Hilo Days, Kona nights

(more and higher resolution photos here)

For breakfast on Wednesday we headed to Hilo Farmers Market (Mom this is where your new jewelry came from) and found the only Mangosteens possibly available in the entire United States. There were only a few available and only from one vendor, so we essentially cleaned him out.

They weren’t as good as the mangosteens in Thailand, but that was to be expected. We finished off with sandwiches made of sushi…sort of. They were pieces of spam inside a roll of rice and an outer roll of seaweed. It’s called musubi, and I’d highly recommend it as your “spam in Hawaii” experience over whatever McDonald’s is selling.

After that we headed to Botanical World Adventures where we visited Kamaee waterfall.

The waterfall was essentially up in a cow field, but unlike where I grew up, when you go up into the field you can look down and see the ocean.

Then we drove up the road to a spot where we could follow a stream up the hill in a botanical garden. The garden itself wasn’t as impressive as a “real” botanical garden like those in Los Angeles or Denver, but it was a nice day and every so often the cool wind would come up over the hill and blow through us.

When we went in we were told there was a waterfall or something at the top, but we didn’t see anything and got confused and walked back. We never did solve the mystery, but we had other places to go and other things to see.

Afterwards we headed to Akaka State Park, but on the way we stopped at a roadside stand selling (expensive) fresh coconut and pineapple. It turned out the pineapple was so sour that it burnt the inside of my mouth and I couldn’t eat pineapple (or citrus) for another few days. I tried fresh coconut (again) as you can see from the photo below, but I still don’t see what the big deal is.

Down the road we came to Akaka waterfall. Like most of the publicized waterfalls in Hawaii there was no way to get close to it unfortunately.

We were getting hungry in the mid afternoon so we went back into downtown Hilo and decided to have veggie burgers at Abundant Life Natural Foods. As with the sub sandwiches the day before they piled on the sprouts, but I must be warming up to new things as I get older because the burgers were great. We sat by the bay while we ate.

Our next stop was a special request of Sam’s; the Mauna Loa macadamia nut farm and procesing facility. The small processing plant is located at the end of a three mile macadamia tree orchard, which, even though I’m allergic to nuts I have to admit smells really great.

After that we were zooming across the island between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa on the two freeways that meet in the middle to connect the east side of the island to the west. We were zooming because we had to be checked in, fed and out on the pier in Kona by 7pm to catch our rescheduled Manta Ray tour.

We arrived in Kona with just enough time to check into Uncle Billy’s, where they upgraded us to a “bungalow” on the beach. Here is the view from our lanai (that’s balcony to the rest of us).

We didn’t have much time to check it out, though, as we had to grab a quick dinner before walking to the pier for our manta ray night dive. We stopped at several of the restaurants along the street leading to the pier, but none of them could guarantee we could get in and out in thirty minutes until we found Seiji Brew Garden. Seiji himself welcomed us and made our meals a priority for his staff, which was very generous of him as he had several other customers waiting. This was a small bit of hospitality (combined with the upgrade at Uncle Billy’s and other things to come) that would endear us to Kona much more than Hilo. After a few minutes a delicious unagi bowl and a katsu bowl came out.

Unfortunately since we were so incredibly rushed I ended up having one of my stupid throat problems again. As it turned out Seiji’s doesn’t have their own bathroom. I was told by the waitress to go to the “blue door” in the hallway between buildings. There were three blue doors, one with a big sign saying “THIS IS NOT A BATHROOM!” and two more that had padlocks…it was like some televised hidden camera practical joke. None of the doors in the hallway would open at all (blue or not) so I ended up doing my disgusting spitting up food bits behavior in the back alley in front of other tourists. We were so strapped for time though that I didn’t really get done what needed to get done. We hurried over to the dock where the cast and crew for our Ray tour was slowly assembling. I just wanted to get on the boat and go to the bathroom to end the ordeal, but they made us wait and wait so they could tell us all their disclaimers etc. etc. So I ended up running over to a trash bin a few times and doing my business, bringing unwanted attention to myself and to Sam.

When we finally got on the ship my throat got a little better and after an hour getting out to “the spot” in the north it was pretty much gone. That was a very good thing as the swim was an incredible experience. They have you float off of a giant floating light that releases plankton into the water, which the mantas eat. You can kind of get an idea from this blurry photo…. maybe…

At first there were three “smaller” mantas circling below us. “smaller” is a bit of a misnomer since a smaller manta could weigh over 1,000 pounds and have a ten foot wingspan. After about twenty minutes a much larger manta, 15 feet across cam up and proceeded to do loops right in front of us for the rest of the trip. The guides had to literally rip us off the platform one by one as none of us wanted to leave, including the manta ray.

I didn’t really get any good photos as I didn’t have flash (and they told us we couldn’t use flash anyway). I should have taken a video, but I didn’t think of it. Sam was so sad that she didn’t have a video of the experience that we went to Costco the next day to buy an underwater camera to use on the rest of our snorkeling adventures.