Sunday seemed like a good day to drive all around the upper half of the island. I know it's "the Big Island," but I liked that it wasn't SO big you couldn't tell you were ON an island—we could see our progress as we drove around and the ocean was on different sides of us depending where we were.
But first we went to church. We saw a couple of our churches in Hilo (maybe there are more we didn't see). You can always tell when it's one of ours! Even if they are different-shaped than the ones back in Utah that look much the same as each other. This one had beautiful rainbow stained-glass windows in the chapel.
And a cool little open courtyard in the center! I love going to church in other places. Here, the bishopric wore leis and there were Christmas decorations in the foyer. So fun. People were friendly to us and it was just nice.
After church we drove up through Hilo again. There was a road all lined with Banyan Trees. They are so cool! I've only seen pictures of them before. They're like…those bead curtains people hung across their doorways in the 70s. Or like flap-brushes in a carwash. But alive!
(I'm fine with them as long as I don't think about those long vines growing down, down, down…INTO the ground. Thank you for asking.) (What do they do if there's something in their WAY when they get there? Just grow…through it? *shudder*)
Then we found a Japanese garden, and I love a good Japanese garden! Especially tropical-style.
Another great tree! I love how these have a canopy that spreads out so wide and criss-crosses so neatly against the sky. Like those cracks that you get in the safety-glass when your car windshield gets hit and shatters. Or like a mesh screen overhead.
I wonder if their roots look just like that too, under the ground?
Here is one of those trees from afar. It's huge! What is it? I realized on this trip that my tropical tree-knowledge is sorely lacking!
More banyans! Look at tiny Sam next to that one. (I hope the hanging-down branches don't grow down…through him.)
Looking up
Those hanging vine-branches…argh, what are they called? Aha! (I looked it up)—prop roots or column roots. Anyway, they look viney and wispy from afar, but many of them are quite substantial up close! Heavy and thick! I whapped one with my hand and it hardly moved at all. And you can see they're all woven and twisted and grown together like netting. Hmm. I love banyan trees but I also…looking back over these pictures…don't feel entirely comfortable with them. Let us move gracefully on to a new subject.
We made another stop north of Hilo where there was a little roadside sign pointing to a hike. This was one of my favorite places. There was a steep descent down to the ocean, through another of those amazing tropical rainforest jungles. There were some HUGE leaves, much bigger than Clementine, as you can see.
Cute gecko-shadow on the huge leaf above us
At the bottom of the hill you ended up in a little cove where the ocean came crashing in right up against the forest. It was SO BEAUTIFUL.
I could not get enough of the way the sun looked coming through the rainforest air. It was humid and you could feel it, but it wasn't uncomfortable. Just warm and jungle-y. It seemed right.
There were more big waves here. We climbed out onto this rock and the particularly big ones got us wet. It felt nice.
It had an almost desert-island-y feel—the huge plants and towering trees and the sheltered little beach.
Curving around to the north of the island, we looked for a place to eat lunch and found Laupahoehoe Point, a beach park with MORE enormous waves. I sat nursing Clementine with my back against a poky lava rock and watched the waves crash through the big rocks below. (See my foot there in the corner?) I had a hard time maneuvering the camera with only one hand, but of course that didn't stop me. Could there be a better spot to have lunch? No, there could not. Now I think of it, I should compile a book called "Places I Have Nursed a Baby." There have definitely been many beautiful ones!
I think it was the narrow channels between the rocks here that made the waves so impressive. When the water was forced hard through that space, it shot WAY into the air!
The view back up to the main road was beautiful too. Those green hillsides!
Along the north side of the island, it's still green and beautiful, but it doesn't feel quite like rainforest anymore. We drove through big forests of tall trees, all the same—eucalyptus, I think. And we drove to a spot where we could overlook the Waipi'o Valley. It would have been fun to hike down into it.
Do you want to know more about that apostrophe-thing in words like Waipi'o, by the way? I did. It was driving me crazy because it ISN'T an apostrophe. Practically every Hawaiian word, on signs or wherever, had what looked like a left single quotation mark in it, and it looked so wrong! In English, the symbol we see in the middle of words is always an apostrophe (which looks like a right quotation mark). Anyway, I finally looked it up, and learned that this mark is called the 'okina, and it's like a tiny 6 with the hole filled in. Properly written, it's actually smaller and lower in the superscript than a left quotation mark (see here). It designates the glottal stop in a word. So! Now you know. (And it is acceptable to use the left single quotation mark, if you must.)
Clementine contemplating proper usage of the glottal stop
After looking over Waipi'o Valley, we backtracked (the road ends there at the overlook) and drove up through the Waimea Valley where the terrain changes drastically yet again! There are big sweeping open fields with grass and cows and horses grazing. I read there are cowboys and huge cattle ranches on this part of the island.
It had gotten a little cloudy earlier, but here we had come up through the clouds. Mauna Kea is in the distance, I think.
It almost felt like Logan or Idaho. Though greener.
Then we drove down a beautiful long green slope…
And after that it was dark and rainy and we couldn't see much as we drove down through Kailua-Kona—except a quick hurried flash of what was unmistakably a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temple! I didn't even know there WAS a temple on this island, so it was fun to run into it unexpectedly!
What a beautiful, beautiful part of the world this is!
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