We were all a little worn out from the long day at the Volcano yesterday, but no rest for the weary – we’ve got Kona to see! I was up with the sun and Noelle was right behind me as soon as the smell of kona coffee filled the house. Weather was looking cloudy outside and rainy, but supposedly the Kona Coast is much dryer than our side.
We left the house close to on schedule at 7, which is good because we’ve got a long drive. We need to drive clear cross the whole big island to get to Kona. If I had to do this again, I probably have booked us 2 nights in Hilo, and 2 in Kona just due to the distance. Too late to worry about that now though – let’s hit the road for ~1.5 hours.
The drive was nice – once you get out of Hilo it turns into normal looking Hawaii landscape, although this one was very different than Maui. You’re still navigating mountainy terrain, but it’s spread out of a huge area and elevation changes very gradually. Most of it is less tropical and more light green’s and tan’s with grass and less forest. After answering “how long till we’re there?” at least a dozen times, we descended down to the beautiful seaside town of Kona.
Kailua-Kona is it’s usually termed (Kona is more the area, Kailua is the largest town) is much more of a touristy area than Hilo and more upscale. The first sign that we were in a tourist trap came when we tried to find parking to go get some breakfast. Every parking spot in the restaurant/shop area was pay parking at $12-$15 an hour. Holy cow – for $15 an hour, I better come back to a washed and waxed car. I begrudgingly paid with my phone and we walked to our breakfast place.
It turns out the breakfast place that I scouted out was actually just a coffee place – Kona Coffee Café. They didn’t have warm latte’s ready yet, so I got Noelle a cold Latte and I got a drip Kona coffee (when in Rome).
Coffee was good, but we really came to eat, so we walked down the road a block and accidentally found my backup breakfast place (yes, I plan backup locations for meals if the first one doesn’t work out) – Papa Kona Restaurant. Papa Kona should have been the primary – it was an awesome location right on the water with waves crashing right behind us. Food was good, not spectacular – no complaints, but view made it a 5 star.
Our first stop after dinner was a snorkeling trip at Kahaluʻu Bay. Due to the failure of reservations for Hanauma bay, we haven’t done any real snorkeling yet, and this place was supposed to be good for it. We found a free spot on the road, avoiding whatever obscene price they had at the main pay lot. It was fairly crowded, so initially we setup camp on the other side of a stone wall away that separated the good beach that had the ocean next to it from the sad beach for people that didn’t get up early enough to grab their spot. Fortunately, somebody got up to leave on the good beach right after we sat down, so we just quickly moved our stuff over there. Beach was mostly small smooth rocks but it kind of felt like a rock massage when you walked on it bare foot.
The kids put on their snorkel stuff and jumped in the water. They came back screaming about the fish they saw and Noelle followed them in. When Noelle got tired, she came back and traded spots with me. It was a pretty cool little reef. I feel like no reef is like it used to be 20 years ago with global warming and sunscreen doing a number on everything, but there were plenty of fish and some coral that looked like it was growing back. There were signs with warnings to not stand on the reef. The water was a little rough, and the tide was coming in, which caused a couple of Karen’s to panic and require saving by the lifeguard. The lifeguard contradicted the environmentalists slightly in a PA announcement – “try to avoid the reefs, but, but if you’re in trouble stand up anyway – stand on ground, don’t drown”.
As we were enjoying the snorkeling, a piercing siren from the city started off like one you’d expect for a tsunami or a nuclear bomb was incoming. I had to hold my ears because it was that loud. Every looked around wondering if we should duck & cover, but the lifeguards told us it was just a drill (they do drills for that on the first of the month) and we went back to relaxing. A couple of rounds of snorkeling was plenty for our group and we packed up to move on to the next spot.
On the way to the next location, we saw a gelato place called “Gypsea Gelato”, so Noelle grabbed the steering wheel and pulled us over. A little bit of gelato really hits the spot after a day at the beach and this place was excellent. I got one of the recommended combinations – chocolate and salted caramel and made a huge mess trying to eat it before it melted. The girls played a couple rounds of connect-4 and did some faux surfing and we continued down the road.
The drive along the coast was pretty cool – very windy roads with plenty of great views. The elevation goes up so quickly that they are able to stack everyone’s houses so they all have a view of the ocean. It makes the drive a bit more difficult, but the altima was up tot he challenge. It had adaptive cruise control so I could just set that and not worry about wrecking the guy on front of me if I wanted to sneak a quick look at a view.
20 minutes of driving later and we Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau National Historical Park. This was another recommendation for snorkeling, which was a little confusing because there were signs everywhere saying NO SNORKELING IN THE PARK. I flashed my pass, parked, and went to lock the car, but couldn’t find the keys anwyere. I looked in the car, I looked in the trunk where I had just gotten out my backpack. I looked in the backpack – couldn’t find them anywhere. I finally did a careful recreation of everything I did – opened door, open trunk, got hat out of backpack, put on backpack, put on hat. I took off my hat, and the keys were inside of my hat…
The park was small and not super interesting for the kids. It had examples of huts and carvings that would have been done by the native people. We weren’t really in the historical park tour mood, so we headed back out shortly after we arrived. The snorkel place was actually right next door called “Two steps”. It was super busy and the parking was a mess with a bunch of people trying to find leave and find parking at the same time with only a single lane road to do both. The family wasn’t super enthusiastic to go snorkeling at this spot, so we just decided to leave, following the one lane road a bit. It was actually another very interesting drive – zig zagging around residential areas that was definitely not planned by a normal city-planner.
Skipping snorkeling did have an additional benefit – I was able to grab dinner at what was originally supposed to be our lunch spot – Randy’s Chicken and Ribs, which was famous on the island. We got there right as rain started falling and they were closing for the day, but still got a combination ribs/chicken platter togo. Noelle and the kids didn’t want that, so we drove to our planned dinner spot – Broke Da Mouth Grindz. It was a hole in the wall place that didn’t look good from the outside (which is part of Noelle’s generally requirement for a restaurant), but I convinced Noelle it was good and got her a combination of garlic shrimp and beef short ribs that I knew we be could. There wasn’t anything there that would fit the girls pallet, so we drove to food spot #3 – costco! We got the kids some costco food and ate all 3 of our dinners at the costco outside dining area. My bbq was amazing, and Noelle thought her short ribs was one of the best things she’s ever had (da mouth wuz broke). Everybody happy – all it took was 3 stops!
We were still ahead of schedule, but went ahead and drove to the harbor for what should be the highlight of today and possibly the whole trip – Manta Rays! Every guide for the Big Island mentions that you must do a night Manta Ray tour. It’s something that’s very unique to the big island and the only known place where you can do it in the world is here in Kona. You actually get in the water at night with snorkel gear and they have special blue lights that atract plankton, which attracts the manta rays to eat the plankton and you get to see Manta rays up-close and person. We were all VERY EXCITED to see this.
We waited around for an hour in the bathroom by the harbor, which was our pickup spot for Hang Loose Manta Ray tours. The captain arrived and was a funny younger guy with a joke for every occasion and he checked us in. We got fitted for our wet suits and boarded the boat. After a short safety lecture, we were headed out into open ocean!
The drive out was very cool – boat speeding along parallel to the Kona coast where you are getting a different view of the city an the larger island behind it. The timing was perfect as we got a beautiful sunset in the middle of the ride that they stopped briefly so we could snap a few photos. After 15-20 minutes, the sun dropped completely and we in full darkness and arrived at the spot where the manta rays are.
The manta ray spot was actually right next to the coast close to a hotel called the Outriggers. During construction, they used large spot lights that were pointed at the ocean, and some of the workers noticed that a single manta ray would come out every night and feed right there where the lights were. Eventually they figured out that the light was causing plankton (that normally come to the surface during the day when the suns out) to group there at night, giving a buffet to the manta rays. The manta rays started to associate lights with food and the commercial opportunity arrived.
When we arrived, there were a dozen other boats there, alltrying to do the same thing we were doing. There were boards with blue lights everywhere and people in the water holding on to the boards for dear life. Our captain told us they were going to wait for manta rays to start showing up, then we’d move to that good spot and setup….but there was a problem. There weren’t any manta rays. They said that you’d know if there were manta rays because people would be screaming when they saw them and it was silent. I’d compare the atmosphere to that night the titanic sank – a bunch of people in the water, but everyone was very quiet. This doesn’t seem right…
We waited and waited and waited. The excitement everyone had on the boat became more of an annoyed unrest as time passed, and eventually turned into despair. After 45 minutes of waiting, the captain thought that it didn’t look promising decided to try to drive to a different spot that had manta rays a couple times previously. We drove there, dropped the board in the water, waited and…same thing, no manta rays. After 15 minutes of that, he pulled the board back up and drove back to the harbor… Soooo disappointing. We were all looking forward to the manta rays for months and it wasn’t in the cards. The finale of manta ray bachelor must have been on ABC tonight.
There was a manta ray guarantee that if you didn’t see manta rays you could try to rebook another time for free to try again, but when we checked that night, everything for tomorrow was already booked up. They told us to call the office tomorrow to see what was available – they also did other tours, so maybe we could book that, but I’m not sure how we could fit another trip back to Kona into the schedule tomorrow.
The sour mood went from lemon to nuclear warhead during the 1.5 hour drive back to Hilo with us all exhausted. I had to pinch myself to stay awake, but we made it home at 10:30 and all crashed immediately to sleep, dreaming sad dreams of missing manta rays – the most first world of problems.