Pages Tagged “Kona”
Blog Posts
- Hawaii: First and Last Views
Here’s our first view of the island of Hawai‘i, as our plane approached on Sunday morning, April 3. Snow-capped Mauna Kea is rising out of the clouds, with Mauna Loa behind it. A week later, we spent Sunday evening waiting for our flight out of Kona Airport. (After a disastrous experience at LAX in which […]
- Hidden Mountain
There was one morning in Hawai‘i that the clouds in Kona cleared and we could actually see something of Hualalai, the volcano that makes up the western side of the island and on whose slopes we were staying. Here’s the view from our hotel room balcony. Usually it looked more like this: Note: Our stay […]
- Under the Sea (Kailua Edition)
On the same day as our whale-watching cruise (April 6), we took a submarine tour of Kailua Bay from Atlantis Adventures. The tour started at the Kailua pier, where a boat ferried us out to the submarine in the middle of the bay. The sub itself went down to around 80-90 feet by the end […]
- The Keauhou Beach Resort
When we arrived in Hawaii, I posted this photo taken from our hotel room balcony: What I didn’t mention was that that shot was carefully cropped. The view really looked like this: Well, hey, we got the cheap rooms, so you kind of expect that. Still, there was a lot to see right on the […]
- Up the coast to Kohala
It’s taking me longer than I thought to post all these Hawaii photos. North of Kona there are miles of old lava flows, the most recent of which were in 1801 (from Hualalai, the volcano above Kailua) and 1859 (from Mauna Loa, the second-higest peak on the island). Because the island is right in the […]
- Exploring Kona
We spent a lot of time exploring the Kona coast, where towns manage to be both beach towns and mountain towns at the same time. It’s simplest to think of the island as one huge mountain (though there are really four mountains on the island, with a fifth, Kilauea, working its way up). The land […]
- Donkey Xing
Driving through the lava fields of North Kona, you’ll see signs like these: After coffee companies stopped using donkeys for transportation, they turned them loose, and a herd of wild donkeys roamed the fields. They apparently picked up the nickname “Kona nightingales” from their, uh, “singing.” They’ve since been moved up to greener—and less traveled— […]
- Hawaii in a nutshell
So… a week in Hawaii. I guess the main thing to remember is that it is the “big island.” It can take 2½–3 hours to get from one side of the island to the other, and that’s without stopping to see anything along the way. We stayed in Kailua-Kona, and ended up spending most of […]
- Overheard in a Kona cafe
Diner: I was here thirty years ago and had the best beer I’ve ever tasted, anywhere in the world. <pause> This is the worst. Waiter: I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do anything about that. It’s Budweiser.