Hello Everyone! I’m sorry I didn’t get this post written last week, but I was feeling a little bit under the weather and decided that rest was probably more important in the moment. As it turned out, it was the beginning of my symptoms for Covid which I managed to catch somewhere in Hawaii and am still wrangling with as I write this today. It’s not been the easiest thing to deal with either while I continued to run my tour in Hawaii or upon returning here to the mainland. I did, thankfully, climb out of the valley from Phoenix pretty quickly and find myself today in Flagstaff which is cool and clean and a good place to recover my strength and move towards the future. I am very thankful to be vaccinated and boosted and to know that this is likely to only be a temporary setback. It is going to tamp down my plans for the next couple of weeks as I need to make a full recovery before I go back to guiding tours in the second week of June, but I feel like I’m going to be alright. I knew this was going to be a risk when I decided to come back to guiding this summer, but it was a risk I was willing to accept and now here I am. All of that being said, Hawaii was still beautiful and I had a wonderful group of people around me to spend my time there with.
I arrived in Honolulu late in the evening on the 12th and was thrilled to wake up on the morning of the 13th in beautiful Waikiki where I went for a walk on the beach and enjoyed my coffee under the shade of a palm tree. I still had work to do that day, but did manage to get out and cruise around a little bit in the afternoon. I met my group in the evening and we enjoyed a hula show at the International Marketplace followed by a nice dinner and a beer at Maui Brewing Company. The following morning, we headed out to Pearl Harbor first thing for a few hours exploring the museum and a brief trip to the USS Arizona Memorial. In the late morning, we headed up to the North Shore of Oahu. I dropped my group off for a swim in beautiful Waimea Bay and then we had some lunch in Pupukeia before heading up and around the coast. We made several photo stops taking in the magnificent coastline and the stunning mountains rising out of the sea. We wound up our day back in Waikiki with another hula show, this one right on the beach and a lovely sunset over the water.
Saturday morning we made a stop in Honolulu to see Iolani Palace, the home of the last king and the last queen of the Kingdom of Hawaii. We checked out a handful of the other historic buildings downtown and even the modern state capitol before heading off to the airport for our flight to the Big Island. We arrived in Kona in the early afternoon and then headed south and around the island and made a stop at Pu’uhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park. This fascinating and beautiful park once served two purposes in early Hawaii. The first was as a retreat for the royal family and the high chiefs and priests of the island. The second was as a place of refuge for people who had broken the sacred laws of Hawaii and also for the wives and children of warriors lost in battle. There is a lot of fascinating Hawaiian history there and it is always worth a stop. From there we made our way around the island to Punalu’u Black Sand Beach and our first look at some of Hawaii’s wonderful honu or green sea turtles. Then we headed on to the small town of Volcano, just outside of Hawaiian Volcanoes National Park, where we would stay for the next two nights. We stayed at the lovely Volcano Inn which is probably my favorite hotel on the whole trip. It’s a small eco-lodge out in the jungle where you go to sleep to the sound of rain on the canopy and a symphony of tree frogs all around you.
We spent the next day exploring the national park with a local guide who brought us to all kinds of cool places and showed us some beautiful parts of the landscape. In the afternoon we checked out some ancient Hawaiian petroglyphs and the beautiful Holei Sea Arch on the coast. After a quick stop at the Volcano Winery for my group to sample some of their volcanic grown wines, we had our dinner at the park lodge while the sun went down and the glow from Kilauea became more apparent. I visited this park four times in 2019 and there was no lava to be seen so it was wonderful to be able to see this volcano alive again. We traveled to several viewpoints where we could see the glow of the lava, and then hiked out near the Keanakākoʻi crater where we could actually see the lava flowing and pooling. It was pretty amazing and I’m really glad we went out to see it even if it made for a long day.
