More from Hawai'i

We arrived back in Kailua Kona Monday evening.  It’s a nice town, and clearly the real nerve center of the island.  If Hilo is the business end of things, and the Kohola Coast, where all of the best beaches and ritziest resorts are, then Kailua is sort of the center of actual life.  Along its seawall is Ali’i drive, which is bookended on one side by our hotel, the King Kam, and on the other, the Royal Kona hotel.  The thing to do as a tourist in Kona Town (see how I keep switching up what I call it? I’m just like a local now.) is to basically walk up and down Ali’i drive in the evenings, patronizing it’s same 20 shops and choosing which bar/restaurant at which to have a preprandials (a cool word referring to before-dinner drinks I learned from the Jesuits) and pupus (a cool word because it sounds like “poopoos,” which is funny by any measure), and which to have actual dinner.  There are many slight variations on a theme among these places, and the theme is: vaguely Polynesian seafood place serving mai tais, Kona brewing company beers, and grilled fresh caught ono, mahi mahi, and ahi tuna (delicious, mercury-riddled) at exorbitant rates.  It’s really hard to go that right or wrong with any of these places.  Since we were there for 7 nights, we became acquainted with most of them.  On the Monday at issue here, I think maybe we ate Huggo’s on the Rocks?  Nice beach vibe, good grilled ono, tasty mai tai…you know what?, I won’t belabor the thing you get the picture. 

On the way back we made a few of our customary fruitless stops at the boutiques. 

Now, from here on out, our days consisted of the following: wake up very early for some reason, hit the beach, come back and shower, go out for pupus and preprandials, then dinner, mull about at a few stores we’d already been in, then head back to the hotel for an early evening.  I hope I’m not coming across as being bored by this schedule, because frankly, it rules.

One of these places.  Kona Canoe Club?

On Tuesday morning, we were up and out by 7:00am because we wanted to get to Mauna Kea beach, and parking at this public beach is severely curtailed by the private resort which exploits the beach for its own gain and chokes off parking so as not to subject its clientele to the presence of the hoi polloi.  We did manage to get a spot, thanks to our very early arrival, and the beach didn’t disappoint.  A long white crescent of sand with manageable surf and a mostly sandy bottom?  Can do.  There’s also the resort’s chichi Hau Tree beach bar right on the sand.  We went there. What it lacked in true, ramshackle beach bar charm it made up for in price.  But the mai tai was on point.

The question of whether Manua Kea beach was superior to Hapuna beach got Erica and I thinking of what criteria is best to determine what makes a great beach just that.  Fastidious readers on the blog may remember when I detailed my city rating system.  Here’s the beach system:

Criterion 1: Sand

Is the sand white/light tan and finely ground?  Or is it course and dark (and thus hot)?  Is it wide enough to build sand castles without them being reclaimed by high tide?  Is it too wide (like the beach at Wildwood, NJ), so you have to take special transportation from the boardwalk to the waterline? 

Hapuna ranking: 7.5/10.  A nice, wide beach.  Pretty good sand quality here; light and fine, though not the ideal white white of the Caribbean. 

Muana Kea ranking: 7.5/10.  Ditto, though not quite as wide.

Greatest in my experience:   Bay on St. John; Seven Mile Beach on Grand Cayman.  Superfine, super white sand in abundance.  Enough to make you want to make sand angels. 

Worst in my experience: Butterfly Beach, Santa Barbara, CA.  A supposedly lovely beach that is in reality comically narrow and covered with rotting, flea-covered sea detritus.  Blech.

Criterion 2: Accessibility

Is it easy to get to?  I don’t mean, is it in a foreign country or on a faraway island? (not the beach’s fault), but rather, can you park at it?  Is it a long walk carrying all of your chairs and umbrellas and coolers?  Is some greedy resort squatting on the beach trying to block public access to it?

Hapuna ranking: 8.5/10.  Parking is up a steep hill, but it’s there a plenty.

Muana Kea ranking: 2/10.  Manua Kea resort doing its best to deny you access to the beautiful beach. 

Greatest in my experience: Stone Harbor, NJ.  Plenty of parking to be had.  Just drive on up, hop the dune with your gear, and you’re on a great, wide beach.

Criterion 3: Availability

How much of the year can you swim comfortably there?  Are there seasons when high surf strips the sand right off the beach, making even the frolicking of landlubbers impossible?

Hapuna Ranking: 9/10, presumably.  Water temp is great even around Christmastime.  Winter waves might make swimming too hazardous, though.

Manua Kea: Same, since it’s just a mile up the coast.

Greatest in my experience:  Rainbow Beach, St. Croix.  Crystal blue, amniotic waters all year around, while open enough to avoid the overwarm “bathtub” effect of more sheltered tropical bays (I am really nitpicking here).

Worst in my experience:  Hills Beach, Biddeford Pool, ME.  A picturesque New England beach whose waters are never quite warm enough to abide, even in August.  More of a tease than anything else, really.

Criterion 4: Swimability

This criterium encompasses several not-unrelated considerations: Is the surf consistently so puny or so rough that you don’t have any fun while in the water?  Does it have a sandy bottom, or do you risk getting bashed around on dangerous rocks or reefs?  Is it good for a particular water sport (surfing, bodysurfing, snorkeling) of your choosing?  I like to adjudge my beaches from a primarily bodysurfing perspective; you might have an alternative criterium.

Hapuna ranking: 8/10 (waves if anything can be too big when the surf’s up; great snorkeling)

Muana Kea ranking: 6.5/10 (great snorkeling, good sized waves, some annoying rocks underfoot)

Greatest in my experience: Cocoa Beach, FL. Just miles of sandy bottoms and enough surf to make things interesting. 

Worst in my experience: First Beach, Vancouver, BC.  Yes, the Great White North has beaches, but not destination beaches. The stagnant water here is filled with bits of trash and pulp.  Sand was coarse, to boooot. 

Criterion 5: Amenities

This isn’t so much about where the beach is, as what is at the beach, if you take my meaning.  For example, Atlantic City’s beach has miles of shops, restaurants, and casinos running alongside it, but they’re not really there as beach-related amenities.  On the other hand, Coney Island or Brighton, England are old-timey seashore destinations built up in concert with beachgoing. Waikiki’s kind of like this, too. Anyway, my primary interest here is great beach bars, not kitsch.  Also, bathrooms/showers/and changing rooms fit into this category, and are nice haves.  You’re welcome to disagree.

Hapuna ranking: 4/10: there’s really only the Three Frogs grill, which is way overpriced and doesn’t serve booze.  I recommend the “Killah Fish Tacos” for those who their small chunks of fish sticks lost in mounds of shredded cabbage.

Muana Kea ranking: 6.5/10. Better, because of the fancy Hau Tree bar, but you need plenty of sheckles to hang at that place all day.

Greatest in my experience: White Bay, Jost Van Dyke.  It’s all here: the Soggy Dollar, Setty’s One Love Bar, and Ivan’s Stress Free Bar--that’s a murderer’s row. Sadly ravaged by hurricanes this past fall, it remains to be seen whether it recovers its former glory.

Worst in my experience: Lots of beaches don't have any amenities, but how about: Punta Vaca Beach, Vieques, PR.  A tiny strip of beach with no amenities, it's showing up here because the poor water visibility ruined our expensive attempt to snorkel there one time.  Sure it's not fair, but this ain't your blog.  

Criterion 6: Ambiance

Finally, this nebulous criterion captures the overall feeling of being there.  Highly subjective, probably, at the upper echelons of competition, but clearly some beaches outshine others in living up to that a special beachy, I’m-at-rest-from-my-labors ideal.  Helpful if there’s shade palms and sea grape trees to string up a hammock or two.  Aesthetics a major plus, too.

Hapuna ranking: 8.5/10.  Feel the aloha.

Muana Kea ranking: 8/10.  Lacks something of the community feel with the resort right there, but it does have some nice shade trees when the sun becomes a little too much to bear. 

Greatest in my experience: White Bay, again.  The backdrop of the BVI and USVI’s sticking up out of the clear blue water across the strait, free hammocks to use at the Soggy Dollar, raggae playing softly in all the bars.  Man, just get me there.

Worst in my experience: This seems especially hurtful to rank any beach here, but I’m going to go with Galveston, TX.  Tankers in the gulf, and oil welling up between your toes on the beach itself.  No thanks, it’s only 6 more hours in the station wagon to South Padre Island.

So, to tab it all up, Hapuna takes the cake over Manua Kea.  We did also spend Wednesday afternoon at Waikaloa Beach, just south of Hapuna.  It was a pretty, albeit rocky beach with lots of trees growing at horizontal angles to the beach, which was cool.  Swimming was made difficult due to the lava rocks lurking in the surf, and the vegetation on the beach meant little bits of organic dross floating atop the water.  Glad we went, because we got to mix it up, and since it was a hot day, it was nice to have the shade available, but overall I’ll take my Hapuna.

Waikaloa beach.  Still better than 99.9% of other places to be.

Ok, this post is way long now, so I’ll finish the trip report up later.

More from the Big Island

Saturday was a big day because Loyola--little Loyola Chicago--was playing in the Final Four.  Now, normally, we wouldn't give a fig about the tournament at this point, but it's Loyola, and I'm an alum.  Mostly, my alumni sports energy is spent on Notre Dame, as it should be, but here I have a team to which I have a legitimate graduate connection playing in the Final Four--yes, we have to make room for it in the itinerary.

So, we hung tight at our little, teeny beach here at the hotel, and snorkeled in the morning.  And boy howdy, did this little, teeny corner of heaven not disappoint.  Right off the beach we ran into liberally-colored reef fish of a hundred different varieties, and even a few spooky-looking long ago jettisoned anchors and other boat parts to complete the scene.  Nice work, Kona!

At gametime, we walked down Ali'i Drive along the sea wall to Laverne's, an upstairs sports bar with open views of our little bay.  Most of the folks in the bar were cheering for the underdog, which was nice, including a family whose awkward son will be a freshman at Loyola in the fall.  Also, we were playing Michigan, and all right-thinking persons of the world ought to have been resolutely set against Michigan winning so much as a dollar scratch-off lotto ticket, nevermind a final four basketball game.  Alas, we lost, which was a terrible bummer, though it did free our Monday up from having to carve out more vacation time for sports.

After the game, we basically just vegged at the pool, which was great.  The Big Island Revealed guidebook lauds our pool bar for having cheap drinks, so I took them up on that for awhile, then we went to dinner at the fab Kona Inn, a 1930s, koa wood drenched, formerly-very-upscale-but-now-just-kind-of-upscale restaurant right on the water.  The Ono was excellent, though Erica cautioned me about my mercury intake levels, which must at this point be just sky high.  

Sunday was Easter!  We celebrated with the fine parishioners and attendent tourists at the lovely St. Michael the Archangel church right on the main drag in Kona.  The church has sliding glass walls, and they all were open for the service.  Because of the overflow, we sat outside and looked into the sanctuary.  It was all very tropically wonderful.  

Afterwards, we headed out of town to Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park, a 96 mile drive from Kona along the outer fringes of the gargantuan Manua Loa volcano (the largest mountain on Earth, by volume of rock.)  During the drive, we kept track of the Notre Dame women's basketball team, who was playing Mississippi State in the national championship game, via phone updates (there was no available radio feed).  And consarnit, we won!  And in extremely unlikely and awesome circumstances, too.  Just as we had eliminated the perennially-undefeated UCONN in the national semifinal game on a last second miracle shot two days before, the same player hit an even more egregiously-unlikely, fade-away, last tenth-of-a-second three pointer to win the championship game.  Go you Irish.  The drive took forever, since you're not allowed to drive more than 50 miles an hour on this island, and the roads are all just two lane affairs, but we managed to get to the national park in enough time to hike the short Desolation Trail, which traverses a former forest struck dead by an unexpected lava shower in the late 1950s.  Check it:

The Desolation Trail. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. 

Me just slightly off the aforementioned trail.  Now that's what I call desolation!

We then drove around to the Jaggar Volcano Museum (no relation to Mick), and checked out the crater itself.  Here it is in it's smoldering glory:

85+million years and still boiling away

We didn't have a ton of time left before sundown, so we checked into our "hotel" (a very nicely remodeled small condo outside the park, the check-in for which was located in the local True Value store).  We have late dinner reservations at The Rim restaurant in the National Park hotel lodge perched on the crater rim of Hawai'i's currently active volcano, Kilauea.  The food was good, but the view was surreal.  Over 2 miles from our table, across the open plateau of the caldera, was the Hale Ma'uma'u crater, site of a perpetual lava lake, which sites above the Hawaiian Hotspot.  Here's the view from our table, where we dined in the glow of earth's primordial furnace:

That's elemental fire, friends!

The next day, we were all set to do the Kilauea Iki trail, which runs down into and across the bed of, a nearby crater.  Here's a picture we snapped of Kilauea Iki from above the day before:

There are people on the whitish trail down there, if your monitor is big enough to see them

We began the day with a short side trail to the Thorston Lava Tube.  Lava tubes for when the outer parts of a lava flow harden, creating insulting cover for the flowing lava underneath.  When the lava flow stops, a tube is left, and you can walk around in it.  We got there very early, so no one else was around, and the lights in the tube weren't yet on.  So, our time there was lamentably short.

Tubin'

Alas, the off-gassing of sulfur dioxide from Ma'uma'u caught a rare northeast wind, and blew the stuff our direction, forcing us out of the area.  So we didn't get to do our hike (a total bummer), and we ended up leaving the park altogether.  Oh, well, next time.

We ended up taking a different way back, through Hilo.  This town, on the windward rainy side, is a major port, and was once really something.  Today, it is...ratty.  It's one of those places you've been where evidence of former glory is all around you: grand parks and promenades kind of gone to seed, rotting stands of huge trees and rotting shrubbery.  Downtown shopping areas that were clearly cool just after the war during America's tiki culture enthrallment, but are now not, abound.  We ate at a very local place (the straightforwardly named "Hawaiian Style Cafe"), and I got some great saiman (Erica's kahlua pork was smothered in high fructose corn syrup masquerading as barbecue sauce.)  Afterwards, we took a short detour to a nearby waterfall, and then went up, up, up the Saddle Road back to the other side of the island.

The Saddle Road is a recently-refurbished highway originally built during wartime to connect the two sides of the island by the shortest way possible.  It goes right between the summits of Manua Loa and Manua Kea, with stunning views of each.  Though it begins on both sides at sea level and crests at over 6500ft, it does not switchback, owning to the gradual slope of the shield volcanoes.  Frankly, it is weird to drive on a road like this.  Just a constant, endless 5% grade going up, and then down.   Once you're up into the wild backcountry of this island, you begin to appreciate how huge and desolate the Big Island really is.  There are no towns or even residences anywhere, though some of America's largest ranches can be found up here, and even some herds of wild pigs, donkeys, and goats.  At the midway point of the highway, where it is bisected by a road that leads up to the two mountain summits, we pulled over and did a short hike up an ancient cinder cone called Pu'u Huluhulu.  We got some great views of the definitely-not-Hawai'i-looking landscape.  

The snows of Manua Kea 

Weird foliage and Manua Loa

The evening was spent limin' (a great, beachy loan word from Virgin Island pidgin.  I don't know the Hawaiian pidgin equivalent, but I'll look it up) by the pool.  

More later.

Aloha from the Big Island

Hey, reader(s),

Just going to drop a bit of a report here at the rough mid point of this trip.  Being not a true "Big Pig" family-style adventure, I'm not going to be doing full reports, but I did want to get some stuff on the site so I don't forget it all in my dotage.

James is in Danville with Grandma and Grandpa, and Erica and I have come to Hawai'i for a week to celebrate our 10th Anniversary early (summer is already booked up, can you believe it?)

We landed in Kona's mostly-outdoor airport the morning of March 29, after having flown to Los Vegas and then on to LA the night before, and overnighting at a hotel near LAX.  The airport was filled with a bunch of grumpy-looking, sunburned people headed home, and among them happy new arrivals streaming toward baggage claim. That's us :) Though soon we will be them :( Quod es, fui, Qui sum: ecce concipies.

Our first stop was...Safeway for groceries.  But then on to our lovely beach hotel, the King Kamehameha Beach Hotel in Kailua Kona (the town is sometimes called that, but also Kailua, Kona, Kona Town, and Kailua town.  Like "Waimea" there's lots of Konas in Hawai'i (or is it lots of Kailua's?), but that kind of thing is to be expected when your alphabet only has 12 letters.)  Our hotel is on a teeny, tiny little beach that it shares with a super high-priced stand up paddle board rental shack on one side, and on the other, the restored personal heaiu, or temple, of Kamehameha himself, which is part of a national historical park.  The ancient Hawaiians weren't much for building great buildings---the temple is a modest lava rock and thatched roof affair built out into the small harbor on a rock platform, which you're prohibited from setting foot on.  Actually, the ancient Hawaiians aren't even that "ancient."  The first wave of intrepid explorers discovered this remotest of islands after sailing out of probably Micronesia in their canoes around 500 AD--an insane tale of ingenuity and bravery beyond the ken of this pitiable blog.  Anyway, those first people kept it real here for about 500 years or so, but were eventually were subdued and chased into the hills by the ancestors of today's Hawaiians who landed here around the year 1000.  All of the kings we know about, like Kamehameha, whose fame originates from being the first ali'i to unite (i.e., conquer) all of the islands, are mostly those living throughout the 19th century. Kamehameha's personal history overlaps that of the State of Illinois, to give you some perspective.

The hotel, as I was saying, was probably some big deal forty years ago, and today remains a perfectly respectable middle class draw.  It's got a nice beach-side pool and a pool bar with cheap (for Hawai'i) drinks.  We can't figure out how to keep the air conditioning off full blast in our room, but besides that, there is literally nothing not to like here.

View from our balcony...er..."lanai"

View of the pool and pool bar

On the first full day, we went right to it at Hapuna beach, which Conde Nast has in the past rated the best beach in America.  It's about a 30 minute drive north of the hotel.  The beach has all of the fixins: white sand, sandy bottoms, body-surfing appropriate sized waves, a snack bar (sans booze--so maybe not all the fixins), and to top it all off, just killer snorkeling right off the sand (we saw two turtles!)  It's nice to be able to do quality snorkeling without paying some local pirate an exorbitant excursion fee.  We've already had three great snorkeling sessions.  Here's a picture from the beach:

Hapuna Beach!

The Big Island has a bit of an unfair reputation for not having any good beaches.  It's understandable that, on an island as big as the other 6 islands put together, people expect more of the classically desirable beach than is here, but that is because of Hawai'i's very interesting geographical history.  You see, this island is among the very, very few places on earth still be made, as it were.  By the minute, this island is growing--these millennia it's the south flank that's getting bigger--thanks to the amazing power of the Hawaiian volcanic hotspot, the magma pipe underneath the island responsible over 85 million years for an archipelago of islands, atolls, and seamounts that stretch for 3,600 miles out toward Russia (the magma keeps flowing upwards from the Earth's core, but the plate on top of it moves, hence the string of islands left in the wake of the action).  Since the Big Island is the newcomer of the lot, it's still covered in (relatively) fresh lava flows.  Beaches, as we normally think of them, are deposits of tiny bits of coral and shell ground over eons into fine power by the churning of the ocean, and many of places on the Big Island would surely feature such beaches were it not for the volcanoes' annoying tendency to cover them over with lava (there are some black--and even a few green sand--beaches here, but who wants to sit on a hot black lava sand beach all day?)  Still, there are a few great beaches on this island, if one knows where to look for them (guidebooks, the internet), and we found 'em. 

After Hapuna, we drove back to the hotel, cleaned up, and headed out on Ali'i Drive--Kona's bay side tourist strip--for preprandials and dinner at Quinn's Almost-by-the-Sea, a refreshingly honest bar and grill acoss from our hotel that just serves up fresh caught Ono and Mahi Mahi without a ton of fuss.  Good choice, us!

Ok, more on beaches and food later.  In fact, this post is getting long, so I'll post this and hit the hay.