We spent our last few days on the drier, sunnier side of the island (the westish…southish…side) and it was SO beautiful. (I liked the rainy side best. But was so glad to get to experience both!) We stayed right by a pebble beach, all made of black lava rock. It was beautiful to look at but definitely not a place to frolic barefoot, even though the rocks were smooth and round and looked like they might feel nice…but there was just too much variation in their size and placement. Plus, your feet would sink into the pebbles and that made it feel like you were sliding two steps back for every one forward. Very daunting. We did try wading in the water a little but it was just TOO painful! The waves caught the pebbles and tossed them up at your legs and feet, none too gently! Ouch! (I do think it would have been fine if we'd had water shoes, so if we ever go back, we'll know to bring some!)
However…wading or no wading, it was a great beach for exploring! The sound of the water on the pebbles was amazing. Amid the usual growl of the waves you could hear the constant clacking and shifting of the pebbles sliding against each other, and the quiet rattle of rocks being tossed up and down when a wave swept back out to sea. In the Stormlight Archive books I just read with Abe, there's a world (Shadesmar) where the ocean is made of millions of little glass spheres. This beach sounded just how I imagined those Shadesmar beaches must sound, with their endless clatter of shifting spheres.
It was all so secluded and quiet, too. We hiked along the coast here for a bit, ducking our way through some scrubby little woods and clambering over big lava rock pillars. We never saw anyone else. There are resorts on this island, of course. But in general the whole island seemed pretty quiet and peaceful and…well, I hate to say non-tourist-y, because WE were tourists, of course. But it just felt so different from my memories of Oahu. Much more of a remote, small-town feel here, everywhere we went.
This was a sandier section of beach, a short walk away. I love the way the white foam looks against the black sand.
Some views from the house
Baby froggy
Clementine surrounded by pillows to prevent her from scooting off the bed
Breakfast. We tried star fruit and it was so good! It reminded me a little of kiwi fruit.
One morning I hiked south along a rocky trail to that lone tree—see it? Waaaaay down there sticking up from the black pile of rock?
It was a cool trail. There were a few wooded areas where the trees made tunnels to duck through.
And remote little rocky coves
And tall cliffs
Along the way there was a rock mound with a "burials" sign on it where people had left little treasures—shells and driftwood and bits of coral. Nearby was a small grove of plumeria trees (you can see some of their funny twisty branches near the other tree in this picture) with their yellow-and-white flowers, and so many fallen blossoms covering the ground. So pretty.
I can never believe plumerias are real flowers. They look too perfectly molded to be real.
"The tree" (the one I was hiking to) was at the top of a big crescent-shaped lava mound. When we looked at it on a map later, we could see it was one side of a blast crater, where the other side had been eroded by the ocean. It was cool looking back north up the coast and seeing other long black lava flows making their way to the water too. You really can't go too long in Hawaii without being reminded that you're standing in very close proximity to volcanos!
When I looked back down the hill, I was surprised and pleased to see Sam, finished with his morning meeting, hiking up behind me with Clementine on his shoulders!
Was she pleased to see me too? She doesn't look it.
Sam carried her most of the way down.
And eventually all that hard work (his hard work) lulled her right off to sleep.
It was such a blessing for this trip that so many things are able to be done online. Sam was able to keep up on his work meetings when necessary. And here he is sitting on the deck giving one of his BYU Finals. Not the worst place to work from!
I really liked the south end of the island. We drove around the bottom half, heading east, to nearly the place we'd been earlier, the lava flows by Kilauea. So we really did complete the whole circuit of the island! The water was so blue next to the green land (with those black lava cliffs always peeking out beneath, of course).
Here we are looking across to the very southernmost point of the island—and of the whole United States, in fact. See those windmills way out by the ocean?
Here they are closer. That is Ka Lae, the point, just past where they end.
But my very favorite thing on the south end of the island was Punalu'u, this black sand beach. It was not gravelly—not pebbly—but truly sandy, with beautiful fine black sand that felt soft (if HOT) on our toes. It was so beautiful!
You would think this fine black sand must mean the beach was OLD. Because it had to take lots of time for all those lava rocks to be ground down into sand, right? But I actually read that the black sand beaches here weren't formed by erosion:
"When lava contacts water, it cools rapidly and shatters into sand and fragmented debris of various size. Much of the debris is small enough to be considered sand. A large lava flow entering an ocean may produce enough basalt fragments to build a new black sand beach almost overnight. The famous "black sand" beaches of Hawaii, such as Punaluʻu Beach and Kehena Beach, were created virtually instantaneously by the violent interaction between hot lava and sea water."
So interesting, right? I wish I could have seen that happening.
The first great thing about this beach was the water was WARM. I cannot overstate how surprising and amazing that was, and still is, to me. In my mind, playing at the beach is—on all but the very most unbearably hot days—synonymous with venturing into the water with great apprehension and bravery, and then running almost immediately out again, freezing. So to walk into the water and feel nothing but a little shock of coolness, more soothing than bracing, is the height of novelty and delight!
And the second great thing was that it was full of beautiful fish and coral! Our rental house had snorkels for us to use, and even just a few steps from the shore, once you got underwater you could see the most lovely shimmering schools of fish weaving in and out of rocks and patches of sunlight. The water didn't get deep for a long way out, so you could just walk in (not gasping from the cold, and not shivering and thinking about how soon you could reasonably get out again) and swim around, following the fish and feeling like a fish yourself! It was so, so good. We took turns holding Clementine so we could all go in.
I didn't have a camera that could take pictures of it, but under the water it looked like this:
And we saw all those kinds of fish and more. They were so beautiful! We wore flippers or shoes so the rocks wouldn't hurt our feet, and if it hadn't been for Clementine we probably could have kept snorkeling for hours and hours! (I blame Clementine because she can't deny it. But to be honest, Abe would have kept us from losing track of time anyway. He gets hungry and once he's hungry he WANTS TO EAT. He doesn't stand for any nonsense like skipping meals. Or saying "Well, we did have a big breakfast…" Heaven forbid!)
The water on the black sand was so shiny.
And so dark!
Just on the other side of those palm trees above the beach is a pond all covered with lilies—so covered you can hardly even tell it's a pond!
It was pretty. There were yellow butterflies fluttering around everywhere, and then constantly going back to the pond and resting on the ground in groups, like this. I wonder why they were doing that?
This beach had sea turtles, too, sunning on the sand and swimming out into the water from time to time. That was really fun to see.
Clementine wore her swimming suit so she could get in the water if she wanted to. But she generally preferred to stay out, snuggling with someone.
Abe finally got to hang up his hammock, which he had been taking everywhere hoping to find a place to put it. This was the ideal spot!
The drive away from the beach was beautiful too. Green and cloudy. We passed huge macadamia orchards which reminded me a little of the hazelnut orchard we've stayed at in Oregon.
There was a town close by, and this sweet little roadside fruit stand where we bought bananas and (just for fun) a cacao pod.
And—to our delight, especially Abe's—there was a Portuguese Bakery selling donuts! We bought some of everything to try, of course. They weren't really donuts. They were…some kind of Portuguese pastry that tasted like donuts. Everything was really good. I still have an abiding regret, when I look at this picture, that we didn't drive down again another day so we could try the pastry with passion fruit filling, which they were out of when we were there.
When it was time for dinner, we followed directions on Yelp to a tiny little taco restaurant which we were pretty sure, after driving for a while, didn't really exist. We drove way off the main road, through empty fields and toward no towns or houses, and finally turned onto a dirt road heading into an orchard, where we saw a tiny little shed and an open-air kitchen, and smelled the most amazing smells…
It was the best kind of place to discover. Tiny. Fresh-picked flowers on the four little tables. Only a few things on the menu, and the cooks standing there talking to you as they cooked. It was run by the people that owned the orchard (a dragonfruit orchard!) and they were only open a couple nights a week.
And that was the end of a really lovely day!
I've loved going through these memories through the pictures and your thoughts on what we did. Thanks for posting it all!
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking us there! :)
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