Hawai'i - the Big Island

Evidently, you can be ‘in’ Hawaii on any island, but when you’re on Hawaii’s biggest island, you’re ‘on’ Hawaii. All a bit confusing.  With friends, Trevor and Michele MacHattie from Sooke (and the renowned Sooke Philharmonic) we arrived at the Kona airport, skimming over expanses of black gnarly lava before landing. We picked up our vehicle for the holiday… a red and black  4x4 hardtop Jeep Wrangler.  All set for any backroad.  And where did we go first? Costco. It's by all accounts the cheapest place to buy provisions for our rental house, including groceries, gin, wine and Mai Tai mix.
Our first rental house, found on the Vacation Rentals By Owner website, is called the Hula Girl? Okay,.. from the website we thought there were murals in every room depicting hula girls, and we had often seen murals of local themes in tropical hotel rooms.  So, turns out they're cheapo sarongs that you can buy at any roadside stand for $5 and they are tastefully stapled to the wall with big staples spaced 1mm apart.  Although we can see the ocean a fair distance from here, the surf sound is provided by the traffic on the highway below us. Once we made peace with the indoor ants, we moved outside to eat and drink -  very pleasant, with plumeria trees, hibiscus and palms, and in the morning several good birds in the untended yard.  A flock of Grey Francolins, a type of pheasant, forages through with zebra doves and cardinals.

Today we explored the northern end of the island. We took the interior road through Waimea and turned north on the Kohola Mountain Road. The road rides the side of the defunct Kohala volcano and divides the top of the island climatologically into arid and dry on the west, and wet and jungly on the east. Our drive took us through old lava flows and huge ranches, including the Parker Ranch, one of the largest in the U.S.  We didn't actually see any paniolos (cowboys) but we got a shot of a guy coaching polo at a high-tone (obviously, if they have polo fields) private school.  The advantage of limited vegetation is expansive views, and we could see the coast for miles. There’s also not much heavy cover for wildlife, like the flock of wild turkeys that  Michele spotted.  As we climbed to the sleepy little town of Kapa’au the vegetation changed to lush, green, and floral, and the weather turned cooler and misty.

 Polo coach

Wild turkeys

At the eastern end of the road is a look-out over black sand Pololu Beach with cliffs and green valleys beyond. The guidebook says the view is better from part way down the trail, so off we went, down the trail, taking photos all the way of the gorgeous black beach, high cliffs and islands beyond and lush steep mountain sides. Trevor picked a pocketful of pepper along the trail, straight from the pepper trees which he recognized from a trip to Turkey.  Little red berries that taste sweet at first, and then peppery when you chomp the seeds. The black sand beach was soft but we weren’t tempted to swim since we were already wet from the tropical downpour. That’s ok… the sun came up just in time to broil us on the way back up the trail…. And then the rain soaked us again before we could get back to the car! A warning….. Never do this trail in the rain. It gets very slippery.

BTW, you can click on these photos and they will enlarge.

 Picking peppers on the Pulolu Valley trail

 No shortage of warnings at the top of the trail

 These sketchy looking ropes held all four of us

  Along the river delta in the valley bottom

Big bird

Back at the top just before the rain started

 African Tulip Tree blossom 

Ice cream at Tropical Dreams in Hawi (they say ha-VEE) rewarded us for our efforts. Both Hawi and Kapa’au (cappa-OW!) are towns left over from earlier sugar-cane days. Now they’re full of little artsy shops and restaurants. The houses are wood and painted friendly colours, with gardens full of tropical plants and flowers. A surprise was seeing a number of huge old Indian banyan trees, one with a treehouse built into it.  Trevor and Mike avoided the gallery stop by walking up the road and buying some lychee nuts and rambutan from a couple of hawaiian babes.

(I'll put a picture of rambutan in later, when I find it)

The once powerful King Kamehameha was born in and ruled from this area, so one of the places we visited was the Mo’okini Heiau (temple). To get to it, our tough little jeep was put to the test. The road led down to the coast, and then 1 ½ miles along it on a sandy, rocky, potholed track.
The ‘temple’ is basically made of piles of lava stones, originally about 30 feet high, 250 feet long by 125 feet wide. The interior seemed to be divided into rooms. Legend has that it was built by the mythical Menehune people who formed lines of 18,000 of them to pass rocks from one to the other from Pololu 9 miles away. They did it in silence in one night…no tools and no dropping the rocks!
Basically the King and his priests liked to exercise their fearsome power and keep people in line by sacrificing Hawaiians to the gods on the stone out front of the temple. Thousands of people died at heiau (Hey-OW. On our visit no one died. In fact we were treated to a brilliant rainbow…a good sign that we’d make it back OK  along that wretched road.

We took in the sunset at Hapuna Beach…no green flash tonight - too many clouds at thr horizon.
The birding was pretty good on our first day…. Wild turkeys, Red Capped Cardinal, a flash of Nene (state bird), Zebra Dove, Grey Francolin, Chestnut Manakin, Saffron Finch, Black-Necked Stilt, Black-Crowned Night Heron, etc.

Sorting peppers on the lanai after dinner

Tomorrow, a beach visit then a long uphill road to Maun Kea Visitors' Center, international observatories and (hopefully the 13,000+ foot summit).