A day of contrasts...

A day of contrasts...  Our plan for today was to do some birding on the Pu'u O'o trail (off the Saddle Road).  We left our cottage around 7 am and headed there through rain, heavy mist, and 100% overcast for nearly the entire way.  Just as we got to the trail head, it turned into a light fog – decent, but not perfect hiking conditions.  The first thing I did was to check out the trail to make sure it was safe for Debbie to attempt.  Unfortunately it was not – while it's in pretty good shape, it's full of unstable cindery areas that are exactly what someone recovering from a broken knee does not need.  I left poor Debbie in the car while I went on an extended reconnoiter, thinking of a visit some other year.  Conclusion: we must make it back here!  The trail heads into a kipuka just 100' or so from the trailhead, and in there I saw and heard lots of birds.  The second kipuka, a half mile or so in, we're told, is even better birding.  I took a few photos along the way:

I knew this might happen, so I had a fallback plan: to drive around the west side of Mauna Kea to Waimea, then from there up the Kohala ridge to Hawi.  From there we could drive west a few miles to a state historical park with a reconstructed native Hawai'ian village, and east to the lookout over the Pololu Valley.  Both of these are favorite destinations from previous trips.  Well, the Kohala ridge was quite dry, and while still beautiful (see panoramas below) not nearly as beautiful as on previous visits.  The historical park looked fine, but the wind was blowing steadily at about 40 mph, far too strong for comfortable walking.  We did find a couple of nice back roads to explore (non-panoramas below).  And Pololu ... has apparently been discovered.  Instead of a car or two parked there for the hardcore hikers, there were about 100 cars parked there for a quarter mile or so along the road.  We just turned around and left.  That was all very disappointing.

So we headed back to Waimea to get something to eat, at the Big Island Brewhaus.  It had great reviews on Yelp, both for the food and for the beer (Debbie was very interested in that!).  We ended up ordering the same thing: a burrito stuffed with grilled ahi, rice, beans, avocados, tomatoes, onions, sour cream, and who knows what else.  Great stuff!  We also had a bowl of their “luau soup”, which had a clear chicken broth with pieces of chicken, plus rice and lots of spinach.  Also very good.

Then we decided to go check out a couple of other locations that we remember fondly: the Waipio Valley overlook (which we fully expected to be crowded) and Kalopa State Park.  On looking at the map for a fun way to get from Waimea to Waipio, I noticed a little road we'd never been on before, called Mud Lane.  I found it with Google Maps help, and down it we went.  The road was marked “Dead End”, so we were prepared to have it stop at any point – but it was so beautiful when we started on it that we determined to take it as far as we could.  Well, the first couple miles or so was a nice one-lane paved road.  That turned into a nice dirt road.  Then a rough dirt road.  Then a rougher dirt road.  Then a serious four-wheeling road with small boulders, deep ruts, washouts, trees across the road, and so on.  I spent about an hour working hard to avoid hurting the truck while also making sure we didn't go somewhere we couldn't get out of.  After about six miles we ran into an old cane haul road (where big trucks took loads of sugar cane out of the fields).  The sugar cane is long gone, but the roads remained.  We took that old cane road down.  It started out as an awful paved road, with brush growing in from the sides and big holes.  In one part of it, about a third of the pavement had fallen over a 40' high bluff, leaving just barely enough room for us to squeeze through.  That road slowly got better and better, until eventually we hit the road for Waipio.  Phew!

Waipio has changed a lot since our last visit.  There's a tourist trap at the end, with lots of shops for food, gee gaws, etc.  There was a big crowd at the overlook.  We just skedaddled.  Then we drove up to Kalopa State Park, where in past years we camped in the cabins there, including once with Debbie's mom and once with my parents.  Kalopa was a very pleasant surprise.  It looks even better than we remember it, and expanded.  It's obvious some money has been spent on upkeep and improvement.  The flora was lush and verdant, and we heard lots of birds.  Very nice to see that after so many of the negative (at least from our perspective) changes we've seen elsewhere...

Tomorrow we head to the Kapapala Forest Reserve.  We got the combination to the lock on the gate tonight...

Oh, a most excellent day!

Oh, a most excellent day!  It started out by Debbie waking up at 3:45 am, for no apparent reason.  We got up early, and were ready to leave for our planned day around Pahala and Na'alehu by 5:15 am.  We actually started on the way down there, knowing we'd get to the good birding before sunrise, when I had a brilliant idea: let's go see the lava erupting in Halemaumau!

It was still dark when we pulled into the Jaggar Museum parking lot.  We could see an orange glow in the sky from our truck, so we knew there was at least the possibility that we'd actually see erupting lava.  When we walked up to the fence of the observing area, we could see (naked eye) splashes and fountains.  In our binoculars it was like seeing one of those National Geographic videos of bubbling lava.  I've seen something this once before, from my perch on the crater rim of Pu'u O'o some twenty years ago.  Debbie had never seen it.  We watched until the sky started to lighten.  Humbling and beautiful, it was.

Then we continued down to just south of Pahala, where we started the birding part of our day.  You can see the track of our entire day if you're interested in the gory details, or in doing it yourself.  We wandered all over the slopes of Mauna Loa west of Pahala.  Sometimes we were on paved roads, sometimes on dirt roads, sometimes on very rugged four-wheel roads.

We had one serious four-wheeling event, when we needed to cross a gully carved out of the lava by an intermittent stream.  This gully was about 60' wide, perhaps 10' deep, and extremely rough on the bottom.  I had to get out and walk the gully to find a route that we could take that wouldn't cause us to scrape the bottom.  That route was an "S" shape, with a very tight turn on the second curve.  I took it very slowly, and we made it just fine – but I'd bet we came within an inch of bottoming. :)

Our route took us through many radically different floras: macadamia orchards, coffee orchards, farmed eucalyptus (for paper pulp), pastures, and natural forests.  Our altitude ranged from sea level to almost 3,000'.  The scenery was beautiful, and so varied that the only way to understand it would be to see the photos (below).

The birding was fantastic, not so much for variety as for frequency of viewing opportunities.  We had many sightings of common amakihi, red billed leiothrix, yellow-fronted canaries, Japanese white eyes, and mynas, plus we saw an io (Hawai'ian hawk) whirling in a thermal.  We reveled in the almost non-stop bird viewing, even if many of them weren't natives.

After all this hard birding, we were ready for a meal by the time we ended up in Na'alehu.  We stopped again at Hana Hou, and once again had a great meal with friendly service.  We both chose the roast pork this time (and this was my first meal of this trip with an entree of something other than seafood!), and it was as good as we'd anticipated.  I had gravy on mine, and it was especially good: full of roast pork taste and neither greasy nor salty.  This time we had room for dessert, and Debbie had a (huge!) slice of coconut cream pie while I had a slab of liliko'i (passion fruit) bar.  Both were excellent.

The table next to ours had a mom, pop, and teen-aged girl, all Japanese.  The girl walked over to our table, very tentatively, got my attention (while looking terrified) and asked me if I was American.  I said yes, and then asked her why she thought I might not be.  Answer: my hat.  I've been wearing an Australian bush hat while over here, to protect my head (my family is prone to skin cancers, and I'm not taking chances).  She hadn't seen any such hat in Hawai'i, so thought I might be a foreigner too.  She was so embarrassed to be asking!  But apparently her desire to know overcame her fear. :)  I talked with her for a few minutes, trying to put her at ease, and I think I finally did.  I'm still not sure why the idea that we might be foreigners was interesting to her.

After we finished eating, we retraced about half our day's drive and did some more birding.  Along the way I discovered a wasp on my window, which I shooed out of the car after I opened the window.  A few minutes later, Debbie discovered one on her window, which prompted a 400 decibel scream, followed by much frantic motion.  I'm sure my hearing will recover someday...

The photos from this part of day:

After we finished up, around 3:30 pm, we started to head home when Debbie had a great idea: to go back to Kipuka Puaulu (the bird park) and walk that 1.2 mile trail.  This would be our third time this trip, but it's a beautiful trail and we might see some birds – and we'd both get a walk, which would feel really good after a day mostly in a car seat. 

So off we went on this walk, which was beautiful – and we also had some fantastic bird watching.  We had lengthy and close views of two apapane and one red-billed leiothrix, plus good sightings of an oma'o, common amakihi, and a northern cardinal.  Very nice, that walk was!

Then to top it all off, on the way home we saw a brilliant rainbow.  Seriously!

A most excellent day, indeed.

Laundry, waves, growth, and poke...

Laundry, waves, growth, and poke...  Well, today was a bit of a mixed bag.  Our first job this morning was to get our laundry done.  We decided to try a new place on this trip: the wash and fold service at Downtown Laundry Express, because Yelp had it rated so highly.  Their wash and fold service was priced at $1.35 per pound, which meant our laundry would cost us about $25.  All we'd do is drop off the dirty laundry, then come back the same afternoon to pick it up.  That's a bargain so far as we're concerned, as it means we don't have to hang around the laundromat for a few hours waiting to get it done – we can take off and do some sight-seeing.  That's exactly what we did this morning, and this afternoon when I popped in to pick it up, I got all our laundry back, all nicely folded up and my shirts hung – for the princely sum of $22.65.  They did a great job with all of it, lost nothing, and fast and friendly service to boot.  Total time we spent on this chore: about 10 minutes.  Win!

While we waited for our laundry, we set off on a repeat of a trip we made something like 25 years ago.  On that long-ago trip, we left Hilo traveling east along the beach road, and continued all the way around Cape Kumukahi to the Chain of Craters Road in Volcanoes National Park.  This time we had to make that trip a bit differently.

First, the rude dirt road that used to traverse the coast east of Hilo to Cape Kumukahi is now gated off just a couple miles east of Hilo.  We couldn't go far that way at all!  Even that short trip was kind of mind-blowing, though.  On our past visit, most of that was wild, overgrown land with some homeless people living near the beach in giant concrete drainage pipe sections.  Now it's a large and upscale development, with fancy houses, paved roads, and beautiful beach side parks – very, very different from what we saw on our last visit to this area.

We drove back to Hilo, up to Kea'au, then down Kaloli Drive to the shore.  After that we could take various roads all the way along the shore to Cape Kumukahi.  This area was even more mind-boggling to us.  The last time we were here, it was a mix of wild land, small farms, and sparse downscale housing.  This time it was a densely populated suburb with a mix of midscale to upscale housing, mostly on lots of an acre or less.  We did run into a few short stretches that looked mostly like it used to, but darned few.  There were hundreds of lots for sale.  The highway from Kea'au to Pahoa, is now a six lane superhighway, where it used to be a narrow two lane road – and no wonder!  All those people who live down there have to use that road to get in or out of the area.  The area of our memories is almost completely gone, and the aggregate population there must be something like 10 or 12 times what it was.

Finally, we drove down toward the Chain of Craters Road, though we knew we couldn't actually get there – that road was overrun by lava from Pu'u O'o many years ago, near Kalapana.  Last time we were at that site, a barricade and the remains of the old subdivision overrun by lava were the only thing there.  Now it was a commercial emporium, with art galleries, photograph vendors, lava tour hawkers, and gazillions of sun-burned, unhappy-looking tourists.  We turned around and ran as fast as we could go.  Some photos below of this trip, along with a short video at right:

We got done with all this around 1 pm, a bit too early to pick up our laundry, so we decided to eat.  Guess where?  If you said “Suisan for poke!”, you win the prize!  For the third time now, we got a two choice bowl.  Today I had ahi Hawai'ian and ahi sesame shoyu; Debbie had ahi sesame shoyu plus spicy lobster salad.  Both of us thought our selection this time was the best of our three.  We drove down to Richardson's Ocean Park on the far eastern edge of Hilo to park and shovel poke into our faces.  It's a beautiful spot, and it wasn't very crowded.  We faced the ocean as we ate, and watched a seabird catching fish in a fish pond, a photographer flying a drone over the breaking waves, and the waves breaking on the rocks.  We also saw, quite accidentally, a humpback whale breaching a few hundred yards out from the beach.  We saw a second one do the same a few minutes later. 

We only saw a few birds on the whole day's outing, but we did see two separate io (Hawai'ian hawks).  They're not too common, so that counts for something.  We also saw some yellow-billed cardinals just north of Kalapana, so now we've seen all three cardinal species present on the Big Island.

After our feast we drove into town and picked up our laundry, then headed to Da Hawai'ian Brain Freeze Shave Ice & Ice Cream to get a cold treat.  They serve ice cream and sorbet from Tropical Dreams, which we know from previous trips is a superior product – especially the sorbets.  Debbie had a Kona Coffee ice cream cone, and I had a mango sorbet cone.  Yummy, those were!

Tomorrow we're going to head back down toward Pahala and that gorgeous road we found – birding and sight-seeing are in our immediate future...