A Really Big Island

I've recently returned from Hawaii with my friends C and D, where we celebrated C's milestone birthday.

What struck me about the Big Island of Hawaii is just how diverse it is and how different from the other two islands I'd visited, Oahu and Maui. We landed at the Kona airport and since I had an aisle seat, I didn't notice the landscape until after we'd grabbed the rental car and were driving to our condo.

That's when I realized it was DARK outside and not just because there were no streetlights on the main highway. We could see that as we looked up to our right (going up the side of the volcano/mountain) there were lots of houses but there was nothing along the side of the road. The next morning we realized why: it's all lava. Tons of broken up lava chunks, some ground up, but mostly in very large slabs, are all along the side of the highway up & down the western coast of the Big Island.

We were amused at the graffitti that decorated the lava. Unlike permanent spray paint, here the stark brown-black of the lava is adorned with white rocks. That's great because if someone writes something offensive, it can easily be dismantled and changed to something entirely different. None of the graffitti permanent that way. Very clever, we thought.

We stayed at some condos in Waikola, which is north of the Kona airport and the town of Kailua Kona itself. It was very quiet there, lots of hotel resorts & condos, not really much to do but that was fine. Kailua Kona was only about 15-20 minutes away. We were very close to Anaehoomalu Bay (aka A-Bay, for obvious reasons) and it suited us perfectly. It had some shade, some sun and down in front of the Marriott it had lounge chairs. One advantage of going in late October is there are no crowds and we had our pick of places to sit. There was a reef that made getting in & out of the bay a little tricky since I'd forgotten my water shoes, but I managed not to scrape up my feet.

One day while we were there a seal had beached herself. The speculation was that she would soon give birth, but of course she didn't do that while we were around. We also saw several sea turtles on shore that day. We kept our distance but I would have loved to have gotten up closer to them.

Our condo backed onto a golf course so it was all lovely and green on our property with the stark contrast of the lava fields on either side of the main highway. We drove up the NW side of the island one day and the further north we drove, the more the lava fields disappeared and the more we saw traditional yards & houses. We'd gone north in search of a different beach, just for variety's sake, but it seemed to be more cliffs where the lava had run down to the sea, so we ended up back at A-Bay.

Next, the town of Kailua Kona and Volcanoes National Park.