two past the downtown strip for Kona so Andrea could have some good seafood. It was our second “outing” to get good seafood for her, with a previous attempt at Hilo. This one was far superior, no idea the name of the place, but we had a great dinner.
I’m sure there are other missing elements, some other meals we went for, or outings for supplies. I really didn’t want to leave Kona the next day. The fact we were moving on to another island took some of the sting out of it, but it remains the best vacation I’ve ever been on. I would love to retire there, or even just move there if we could do remote work across borders. 🙂
Day 8 in Hawaii started with a nice breakfast in “downtown” Kona. You can see the view from our simple hotel room, with distant cruise ships (I seem to recall they were leaving that day, not arriving), the pier going off to the left which is where we caught the lift to the submarine, a small lagoon sort of on the right halfway up which was for the hotel where the luau was, and then the back of the white and blue building to the left which is where we had breakfast, looking out over the ocean. If I recall correctly, somewhere slightly to the left is where the swimming portion starts for the Hawaii Ironman.
After breakfast, we headed South again, back towards where we went kayaking and snorkelling. There’s a site called the “Place of Refuge”, which has historical roots to people seeking political refuge there with a religious order taking care of them. However, while that in and of itself is noteworthy, I really just wanted to see the turtles.
Yes, turtles. When we were in Hilo, there were some sea turtles that swam around the bay by the hotel, which we had spotted while walking around. It seemed a bit surreal to me that these giant turtles just swam by. At the Place of Refuge, there are a lot of turtles nesting and mating in the area, so you can see them along the shore.
I know lots of people who have gone on African safaris, but I get excited just watching sea turtles. 🙂
For dinner, we drove a bit north to a small marina, and boarded a catamaran for a sunset dinner cruise. There were about 4-5 couples, I think, nothing big. And we chatted with the owners about the business. Like many in the Islands, they had originally gone to Hawaii on vacation, loved it, and eventually moved there. But, of course, they needed income, and so they decided to offer cruises. I found it a complete mystery to me, an area that I had never thought much about before, just assumed most people working in this area would “start fresh”. But just as the guy running the lava tube tour had “bought” the business, so too had this couple bought the boat and business together. Someone else started it and had it up and running, with a predictable cash flow, etc., and like any business, it could be sold to someone as a turnkey system. Which these people had done. I don’t know if they knew much about running a business like this, knew anything about boats, marine safety, weather conditions, etc.
But we had signed up for that day, so it obviously worked!
I don’t remember what we had for dinner, I remember some drinks and a bag of chips for snacks. I remember one of the other couples laying on a hammock strung across between the two runners of the catamaran. I have a vague recollection of the shape of the cabin, storage, a little kitchenette next to the helm.
But the big draw was the sunset on the water.
Part of me wishes we had a way better camera for that sunset. I think it was the first night I felt fully relaxed after the busy year up until and including the wedding. We had nowhere to be; nothing else we had to be doing. We were just chilling on a boat, sipping and noshing.
Day 7 in Hawaii and up to this point, we had barely done stuff in the ocean yet. Sure, we went to the hot springs near Hilo on the first day, and were around the Ocean a lot (or under, if you count the submarine), but we hadn’t really swam properly yet in the full ocean.
We headed south of Kona to a place near the Captain Cook monument, rented some kayaks, and headed across a bay. Once there, we used a simple disposable underwater camera and went snorkelling.
This first photo of the monument is NOT, as you can tell, one of our photos — it’s one of our souvenir postcards. But it shows well the general view above the surface. We parked our kayaks over to the side, as did a lot of people.
As you can see from this next photo, the bay is a bit sheltered, but not completely. We kayaked from about where the sailboats are shown docked at the bottom.
Ah, the fine art of complex photography with water still on the cover.
But we did get some shots of some of the fish…
The bottom of the ocean wasn’t exactly alive with colour, not surprising given the depth and the fact that a LOT of people come snorkelling here. I had some problems with my snorkel, and ended up almost feeling like I was being pounded against the rocks by the shore. I was trying to fix it, and some passing tourist group was yelling at me to get off the rocks. I felt like telling them to “F*** off, I’m trying to drown myself”, but I didn’t. I wasn’t there by choice, that’s for sure.
Later that night, we went to a very tourist-friendly luau at a hotel on the beach in “downtown” Kona. Yeah, it was kitsch, but well, it was our honeymoon. It was a fixed price, with free cheap pineapple juice and rum drinks. You could probably have drank a bucketful and not felt any effect of the alcohol, but it was fun, and the buffet was good. Roasted pork from the pig-in-the-ground was the highlight, of course.
They put on a full show for the tourists, making it seem like they were honouring their ancestors, of course, as most locations do. As an aside, it’s a bit interesting that some of the performers that “lead” the show actually are training to be professional actors, and isn’t a whole lot different for employment than being a character at Disney. They do their “show”, which includes both interacting in character and the performance and then disappearing back to their regular life. The highlight of the night was the fireeater although I confess I liked the early hula dance training as they explained what the hand gestures represented (casting nets, catching fish, etc.).
I found the day a bit tough with the kayak and snorkel, but in the end, it was a good day. Pleasant music, and then a short stroll back to our hotel.
Day 6 in Hawaii was fun as we were now in Kona, ready to start “phase II” of our honeymoon. We had finished with Hilo, and now we were going to explore all around Kona. I mentioned in a previous post that part of my desire for the trip was to experience events that I couldn’t do anywhere else…bucket list items, for example.
The first activity of the day was a submarine ride, cruising around the coast of the Island at about 100′ deep. It’s not exactly the Marianas Trench, but it’s a submarine nonetheless. Of course, it’s designed for tourists and capturing every rent-seeking dollar they can from you, which means they offered the obligatory memorable photo (selfies weren’t really a thing yet) before taking the Atlantis out to the submarine.
In reality, it’s a lot like an underwater bus with windows all the way along and a big glass dome cockpit.
Down the centre ran a long bench, and if there were enough people, they’d probably fill both sides. We weren’t exactly in high season, so you could swing from side to side, depending on which side had the better view.
I didn’t get great shots out the windows with our little point-and-shoot camera, but enough to show fish, a boat wreck with anchor, etc.
It wasn’t as exciting as the helicopter tour previously, but it was fun. If I had one, I think I’d love to just go hang out with the sting rays.
After the morning submersion in the ocean, we went to explore some of the local flora. There was a botanical garden a short drive back towards Hilo, we’d passed it the day before on the way in, and we went to check out the trees, leaves, and flowers. You could wander around and see lots of things, even after a brief rain, but signage wasn’t extensive so hard to identify some of the plants.
Some of the leaves were incredible though. Definitely not Ontario.
We couldn’t identify most of the flowers either.
The submarine was a bucket list item, and I’d love to do it again. The botanical garden wasn’t as exciting as we had hoped, but pretty interesting still.
