Adventure Days

I promised my parents a blog post to read for this morning, but my sunburn and swollen tonsils got in the way last night and I pretty much passed out at 8pm.

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Christmas came and went as it always does, with stockings and Santa and incredibly large family gatherings containing overly-sufficient supplies of food. I met a LOT of relatives, mostly because Nae'ole was sick and left me alone with them.

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Nae'ole was still sick, but that didn't stop me from having fun. We went down to Hilo town and met up with some cousins and Aunties at Reed's Beach, where Aunty Rocky had brought her 2 kayaks. I have a fair amount of experience in ocean kayaks, but not on the ocean. What I had no experience whatsoever on was what I was goaded into trying.



A racing outrigger. The actual boat that I was on was probably 15 years older than this one and not nearly as fancy. One big rule of outriggers- you can NOT lean to the right. Not even a little bit, not even at all. I flipped myself off while I was still being instructed, so I thought, ok, no big deal, now I probably won't do it again.

Wrong.

I got out into the bay and looked around, watching as a large wave came at me sidelong and thought, this is going to flip my boat. Yep. That happened. I panicked so hard that I think I actually jumped out of the water back onto the boat, never letting go of my paddle.

One of the cousins swam out on a boogie board to check on me and asked if I had been using the peddles... Excuse me? The what?? Turns out, when Aunty Rocky had been saying peddle, I was hearing paddle, and that the whole time there was a rudder under the boat that I could have been steering with!!

Anyway, Ka'eo towed me away from the rocks (Aunty's one rule- don't hit any rocks!) but I had had enough and went back in, this time steering nicely. After I recovered a little bit, I went back out, this time in an ocean kayak that I actually know how to use. I picked a few hibiscus blossoms out of the water and brought them back for the little girls.

For some strange reason I neglected to photograph any of this...

That same day we also went to Richardson beach, another black sand beach, this one in Hilo. It was SO crowded.



It was good snorkeling though, and I actually did a little bit of that.



The waves were pretty big and there were a lot of surfers.







I really liked Richardson Beach a lot.



Eventually some of our family showed up! This is Kepa- a cousin- jumping off the rocks.



When you are the photographer, you don't have to jump...



Or climb back up...



All told, it was a really fun day. I did a lot of scary things and lived through them, I swam out into deep water and I took a boat out alone into open ocean (sort of).



Every single person in this photo except the kid under the shower is family.



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I was not really looking forward to this day. Nae'ole was still feeling a bit sick, and I was sore from the terrors of the day before, but we piled in the vans all the same and headed down to Ka Lae, the southernmost point in Hawai'i and the US.

Along the way we pulled over to look around.

Looking right.


Looking left.


We also stopped at the Punalu'u Bake Shop, which boasts such treats as taro sweet bread and lilikoi and guava malasadas. Delicious.

Ka Lae is basically a giant cliff in the middle of the ocean. The water is really deep and there's supposed to be pretty good deep sea fishing, right off the coast. We saw some spearfishers swimming around, and there were lots of guys with their lines out. The reason that I basically only took one photo is because there were FLIES ALL OVER US.



That platform is where you JUMP OFF THE CLIFF. Seriously. No one did it while we were there, but it's pretty popular.



Also there's a hole that you can jump into, and you have to swim to another hole to get out.



See the ladder in the bottom right?

We didn't stay at Ka Lae very long, and the only reason we stayed as long as we did was because of this:



DOLPHINS.

Then we drove over to Green Sand Beach Park, where I finally saw some decent art.









It's a 2.5 mile hike to Green Sands through fairly rough terrain (if you don't go the easy way), but when you see this you immediately know that it's worth it.





Looks like Ireland.





My mother-in-law made the hike with me and she was a champ at getting up and down that hill, even with her torn meniscus. Way to go Cheryl!









We did a LOT of body surfing. Add that to the list of personal accomplishments, because body surfing obviously it requires swimming out in to deeper water, submerging your head, and trusting that after the waves roll you around, you will eventually come to the surface. It was scary, but it was SO. MUCH. FUN.



We walked back the easy way, which was beautiful.







Sorry this took so long to post- I have got a wicked throat infection and head cold, as well as a sunburn from Green Sands. By now I'm mostly recovered, but I've been sleeping a lot the last couple of days.

Next update will have LAVA and SURFERS.