Keauhou Kona, Big Island
The state of Hawaii is composed of many islands.  Our visit was limited to just one island, Hawai’i or “Big Island”, which is the newest and largest of that island chain.  It was the first Hawaiian island to be populated about 1200 years ago by a migration from Polynesia after an ocean voyage of 3500+ miles via canoe (!!).  Hawai’i was the island where the king resided.  It was also the first of the “Sandwich Islands” to be “discovered” by Captain James Cook in 1779.  This history plus the Volcano National Park made Big Island my first choice if I could only see one island. We stayed in Keauhou Kona, which is in the central portion of the west (leeward) coast.  After the fact, I am glad that we leisurely did one island well since we had only one week.
 

The pleasures of Paradise

Visual pleasures:
It looked like paradise, not like Florida.  The volcanoes towered over every landscape. The volcanic features (black sand beaches, lava fields, lava cliffs and caves, etc.) were unique and picturesque.

The flowers were everywhere, lining the roads and pathways, worn in necklaces and as hair ornaments, sold on street corners.  From now on, I will have a strong, pleasant visual memory of Hawaii’s vivid-colored flowers.  Most were unfamiliar and I did not learn their names, but the colors were so rich that they made visiting Hawaii be like coming to life in a Gauguin Tahitian painting.  Bright yellow small flowers, magenta triangular flowers, big red-orange flower sprays on trees, pure white small flowers with petals like a child’s drawing, small white flowers with yellow centers, pink-purple small flowers, rich red hibiscus as well as yellow hibiscus, orchids of pink, purple, white --all shades!  The first morning in Hawaii, John and I were so jet-lagged that we got up extremely early and took a walk to watch the sunrise.  Hawaiian sunrises and sunsets are spectacular.  Everywhere we walked there were lovely flowers, rivaling even the sunrise’s hues.  The bushes and trees had “carpets” beneath them of shed flowers.  I began picking up these beautiful fallen flowers as we walked and took a double armload back to our hotel room, putting them on my daughters’ covers so they would wake up their first morning in Hawaii surrounded by fragrant flowers.

About the very lovely sunrises and sunsets, watching them became a part of our vacation day.  One evening we walked down to the beach to watch the sun go into the ocean, and there were many other people from our resort sitting on the rocks and benches in total silence to view the sunset (--eerie).  It struck me that we never take the time to stop to enjoy sunrises and sunsets at home.  I’ve resolved to bring that back with me from vacation.

Fragrant pleasures:
Most of those beautiful Hawaiian flowers are extremely fragrant, perfuming the air surrounding them.  I grew up savoring floral fragrances.  When I remember my Grandmother Johnson, I remember the scent of Cape Jessamine (gardenia).  She planted a Cape Jessamine bush beside the breezeway at her home to smell every time she went in or out, cutting the white flowers for her kitchen.  My mother loves tea-olive trees, planting these outside the bedroom window and beside the back door.  I grew up with the scent of tea-olive wafting through our house.  Now I have my own tea-olive tree outside of my dining room window, and my own Cape Jessamine fragrantly flourishing beside my front door and immediately outside of Mary’s bedroom windows.   Needless to say, Hawaii’s flowers found an appreciative olfactory fan in me!   Also notable about Hawaii is the wonderful aroma of Kona coffee, strong and tantalizing every morning.  It smelled great and tasted as good as it smelled.  I loved Hawaii’s fragrances.

Pleasures of taste:
Well, I kept myself on a slack leash.  First on this list is the outstanding Kona coffee.  The resort put out a complimentary coffee pot every morning at 6:30 and kept it there until 10am.  I got another cup every time I walked past it.  John laughed at me for counting how long it was until 6:30 one morning.  That was absolutely the best coffee I’ve ever had --mellow, not a bit acidic.

I also thoroughly approved of the Hawaiian variation of barbecue, namely their luau pig , “kalua pork”, which is flavored by wrapping the pig in ti leaves and burying it in a pit in the ground to steam.  Those ti leaves-as-flavoring made me temporarily forget Maurice Bessinger’s delicious mustard-based barbecue sauce --not easy to do!  (Maurice, South Carolina’s barbecue king, really ought to take a field trip to a Big Island luau.)

My family greatly enjoyed the unique fruits, particularly fresh pineapple and papaya.  We ate a lot of “fruit boat” lunches --piles of various fresh fruits chunked into a slightly hollowed pineapple half.  Both of my daughters fell in love with having fruit smoothies (fruit whipped through a blender into a milkshake-like drink) for breakfast .  --Diana brought that home with her and continues to make these.  Haupia,  a sort of coconut milk jello, was another treat --yum.  I wanted to try the pineapple coleslaw, praised in the restaurant reviews I read on the Internet when I paid advance visits to Konaweb, but I never had the opportunity.  I confess that I did try the famous “Mac pie”, made with local macadamia nuts, and it was good --lived up to its reviews.  It is always fun to eat at good restaurants on vacation.

Footnote:  One local favorite food did not rate being labeled a gustatory pleasure --poi, which is pounded taro root, a purple paste that is a staple of the native diet.  One taste was all I needed.  I could, however, get used to the potato-chip-like salty taro chips.

Typical vacation pleasures:
Going to the beach, swimming, boating, snorkeling, touring the local sites, shopping.  All of this was done and found to be excellent.

Beaches:
Big Island boasts a variety of different types of beaches.  We sampled three different kinds.

Lava cliff oceanfront:  The oceanfront at Kona Surf Resort where we stayed consists of rugged lava cliffs.  Even though these allowed no beach access for swimming, they rated the top of our “favorite things” list --fun to explore and for our walks.  John reminded me of a retriever let off the leash the way he did those beaches --excitedly into everything and all over the place.  We had never seen lava before and found it interesting.  There are, according to the Hawaiians, two types of lava: smooth “pahoehoe” lava and  chunky “`a `a” lava.  We saw both types, most being a black porous lava; but we also saw some rust-red lava, gray lava, and even lava with streaks of yellow ochre.  Often the lava look rippled and curled, like poured caramel.  We happened up on two interesting and rather treacherous blowholes very near our resort.  I learned that the repetitious, pounding waves erode the porous lava cliffs, making caves.  Then the force of the waves gets directed upwards and digs out a blowhole (like a big well) in the top of the cave.  Next, the arch on the ocean-side top of the blowhole is worn away to produce a dent or cove in the shoreline.  Another lava beach feature is Hawaiian-style graffiti --you collect white coral pebbles during your beach walk and place them to form letters to spell your name, etc.  We saw lots of these graffiti messages.

Black sand beaches and white sand beaches: For swimming, we drove five minutes up the coast road to a black sand snorkel beach , and, later, ten minutes up that same coast road to a white sand beach.  These public beaches are much smaller than the very long Atlantic beaches that I’m used to.  Both of the beaches where we swam had vigilant lifeguards.  The black sand beach is typical, the sand resulting from lava.  Four sea turtles lived there, as well as many tropical fish and coral.  White sand beaches are more unusual.  Residents call white sand beaches “storm beaches” because the white sand gets thrown ashore during storms.  Basically, white sand is “fish poop”.  The fish feed in the coral, and bite off chunks of coral that pass through their digestive tracks to result in coral granules = white sand.  A tour guide told us that each parrot fish produces one ton of white sand per year.  (--Who measured that?)

Surfing beaches:  We fully intended to go to `Anaeho`omalu Bay (known as A-Bay) for my daughters to take windsurfing lessons, offered 10am - 2pm daily, but we didn’t have time to do everything we wanted.  Conditions were right in that bay for big waves.

Snorkeling:
Every vacation should have an adventure.  My unexpected adventure was to snorkel for the first time in my life.  It was a totally wonderful, unique experience --looking into another world that’s strange and beautiful, populated by very active, strange and beautiful sea creatures.  My oldest daughter, Mary, loves fishes, has kept aquariums as a hobby since she was in second grade, and she wanted to snorkel in order to view the tropical salt-water fish in their natural habitat, Hawaii’s coral reefs.

Hawaii is the world’s premier snorkeling site.  Six hundred eighty different types of  fish live in the Pacific waters by Hawaii, one third of which are not found anywhere else.  Mary and Diana went on a four-hour harbor cruise that taught snorkeling and allowed snorkeling for one and a half hours.  Both daughters came back from this with stars in their eyes, raving about the experience. Snorkeling was Mary’s favorite part of the trip.  Their boat had gone to Kealakekua Bay at Captain Cook, Hawaii, to allow snorkeling in the coral reefs marine preserve there.  The water was so clear there that Mary said she could see to the bottom while standing on the tall upper deck of their boat.   Mary was dying to snorkel again, asking to take a raft trip that would also explore the seacoast caves and lava tubes.  Diana did not want to go.  I was hesitant to go, but at the last minute, signed up so that Mary would have a companion.  Also I really wanted to see the Captain Cook monument, commemorating the site where Captain James Cook died at the hands of irate natives.

I am so glad that I had the beautiful experience of snorkeling.  As in the case of the Hawaiian flowers, I saw many different types of lovely fish, but did not know their classifications/names.  I understand that snorkeling enthusiasts like to identify types of fish that they have seen and check them off a list (the same as birdwatchers do with their bird book).

Our tourguide told us the very interesting story of Captain Cook “discovering” Hawaii as 10,000 natives swarmed down onto Kealakekua Bay beach, swimming out to his ship, believing him to be their god of fertility whose festival was being celebrated at the time he arrived.  A month later, that god’s festival was over and the British had worn out their welcome and had left.  Unfortunately, the mast of one of the British ships broke in the storms of the treacherous strait between Hawaii and Maui; so Cook’s ships had to return to the same harbor bay for repairs.  This time the natives were in the time of honoring their war god and were rev-ving themselves up to do battle (--terrible timing).  Cook’s men took water without permission: it was a time of rationing for Hawaiians.  The natives angrily took back the water plus the longboat that carried it.  Captain Cook tried to deal with their resentment and tried to get his boat back via a plan to kidnap the king, but ended up getting massacred along with others of his crew.  The little area where his monument sits is the only piece of soil still owned by Britain that is in the U.S.   (Knowing interesting local history gives my trip a highly enjoyable four-dimensional quality, allowing me to savor both the “now” and the “then” as well as the scenic surroundings.)

Parasailing:
My youngest daughter Diana went parasailing and enjoyed it to the fullest.  For ten minutes she flew 800 feet above Kailua Bay, dangling on a kite, towed by a boat.  She says that at no point was she frightened.  I watched her do this (though she looked like a speck) and vicariously flew.
 

Touring the local sites:
Flight over the volcanoes:
We went “flightseeing” in order to have a tourguide show and discuss views of the volcanoes that couldn’t be seen by hiking or driving.  Thus we were able to view all five of the shield volcanoes that created Big Island.  These are Kilauea and Mauna Loa, still active, Hualalai which last erupted in 1801, and Mauna Kea and Kohala, inactive in recent history.  Mauna Loa is huge.  I believe our guide said that only a volcano on Mars is known in our solar system to be a larger volcano than Mauna Loa.  Mauna Loa is a massive 13,677 feet tall.  Much of it is owned by the Greenwell family, who raise coffee on its slopes.  Mauna Kea is also very impressive, the tallest volcano in the world when the section rising from the seafloor is counted.  It stands 13,796 feet above sea level.  Mauna Kea provides an ideal site for viewing the stars and is home to one of earth’s most important observatories.  Kilauea is earth’s most active volcano, erupting continuously since 1983.  The Hawaiians who practice/d the old religion believe that Pele, the volcano goddess, resides in the Kilauea Caldera.  Instead of a cone, Kilauea’s summit has a crater that looks like a witches’ cauldron.  Near Kilauea on Hawai’i’s east coast is the city of Hilo.  Hilo looks like paradise, with a rainforest, many spectacular gardens and waterfalls; but it is a paradise I’d avoid.  In this century it has twice been washed away by giant tsunami waves, and Hilo is in the path of the active volcanoes’ lava flow.   We flew near the smoking Pu’u O’o vent that erupted from 1986-1992, destroying 300 homes and adding 200 acres of new land to Big Island.   During our volcanoes flight, we had spectacular close views of  Kilauea’s lava spurting into the ocean from a famous Lava Tube whose name I didn’t quite catch because I distracted by taking so many awesome photographs of it.  There is one more volcano affecting Big Island --the Loihi Seamount, an underwater volcano seven miles off Big Island’s east coast.  It is spewing up large volumes of magma and creating (in about another 100,000 years) either a new Hawaiian Island or a large addition to Big Island.

Astronomy tour of summit of Mauna Kea:
Diana took this tour one afternoon from 3:45pm until midnight.  She said she learned the most from it.  She also said the tour guide was enthusiastic, an astronomer who makes lenses for telescopes.  After the tour group went to Mauna Kea’s snowy summit, the tourguide set his telescope up and directed the group’s viewing of various points of astronomical interest.  I was intending to get a lot of vicarious mileage from Diana’s discussion about what she learned during this tour, but she  was so tired that she didn’t have much to say.
 

Place of Refuge National Park:
This is a lovely, breezy point of land on the south Kona Coast that has been very significant in native history because it provided a place of refuge.  Women and children went there during battles, as did wounded soldiers.  It was also a refuge for unfortunates who broke kaput --and there were so many whimsical things that were kaput/forbidden in that extremely structured society.   To give just one example, if you accidentally stepped where the king had stepped, you were injuring his mana (spirit of power), thus warranting death.  Whenever kaput was broken, it offended the gods who could get angry enough to kill everybody; therefore, the kaput-breaker was quickly punished in order to appease the gods and save everyone else.  The only punishment practiced by the Hawaiians was death.  To avoid the death sentence, fortunate kaput-breakers fled to the Place of Refuge, were cleansed by the priest there (which would take perhaps an hour) and then returned home, forgiven, to resume life as usual.

Several interesting things at the Place of Refuge were a mausoleum hut that contained the bones of the past Hawaiian kings thus preserving their mana so it would continue to benefit the island, a petrogylph (carving in a rock of a stick figure person), the royal fishponds where fish caught in the ocean were kept to be consumed later by the royals, and a board game somewhat like checkers, using smooth black lava rocks and smooth white coral rocks.

Tour of a Kona Coffee Plantation:
The joke was on me.  I had read on the Internet that Kona coffee beans cost about $1 a pound, so I thought, “I’ll buy a case of one pound bags of coffee wholesale, direct from the coffee mill to bring home to give as gifts.”  HA!  Instead, I bought three pounds of the best quality “extra fancy peaberry” Kona coffee (sold only in Hawaii), costing $24 per pound.  My local friends + family will each get a ziplock bag containing four tablespoons, enough for one pot.  Kona Coffee is the world’s most expensive coffee.  Most growers in the world earn 22 cents per pound for the beans they grow, but, on the day I toured, the going rate for Kona coffee beans was $1.24 per pound to the grower.  This is before all the sorting, processing, drying, roasting, etc. when it takes six of those raw pounds to equal one pound of finished coffee sold on the market as Kona Coffee.  I toured Bayview Farms, and saw the whole process, from the beans growing on the tree, through getting the husks off, the skin off,  sorting the beans into the six sizes (the bigger the better, flavor-wise), eliminating defective beans, drying, re-sorting, roasting, bagging, and the tour’s conclusion --the gift shop --selling the coffee.

I did learn one thing on this tour that stunned me.  The Greenwell family who has the huge Kona Coffee plantation and who are multi-millionaires, owning most of Mauna Loa, are descendants of the original missionaries who came to Hawaii to bring Christianity to the Hawaiian natives.  I heard this and had a similar reaction to Linus’s (in the Peanuts cartoon strip) when he found out that Miss Othmar, his greatly admired schoolteacher, received a salary for being a teacher.  How could the missionary offspring get rich off Hawaii, leaving the natives as hotel maids?!

The Painted Church:
The Painted Church was small, rural and hard to locate, taking three separate “tries” to find, but I was determined to find it and view the paintings.  The Painted Church is Catholic, founded by a missionary Father from Belgian.  He began painting significant religious scenes to get his message across to the natives, who could not read.  He used housepaint and the walls of his little wooden church.  This ministry proved very effective --the Hawaiians liked the paintings and responded well.  I wanted to see what scenes he chose to illuminate for the natives.  Well, I was surprised --no baby Jesus in a manger, no Crucifixion of Christ.  The only picture of Jesus was of His temptation, Jesus casting down the devil from the high place.  This Father painted one Old Testament scene, “The Handwriting on the Wall”.  He painted St. Francis seeing the vision of the cross.  There was a compelling picture, titled “A Good Death”, of a sweet-looking white girl with a cross on her chest, in a stone crypt with light coming through a window onto her body.  The painting next to it was a vivid scene of the torments of Hell. (--Obviously this was a priest who thought he was getting right to the point, namely selling fire insurance, instead of revealing God’s love).  Seeing this, satisfying my curiosity, was worth the effort.
 
 

Luau at Ahu’ena Heiau - Temple of Peace and Prosperity:
A luau is a “must”.  It was a total experience (almost hypnotic) -- a feast of great-tasting native food, an explanation of native history and customs, plus a fabulous floor show of native dancing with splendid costumes.  The luau we attended featured not just Hawaiian dances but also Polynesian dances from the Polynesian islands that were earlier homes to the natives who migrated to Hawaii.  My favorite performance by far was the hissing, tattooed, grimacing (making scary faces), chest-beating Maori dancers from New Zealand.  Even their women were tattooed.  The luau’s grand finale was a fire dancer who twirled fire batons, juggled fire, rubbed himself in flames and even ate fire.  Our luau was appropriately held at a historically significant place, the Temple of Peace and Prosperity (the temple of the benevolent fertility god), which is a big thatched hut near the pier in downtown Kailua Kona, and very close to where the last Hawaiian king lived.  This historic site is in the side yard of a big resort hotel that has its own small upscale shopping mall.  (About 20 miles up the coast is the big stone pyramid Pu’ukohola Temple of the Hawaiian war god --a very menacing place that was dedicated in 1791 with human sacrifices.)
 

Shopping

The area around Kailua Kona’s pier is full of great shops.  In addition to the Kona coffee, the lava chunks and the ziplock bag full of black sand that I brought home as mementos, we also purchased four really tacky but charming dashboard hula dancers (--Mary and I both decided to put one on our respective car dashboard to summon good Hawaii memories each time we see it; the other two are gifts to a couple of our neat friends who have a good sense of humor), two beautiful (but loud-colored) Hawaiian shirts, and several lovely flower leis.  I also bought a red hibiscus hair clip so I can sometimes have tropical flowers in my hair.  Mary, my fish-loving child, bought herself a Humuhumunukunukuapua’a tee-shirt. (--She thought she deserved it because she learned how to pronounce it.)  That is Hawaii’s state fish.  It makes a grunting sound, so part of its name translates as “pig”.  It is also called a “reef triggerfish”.  And we got lots of pretty postcards.
 

Why we went

Our traditional family vacation for the past few years has been to attend the U. S. Open Chess Tournament since chess is my husband’s passion, hobby and avocation.  John does not choose to compete in the actual annual U.S. Open tournament that determines who gets the title of U.S. Chess Champion, but he is extremely active in the U.S.Open delegate meetings (“chess politics” --human chess) of the U.S. Chess Federation.  Attending U.S. Opens has allowed our family to visit and explore major U.S. cities.  This year’s Open was in Hawaii.  Since airfare to Hawaii for our family cost $5000, I thought we could not afford for anyone except John to attend.  He surprised me by insisting that the entire family go, telling me that it would be our “trip of a lifetime”, an indulgence to take now because our daughters are so close to leaving home.  Could these seven days and six nights live up to such high expectations, being our “trip of a lifetime”?  My answer is yes.