Our rental car, trees, vines, and a curve on the Old Mamalahoa Highway. The Big Island, HI. September 2024.
If you find yourself on the Big Island, and most especially if you stay on the east side in or near Hilo, a must stop (for the physically fit) is Akaka Falls State Park. As you head north to that park–only 15 miles distant, a very easy drive–just past Paukaa you’ll see a typically yellow/orange/ochre, diamond-shaped highway sign telling you that to your right is a “Scenic Highway” with a little sign beneath that says it’s four miles in length. Hopefully someone in your car (perhaps you?) will say as my wife did, “Let’s take that!” When you jerk the steering wheel to the right in the Papaikou census area (pop 1314), you’ll be on the Old Mamalahoa Highway.
These aren’t my best photos. Skies were overcast. Dense tropical foliage made it dark everywhere. Green predominates. The road twists, turns, offers few places to just pull over to grab a photo.
Halfway in we stopped at the Hawai’i Tropical Botanical Garden. It looked interesting, and it had restrooms. Our interest waned when faced with admission prices of $30/each and the prominent display of mosquito repellant for sale right beside the register. Translated from “customer-eze”, the signs basically said, “You’re a fool if you don’t apply repellant.” I’m sure it’s a wonderful point of interest: it features a valley down to the ocean with 2,500 species of plants. Nevertheless, we drove on. We stopped soon after when we found a bridge and a wide spot to pull off the road.
Kawainui Stream, Big Island, HI. September 2024.Kawainui Stream, Big Island, HI. September 2024.
I had become fascinated by a orange-red flower growing high in the canopy. At this stop we found ourselves above some of these trees, permitting me to photograph them:
Big Island, HI. September 2024
Driving north as we did, one suddenly pops out of the dense foliage and into a grassy pasture area on the edge of Pepeekeo. Joining the main highway, we drove on to Akaka Falls.
The Pride of America (Norwegian Cruise Lines) leaving Hilo Harbor, having just sailed through the opening in the breakwater. September 2024.
Our room at our Hilo hotel afforded me a delightful perk because it faced Hilo bay and its breakwater. I hadn’t realized only the larger rooms faced this direction–just a lucky pick, I guess. I’ve always had a curiosity about boats and ships, but especially commercial ships. I’ve never had a desire to work on a ship–heck, I barely want to be on one at all. Maybe that’s what makes it intriguing to see ships plying their trade in coastal waters.
After checking in to the Grand Naniloa hotel on a Tuesday, we witnessed a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship leaving the bay at dusk (above). By Wednesday morning I realized the passage in the breakwater lay to the west of us, but moorage lay to the east. Therefore, all of the ships passed our balcony in a leisurely fashion, guided by two tugs. (Astute readers will note the commercial docks in all my sunrise photos posted to date.) Within 24 hours I learned this would be a frequent feature of our visit.
Guiding her out; our first full day. September 2024.Dawn, our second full day. The Pasha Hawaii and a tug-guided barge of containers. September 2024.
I never did figure out the exact roles of the two tugs. One always headed out after the first one, and one always peeled off and headed back to the dock as they guided the ship in–leaving the other tug to finish the job.
Tug #2, heading out to catch up with the job at hand. Day #3. September 2024.Still catching up! September 2024.
They worked at night too….
Bringing in a container ship. Day #5. September 2024.
Getting ready to leave, again on a Tuesday, we managed to complete the cycle: the Pride of America returned to stay docked all day before heading out again on a Tuesday evening. We left a few hours later, but I still see it as I write these words, magical perhaps to no one but me.
The Pride of America, guided once again by The Tug That Remained. Day #7. September 2024.
The KTA Super Store in downtown Hilo…on a much sunnier day. September 2024.
Since our hotel suite had a small range, pots/pans, and dishes, after our morning walk on the first day, we visited the downtown Hilo KTA Super Store, a funky grocery that reminded me of rural groceries which need to be a little bit more of everything for their customers. A guy at breakfast had described getting to a grocery, but I think I didn’t understand him because a flashy new Safeway and a much spiffier version of a KTA existed a similar distance to the southwest…but we went northwest, and I was glad we did. We dodged the raindrops which had threatened all morning, and as we shopped, I saw many products I’d never seen before, including….
Dried fruit at the downtown Hilo KTA Superstore. Hilo, HI. September 2024.
One of our many islets in the waters around our hotel. Big Island, HI. September 2024.
Our first full day in Hawai’i on the Big Island, we woke to mostly cloudy skies–not surprising considering we were on the rainy side of the island and we’d arrived to Hilo Airport under a solid overcast. As is our wont, we spent our first morning lazily, eventually venturing forth to explore our near surroundings. Here, it meant taking a walk around the western half of Waiakea Peninsula. Our hotel sat on the northernmost tip of the peninsula, situated on pretty grounds, so we started there.
Grounds of Grand Naniloa Hotel, looking east. Big Island, HI. September 2024.Grounds of Grand Naniloa Hotel, looking north. Big Island, HI. September 2024.A flower-cluster on one of the plants around the grand Naniloa Hotel. Big Island, HI. September 2024.Looking northwest from the northern tip of the peninsula. Big Island, HI. September 2024.
After touring the property, fencing forced us to the road in front of the hotel, Banyan Drive, so-called because 75-90 years ago a bunch of folks planted banyan trees to line it. Every time we drove in and out of the property we traveled Banyan Dr, making it one of the cool pieces of Hawai’i for me. Banyan trees are huge:
Typical banyan tree on Banyan Dr, Hilo, Big Island, HI. September 2024.
Our perambulations took us to a small park which culminated in Coconut Island, a spit of an island which took it in the teeth when a tsunami hit in 1960. (The somewhat famous Tsunami Clock is located nearby.) By now I had started cursing my brother who talked about the gloriously comfortable weather where humidity gets balanced by near-constant breezes. Our shirts were getting soaked. Temps were running close to 90 as the clock approached noon. As North Carolinians we’re very experienced with gray, overcast skies accompanying warm, humid conditions. We learned later this weather pattern wasn’t normal.
Our last stop consisted of wandering Lili’uokalani Gardens, a Japanese-style layout with plenty of Hawai’ian flora–at least I took it to be native. Who knows? Asking around later, I learned the park lies so low, so near Hilo Bay, that Waihonu Pond and other low-lying areas fill with extra water from the high tides. It prevented us from walking some of the paths.
At low tide one apparently can walk to and over this nice little Japanese-esque bride. Lili’uokalani Gardens. Hilo, Big Island, HI. September 2024.A Nene goose, Hawai’ian native. Lili’uokalani Gardens, Big Island, HI. September 2024.Yes, it really was that green. Lili’uokalani Gardens. Hilo, Big Island, HI. September 2024.
I’m conflicted. I enjoy casual birding, and when I visit Hawai’i and can suddenly see many new birds, I should be thrilled. I did thrill to bright, different birds. Then I learned that virtually every bird I saw had been introduced to the islands in the past 150 years or so. It seemed none of the common ones (the birds hopping around parks and following the tourists around) could claim they were indigenous to any island in Hawaii. Still…they are quite different to commonly spotted birds where I live.
A Saffron Finch. Lili’uokalani Gardens, Hawaii, HI. September 2024.The Common Myna. Outside our hotel, Hilo, HI. September 2024.
The Common Myna appeared everywhere on Hawaii and Maui. It’s native to Asia, but has spread so much it qualifies as “one of the world’s most invasive species,” according to the IUCN Species Survival Commission which listed it on its 100 of the World’s Worst Invasive Species (one of only three birds on it). When we first landed on the Big Island, and I heard this incessant chattering, I thought Starlings had made it to Hawai’i. It’s a noisy bird, and it looks a little bit like a Starling until you get close enough to see the yellow eye patch, the more brown body, and that it moves rapidly on the ground when it wants to.
The Saffron Finch comes from South America. It’s been on the Big Island (Hawaii) only since 1960. We only saw these in the Lili’uokalani Gardens and around our hotel, both of which are on a very small peninsula on the east edge of Hilo, Mokuako.
A Yellow-billed Cardinal. Seriously–see below. Outside our hotel. Hilo, HI. September 2024.
There are three common cardinals in Hawai’i, and none of them are native. One of them isn’t even a cardinal! We saw two: I photographed only the Yellow-billed but we also saw the Red-crested. They both originate in Brazil, but the former has a wider range into Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, and northern Argentina. Thankfully we didn’t see any Northern Cardinals. I see plenty of those at home, and it would have been very depressing. Because I have no photos of the Red-crested, I’m including one from Wikimedia Commons.
My biggest consternation regarding birds wasn’t the Northern Cardinal. It was the onslaught of House Sparrows which assail one in every open restaurant, marketplace, park, and you name it. The fearless critters even hopped into our room in Hilo on several occasions….
“G’morning! Could ya take this peanut-bread-Cheeto whatsit off my bill?” Our first morning waking in Hilo, HI. September 2024.
Though we saw plenty of spotted and zebra doves (both introduced from SE Asia), I failed to take a good photo of one. It remained until we traveled to Maui before I saw a bird endemic to the Hawaiian Islands…
This is the tail end of a family of Nene geese, the state bird of Hawai’i. Maui, September 2024.
Sifting my photos for birds proved beneficial when I tripped over one, and only one, photo of a different group of birds. The Chestnut Munia isn’t native to Hawai’i (of course), but it’s a pretty cool-looking bird nonetheless. In the photo below, the bird on the left is a classic, I’m-sure-it’s-a-Munia example. Moving left to right, birds #2 and #4 appear to be Munias but they’re not supposed to have breasts like that. (Males and females are supposed to look about the same.) Photos of immature birds don’t look like those two. Bird #3? I’ve no idea what that is, but I find it difficult to believe it would just hang out in this group without being one of them.
Chestnut Munia (L) with friends. Kapalua coast, Maui. September 2024.
And in Maui I finally got a photo of one of these long-legged things which had bedeviled me on the Big Island. (Blurry photos? Sure, I’ve got ’em.) I don’t try to identify long-legged birds like this because they are so diverse and so similar. I don’t even know if this one is the same species as the ones which ran around on the rocky coasts of Hilo Bay.
Hello Mr. Long Legs. I’ll ID you one day. Kapalua coast, Maui. September 2024.
I would be remiss not to include a photo like the one below. Chickens. Yes, chickens. They’re not exactly everywhere but they’re darn common running around many areas where you wouldn’t expect to see them. They apparently are “wild” in the sense they don’t go to a coop and get fed by humans. They hang around the cities and towns, though, so…what is “wild” anyway?
The parking lot outside the Maui Aquarium. I think this guy met me ten minutes later at the nearby gas station. Maui, September 2024.
I’ve but three Hawaiian airports under my belt, so take this statement with several grains of salt: a first-timer’s arrival to Hawai’i could scarcely be better than passing through the Hilo International Airport. Smaller airports does not always mean better: a truly uninspired one exists in my hometown of Spokane. Most exist as tiny copies of the Big Boys. That’s what makes Hilo’s such a refreshing surprise.
An exit from Hilo International Airport. September 2024.
Unlike any other airport I’ve been in, Hilo’s opens to the air…everywhere. Call it The Lanai Effect. On the concourse level most walls rise to railing height only. The arrival/departure level echoes the effect. Large doorways punctuate the building so frequently, one becomes hard put not to claim the walls punctuate the openness. Green steel roofs the low-slung building and covers the walkways. It reminded me of photos I’ve seen of other tropical buildings, particularly those serving some kind of transportation need: freight depots in the Amazon; a train station in the Congo; tropical open-air markets in a cruise ship’s port of call.
Hilo International Airport as seen from “car rental row” across the street. September 2024.
Hilo’s airport boasts the most comfortable waiting area seats this road warrior has ever seen, similar to someone’s living room (note coffee and end tables):
General waiting area, Hilo International Airport (ITO). September, 2024.Close-up of chairs in general waiting area at Hilo airport (post-TSA). September 2024.
I know, I know: not all airports could work this way. I’m just happy this one does.
Touchdown! Honolulu, Oahu, HI. Technically not on Hawaiian soil yet. September 2024.
Just over 49 hours after our plane took off from Maui Monday morning, I’m sitting here trying to make sense of it all. Not the time there. That’s easy: it delivered in ways unanticipated, surprised almost hourly, relaxed me more than has occurred in years (decades?), and sated our senses. Translating to TikTok language, it was “awesome.” No, that’s not it. The sense I’m searching for has to do with much more than that.
I’m 70. When I marked my 37th birthday I had only the barest of inklings that less than two weeks later my marriage would end. I’d been working on sprucing up our former house, a recent rental being prepped for sale, and I looked forward to a vacation to Honolulu, Hawaii, in about a month’s time. I learned my life would take a different course about 10 days after my birthday. A couple of weeks after that, my soon-to-be-legally-ex-wife convinced me to cough up my travel vouchers for her close friend so that they could go to Hawaii. (I stubbornly had thought I would still go: traveling in a chilly, no, frosty silence on the plane and finding separate lodgings. I guess I’m thankful she convinced me not to.) She enjoyed Hawaii, I had a hollow experience at a regional blues festival. Don’t read into this too much. She wasn’t a horrible person, just a helluva lot more pragmatic than I. Many signs pointed to the ultimate demise of our marriage. I just didn’t want to acknowledge them.
This experience plus a relocation to the Eastern US Coast put Hawaii into a “maybe someday” category. I watched as my brother and his family visited time and again, including the year of my second marriage in 1995. After five, ten years, it seemed everyone had been to Hawaii but me. That was unfortunate, because then my contrarian nature kicked in. I’ve been contrarian since childhood. I didn’t attend popular movies precisely because they were popular. Everyone’s going to Hawaii? Well, not me!
My new wife wanted to go, though. A financial impossibility by the time we moved to the West Coast, it continued to be so after we returned to the East Coast. By the time we maybe could have afforded it, my job precluded it. Then I retired at the end of 2019, and 2020 being our 25th anniversary, we set our sights on Hawaii. But 2020 wasn’t kind to us or anyone else. We spent that Silver Anniversary eating take-out pizza and watching TV. Sad. As we emerged from Pandemonia, I studiously ignored the idea we could go to Hawaii. Then 2024 arrived. Our mantra became, “just book the trip.” Instead of equivocating about a possible trip, just figure out if you can afford it and if you can, book it! We did. A few logistical glitches will be discussed in future entries, maybe, but we flew there as planned, and actually stayed an extra day due to a bit of poor planning on my part.
Those weren’t my only issues with traveling to Hawaii. If we’d consummated a trip to Puerto Rico in February 2022, I would have resisted Hawaii. But PR had smarter, more restrictive Covid protocols than the mainland US, and that year I doubted we could meet them given the logistics of a Covid testing thing. We approached 2024 and its mantra of “just book the trip” with the knowledge that this year marked the 30th since we met, and the threshold of our 30th anniversary in 2025. So I came through: I booked a European river cruise for 2025 and booked Hawaii for this year.
At 70 I’ve had more than 60 years of thinking Hawaii is a lush, tropical chain of islands. It’s not–not the lushness part. The Trade Winds blow SE to NW which coincidentally aligns with the main islands of Hawaii. The Big Island takes the first shot of those winds and their weather. The east side of the island, anchored by Hilo, catches constant fog/mist and gentle rains. It measures its rain in feet-per-year. To a lesser extent, this pattern extends to the other islands. The east coasts catch rain, the rest of the island is semi-arid grasslands ranging from a lush grassiness to a dry volcanic scabland I knew well from growing up in eastern Washington State. Oddly (to me), the destination vacation spots are on those semi-arid sides of the islands.
Thankfully, I’ve harbored a strong desire to go to the Big Island since the 1970s when I knew Betty Nahoopii as a young reporter in Monroe, WA. She and her husband organized trips to the Big Island, and she gushed about all the amazing and weird stuff one could see there. This was the island I had to visit. Here’s where the Fates kicked in. One of my cousins lives on Maui. I planned to visit her and that island for a few days, then we would shuttle over to Hawaii and spend a week there. (“We’ll get a taste of Maui, four or five days, and then we’ll relax into the Big Island,” I said.) When I found out I couldn’t fly directly out of Hilo to the mainland (thanks, Southwest), I begrudged the day we would lose to fly to Honolulu and then overnight there to catch the next morning’s flight to the mainland. Therefore, I flipped the trip around because I could fly directly out of Kahului, Maui. We were tethered to Southwest because of all the points I built up as a consultant over the Twenty-teens. Another stroke of fortuitous luck: Southwest only flew into Hilo–not Kona. Virtually every other airline flies into the dry side of the island where Kona is located. For a week, therefore, we got a true tropical experience. Our room:
Our room at the Grand Naniloa. All drapes pull fully back, and the sliders provide a wraparound experience on the lanai. Hilo, Hawaii, Hawaii. September 2024.
Our definition of “fortuitous” lies in spending most of a week in an established city on the biggest island of the archipelago. We drove to the west side of the island and Kona on our final full day on the island. Kona proffers the worst of resort-oriented vacationing. We could discern no true center to the “city” and all that seemed to be there was hillsides covered by vacation houses and condos, marinas full of boats, and more American Standard Fare shopping centers in a few square miles than we saw in almost all of Hilo. A semi-pathetic National Historic Park offered the only draw for us. We sweltered in the dry heat, gassed the car, and beat a quick retreat to the east side of the island.
Maui brought the opposite, in the sense we found ourselves in a copy of Kona. After flying in around 4:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, I discovered Google Nav hadn’t lied. We were in for a one-hour drive to our condo on the extreme north end of the resort coast of the western, resort area of the island. It resembles Kona in many ways, though a bit more lush. We had to drive an hour back the very next day to meet my cousin and her husband for lunch the next day. Returning from that delightful reconnection with her (after 50-ish years!), we resolved to hang out on the quiet resort coast of Kapalua and so we did.
I know this: “Hawaii” means a different thing to the large majority of people who aren’t us. Ocean stuff? We’re not going to snorkel, dive, sunbathe, surf, fish, jet ski, kayak, or anything else related to any strenuous activity. We’re going to look at it, hike along it, sit on the beach and marvel at it, poke into tidepools if allowed, and if none of that works out, we’ll drive along it and take photos from on high. Our idea of a vacation doesn’t extend to reserving a pickleball/tennis court, doesn’t include (usually) any guided tour, doesn’t include a helicopter ride into a volcano, and sure doesn’t get defined as “hanging out at the pool under a cabana for a week while waiters bring us drinks.” We’re not going to spend all our time fixing our own meals in a condo.
What does Hawaii and by extension “vacation” mean to us? Stay tuned. I’ve not decide how to present everything, but I know that I’ve got about 750 photos to back it up! Here’s one:
Our view looking down from our wrap-around balcony at the Grand Naniloa Hotel, Hilo, HI. September 2024.
all the voices in my head 