Lift Up Your Hearts!

Our concierge had informed us of Waikoloa Village Market, where the locals buy groceries, so yesterday we picked up a few supplies, such as SPF50 sunscreen, a pineapple, a knife with which to cut the pineapple, and breakfast materials.  It was nice not to pay resort prices, but overall it must be admitted that Hawaii makes Swiss price tags seem reasonable.  Lower-48 Americans can stop complaining about the cost of a fill-up now: gasoline is about a dollar more per gallon in Hawaii.  We even paid more for the pineapple than we do at home in Florida.

We began our day with breakfast on the balcony:  Raspberry Ginger Clusters & Flakes.  It was good stuff, although the ginger overwhelmed the raspberry.  Obliterated, really.  Think of it as Blenheim-in-a-box.

The Hilton Waikoloa Village is a super resort.  You could have a bank-breaking fabulous vacation without ever leaving the property.  So, having spent but one night there, we left.  We kept the room, for we intended to return the next day.  (And we did.)  But what care we for super resorts?  We can have those for a lot less money without leaving Florida.  Beaches, swimming, and snorkeling?   Ditto.  But volcanoes?  Florida is remarkably short of that particular natural beauty.  So we hopped in our rental car, and hit the road.

If we’d been smart, we would have bought Hawaii: The Big Island Revealed (aka “the blue book”) before we left home and not paid island prices; even so, it was a great investment.  Along with the map our concierge had given us (more useful than the AAA map we had brought), this became our most important guide for the rest of the trip—even though I felt I was navigating standing on my head, since much of our journey went in the opposite direction from that described in the book.

When we had picked up the car, we had been asked if we wanted to upgrade the vehicle—to either a convertible or a Jeep.  “A Jeep?” I queried Porter in amazement, when he reported the option.  “I can see a convertible as an upgrade, but a Jeep?  No way.”  I was to learn my mistake later.  For this trip, however, we had no worries in our Ford Fusion.

Click on the map for more detail.  You will be able to zoom in and out, and move around.

We first returned to Waikoloa Village, the continued on Waikoloa Road to the Hawaii Belt Road (Route 190 at that point), and thence to the town of Waimea.

Does “Polynesian cow town” sound like an oxymoron?

Of all the images I had associated with Hawaii, “cattle country” was not one.  Yet the Parker Ranch—which traces its origins to a gift of longhorns given to King Kamehameha the Great in 1793—is one of the largest in the United States.  (Our helicopter pilot said it is the largest, but then you have to quibble about “contiguous” and “privately-owned” and other details; suffice it to say, the Parker Ranch is big.)

From Waimea, we continued on the Belt Road (now Route 19), deviating from it for a drive along the (even more) scenic Old Mamalahoa Highway.  This is the only time I wished we had had a GPS, because we were looking for a particular cave to explore, and the only instructions, besides a rough indication on the map, were latitude and longitude numbers.  We never found the bigger cave we were looking for, but settled for this small version, and went on.

Back on the main road, we made sure to stop at Honoka`a.  What’s in Honoka`a, you ask?  Nothing less than the Tex Drive In, famous for its malasadas (a type of doughnut introduced by the Portuguese).  Yum!  Er, make that Yum!  Yum!  We each had two. Not that they were really anything special as fried dough goes, but fried dough does go rather far in that direction.

That’s also where I took a pictures of this tree.

So far I’ve been unsuccessful in my efforts to learn its identity, but I doubt it’s true name is more evocative than Porter’s nickname:  “African-American hairdresser tree.”

Our next stop required a side trip, to the end of Route 240.  From there we looked out over the beautiful Waipi`o Valley.

Here is where having taken the helicopter ride saved us:  we knew there was no need to find a way down into the valley itself, as we would never get a view as good as yesterday's helicopter tour.  As the blue book says,

Don’t even think about driving a regular car down Waipi`o Valley Road.  The paved one-lane road down into the valley has a ridiculously steep 25% grade.  Vehicles with 4WD and low gears (so you don’t burn up your brakes) can make it down the 900-foot descent (in less than a mile).  Regular cars simply can’t.  (There is a wad of metal that was once a two-wheel drive truck below one of the turns left by someone who thought otherwise.  He miraculously survived by jumping from the vehicle just as it started tumbling down the almost vertical plunge.)

I was no longer laughing at the idea of a Jeep being a rental car upgrade.