So Jeff and I arrived at the airport at an ungodly hour, 4:45 am on Wednesday, Aug 23rd. Here's a lovely picture of us early birds. We arrived in Hawaii around 11 a.m. and I couldn't wait to get out of the plane. After what seemed like eternity, we hopped into our rental car (Mustang Coupe... it was a massive car for an "economy size" car. I could barely see over the dashboard :P) and drove to Hilton Waikoloa Village. The hotel was absoultely beautiful. They had paintings and sculpture all along the walls of the hotel.
I felt like I was in a museum. The resort was pretty big so we had to take a monorail from the lobby over to our room. It was kind of a pain cuz we had to wait for it each time for it to come so we saved time and ended up walking to our room instead. That amounted to quite a bit of walking. :PAfter settling in, we decided to grab something to eat at the cafe by our tower. After discovering that our measley lunc
h costs just as much as a dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe, we decided to head over to the local grocery store and stock up on munchies. :) Later that evening we dined at a oh-so-good Itailian restaurant, Donatoni's. I also had the best glass of Reisling ever! The kind from Germany is the way to go ;) The next morning we headed over to the East side of the island for a lava-tube tour. On the drive there, the landscape was incredibly dry. All we could see on the side of the highway were mounds and mounds of dark brown/red lava rocks. As we reached the middle of the island, the landscape turned into rich, lush, greens. It was also swarming with mosquitoes. *shudder* Anywho, back to the lava tubes. We were 45ft underground and it's known to be the longest lava tube in the world. Pretty cool, eh? We saw "lavacicles" and "crusted over tube within a tubes" and man-eating cave spiders (ok, kidding on the last one, but there were spides except they were more like the size of a pencil tip)... oh yeah, and there was also a skelton of a moongoose. Apparently, it fell in the tube and bled to death. Poor thing. Afterward we ate our pb&j sandwiches and headed over to see the waterfalls.
After driving around and spotting more waterfalls, we grabbed dinner and headed back to the hotel.The next morning we set out to go snorkeling at the "Place of Refuge". We found out from the hotel that it was one of the best places to go snorkeling because they had seaturtles there. Unfortunetly we didn't get to see any sea turtles *boo* but we saw tons of "itty bitty yellow tangs" that weren't so itty bitty and a few puffer fish. Afterwards we drove all the way down to the tip of the island called "South Point". Now I can say "I stood in the southest part of the U.S" cuz it is :) Here's a shot from South Point:
We decided to call it a day and headed back. I have to say, the drive wasn't so fun. Everything on the island is spread out so it takes a few hours to drive to each destination. We planned on going to the Volcano National Park but after all the driving we've already done, I wasn't too keen on spending another 6 hours in the car to melt to death on an active volcano. We decided to save that for another trip. :) On Saturday we set out to go hike to Kohala Bay. This was probably my favorite part of the trip. We hiked along the shore on black rocks and saw sea turtles basking and swimming in the sea. (there's a pic below, the turtle looks dead but I swear, it's not. I even have photo proof!) We reached the bay and swam around. There was a mixture of cold water (from the bay) and warm water (from the ocean). It was a weird sensation. Nonetheless, the view was breathtaking.
On Sunday we attended a luau...and it was open bar... amy had a bit too much to drink BEFORE the meal. Oops. To say the least, my stomach wasn't exactly very happy that night. The food (of what I remember) was delicious and the show was a lot of fun.
Monday was a sad day. It was our last day in Hawaii. We checked out of our hotel room at noon and realized we had about 8 hours to kill before our flight. Hmm... what to do?? You'd think there'd be plenty to do, but the weather was hot and humid. The idea of walking around in sweat and not being able to shower before boarding the plane was not very appealing. We drove to the northern part of the island and visited the Polulu Valley and then stopped for "the island's best ice cream" which really was the best ice cream ever. Here are some shots of the valley and ice cream :)
That only killed about 2 hours so we drove to Waimae and wandered around in a grocery store...yes, we were that bored. On the way back we browsed through a few gift shops and headed back to the resort for a last goodbye and then headed to the airport. The flight left at 10 pm and we arrived in chilly and gloomy San Jose at 8 a.m. That ends my trip and I'm so so so sad that it's over. Seeing that it took up 2 hours of my time at work to write this entry, I don't feel quite so bad anymore. haha. There are so many more photos I took. You can find them here: Hawaii Pictures
Aloha!
