BOX 236: Hawai'i 6: Big Island.

In May 2002, right after final exams were over, Anne and I took nine students on an 11-day tour of Hawai'i's Big Island and O'ahu. It was a kind of branching off of our annual January trips to Europe, and more directly it tied in with a course I'd just taught that spring: "Literature and Cultures of Hawai'i," an interdisciplinary course featuring guest lecturers in Geography, History, Political Science and Art--a course I'd developed, working with Anne, from research we'd done during previous Hawai'i trips. Students who had taken the course could earn an extra college credit and experience first-hand some of the settings for the fiction as well as the geological phenomena and the historical sites they had encountered in the course. Anne and I had designed a custom itinerary, and since we ended up with a much smaller group than on our European excursions, we saved money on buses by renting a van on each island with us as the drivers.

In the photo above you see the nine students with Anne on the right. I greatly regret not remembering the names of most of them at the moment, especially since they were delightful people who made the whole endeavor a great pleasure. I haven't been able to find a roster of names, but if I do, I'll add them to this post. (And if you know any, mention them in a comment below!) At least I can say that's Kim on the left, Sheryl fourth from left, and Mark standing behind Anne's right shoulder--you may recall him in the Armani suit he bought during our stay in Siena (BOX 234.) We're standing in the main street of the town of Kailua-Kona, having landed the previous afternoon at the nearby airport.

My photos (scanned slides, as always) in this and the next post will feature the students quite a bit--in contrast to nearly all my previous travel posts, with their focus on the places themselves. Maybe I wanted to document this trip for our campus community and recruit participants on future trips, plus I'd taken plenty of photos of certain Hawai'i sites on previous trips--and most of the students seemed to enjoy posing!

We stayed at by far the best of the Kailua-Kona hotels, the King Kamehameha, thanks to our being able to get a group rate. My first slide of the trip shows the view from our hotel window: not a very inspiring sight except for the palm trees, because a haze is blocking most of our view of Hualalai, the extinct volcano rising in the background.

But I love my second photo, showing Anne in profile as we took our first walk along oceanside Ali'i Drive in Kailua-Kona:

Along this street is the Hulihe'e Palace, dating from 1838, where Hawaiian royalty (the ali'i) resided:

On our first afternoon we took an excursion south along the Kona Coast, stopping for lunch at the Manago Hotel in the town of Captain Cook and, a little farther south, looking over the coffee beans growing on the slope leading down to Kealakekua Bay:

We stopped at a macadamia nut farm that Anne and I had visited on a previous trip--the place had a showroom with historical farm tool and processing machinery and very fresh macadamias for sale, but my only slide is an awkward one of the parking area with the main building on the left. Better is a shot of the lovely St Benedict's Catholic Church, completed in 1902, nicknamed the Painted Church because of its fantastic interior. On other occasions I photographed the inside, but here I have just one shot of the exterior, with Anne speaking to another tourist or a local person. (To see the painted interior, look here.)

We also stopped at the House of Refuge, an ancient place of sanctuary, now a National Historical Park. My one photo provides a glimpse of some reconstructed buildings--and some beautiful palm trees--but you'll need to look here for background information.

Back at our hotel we got ready for a luau on the hotel grounds (included in the price of the trip). Here are Anne and I ready for the luau, and three students on a lanai above us:

My first photo of the luau itself is not exactly a typical one: a chameleon licking a maraschino cherry on a shelf behind the bar serving mai-tais. The bartender said he was a regular--presumably not under the influence.

Hula dancers--on the hotel's beach near a shallow inlet--were part of the luau entertainment before the dinner. I'll show you the full slide and a cropped version:

I took one pic of our table at the luau, after which a staff member volunteered to take one of all of us:

In the above shot, and in the one below showing the luau musicians, you can see the town across Kailua Bay and the slope of Hualalai:

Our next day's excursion took us northward and upland into cattle country and the slopes of Mauna Kea:

We descended to the Hamakua Coast on the other side of the island and the Waipio Valley at the north end of the Hamakua highway. On previous trips Anne and I had been to the lookout with its stunning view of the valley isolated by 1000-foot cliffs. People of Hawaiian descent still lived there but restricted visitors to pre-registered groups. Anne and I were thrilled to be able to go into the valley, after having read a great deal about it. It was reachable only by a narrow dirt road winding down the southern cliffside (or by horseback or foot on the higher north cliffs). We met our guide at the lookout and were taken into the valley by a van. (I would certainly not have wanted to attempt the drive myself.) Here's the view as we started our ride:

And here is the river down on the valley floor:

This farmhouse has a spectacular waterfall beyond it:

We transferred from the van to a horse-drawn wagon to take us on a rougher road through more of the valley:

The valley's tropical vegetation stood out against the forbidding north cliff:

I see that I couldn't resist taking waterfall photos from the wagon:

Here is another farm:

And here we're looking westward up the valley:

At the end of our tour we spent some time at the lookout point where the valley meets the ocean:

We returned to Kailua-Kona by going back upland, this time through the town of Waimea and down to the Kohala Coast. We stopped at the Hilton Waikaloa Village, showing the students an extreme contrast between the very traditional rural life in the Waipio Valley and the ultra-luxurious (but free to visit) Wailakoa resort, where we had drinks at a cafe:

The Waikaloa still had its dolphin pool (we had seen it in 1994 with Michelle and Becky, when the resort was a Wyatt Regency). Here's a resident dolphin up close:

That evening we had excellent pizza at the Kona Brewing Company near our hotel, and the next morning, with those who wanted to join us early, we went snorkeling at our favorite spot south of town. In the afternoon we packed up and continued down the Kona Coast around the southern tip of the Big Island, and upward toward Volcanoes National Park. I don't know where this next photo was taken--somewhere along that drive:

Again thanks to group rates we were able to stay somewhere Anne and I couldn't have afforded on our own: at Volcano Lodge, the historic hotel built on the rim of Kilauea. More precisely, the hotel rented us a cottage on their grounds with enough separate rooms to accommodate us. It was an enchanting place in a woods quite close to the hotel yet isolated. I wish I had taken more photos of it--at least the one shot I have, showing the entrance, gives a sense of how secluded and inviting it was:

Beyond the back terrace of Volcano House you have spectacular views of the Kilauea caldera:

It was an occasion for some good student poses:

In 2002 you could still take a walk up to the edge of the Halema'uma'u crater within the larger Kilauea caldera--a decade later it was actively erupting and couldn't be approached:

My next photo gives a good sense of the steep cliffs rising above the floor of Kilauea:

Two more pics are less well focused but do show some of our group investigating the cooled lava floor:

The next morning was unusually clear, affording views of the slope of nearby Mauna Loa rising above Kilauea:

. . . and of Mauna Kea in the farther distance. I tried to get both the mountain and a flower of the ohi'a lehua tree, a native plant, in focus but got only the flower:

The last of my Volcano slides, a shot of a pheasant crossing our path in the trees near our hotel, is too blurry to show, so let's continue our itinerary, taking us down to Hilo, where we had some time to explore the town, including its open-air produce market, before flying to Honolulu for the second part of our trip. Three of the students posed near the flower market--I'm guessing they're wearing dresses they'd bought locally. Meanwhile, Anne bought a bunch of flowers to take to O'ahu--I can't decide which I like better of the two similar photos I took, so I'll include both:

The last two Hilo slides you may find puzzling, since they show a very ordinary-looking street. But we wanted a visual record of Mamo Street in Hilo, because it is the main setting of one of the best of the novels we had studied in our course, Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Heads By Harry. (The novel is set decades earlier when older buildings, including a neighborhood movie theater, were still standing.)

I'll report on our stay in Waikiki and exploration of O'ahu in my next post.