Our week-long trip is drawing to a close, too soon! It’s been an amazing experience – one of our most exciting adventures thus far. Here’s a quick look back at our itinerary, which was dive-centered. In fact, the dives were the only thing booked in advance; we made up the rest of the schedule as we went along.
Saturday:
The 5 of us arrived at 6pm. Stopped by Safeway to load up on groceries, then looked up Yelp for a Japanese restaurant recommendation. Hayama Japanese Restaurant was right around the corner, and what a great find! I ordered the chirashi, and had one of the freshest and sweetest scallops ever. Mmm-mmm!
After dinner, we drove up the Queen Kaahumanu Highway to our condo, Fairways at Mauna Lani. The location is a little out of the way, it turned out, for what we’d planned, since we didn’t spend much time exploring the area (Hapuna Beach, one of the top beaches in Hawaii, was just a few minutes away). But the house we rented in the gated golf community was luxurious and very well appointed. It had two floors and 3 bedrooms that sleeps 6 comfortably, and a large pool and jacuzzi just steps away. It was very reasonably priced too, $65 a person a night.
Sunday:
E&S, Jeff and I (left David behind) headed south back to Kona just as the sun rose, for our first dives. We’d signed up for the dives in advance with Kona Diving Company. I’d found them on both Yelp and Trip Advisor, and the recommendations turned out to be spot on. The crew were all super professional and friendly and very very fun, and the 34 foot boat Hale Kai was very comfortable and well stocked with delicious chocolate walnut brownies, drinks and other snacks for between dives.
Dove at two sites: Turtle Heaven and Freeze Face, and had a field day spotting both the pelagic and macro life. Dolphins, Hawaiian Sting Rays, Eagle Rays, Nudibranches, Harlequin Shrimp etc! It was very windy and choppy out however, and the usually 15 minute boat ride back from Freeze Face took an entire hour.
By the time we joined up with David at Tommy Bahamas, it was after 3pm. We feasted on a late lunch of fresh fish and salad, then returned back to the house to crash. And crash we did, after a brief soak in the jacuzzi. We slept all the way through dinner and the next day. 
Monday
E&S backed out of the morning dives after struggling with sea sickness for a long time the day before. Jeff and I went out anyway, because he was doing his open water certification and because I was stoked to see more stuff. The waves were a little calmer, but still choppy. Two new dive sites: Pyramid Pinnacle and Golden Arches. Amazing visibility and drop off. Sighted another Hawaiian Sting Ray and a couple of Manta Rays.
The other 3 picked us up after our dives, and we grabbed a quick and cheap but awesomely delicious lunch at Killer Tacos at the recommendation of the dive shop staff. The fish tacos was really, really good!
Then it was back to the boat for the afternoon and night dives. En route to the dive site Garden Eel Cove, we spotted a pod of humpback whales in the distance. Apparently, this has been one of the worst seasons to spot these; usually by mid January, which is the peak of migration season, whales can be spotted left right and center. Anyway, amazing dives at Garden Eel Cove. It’s my favorite dive site of the trip! And of course, the manta ray night dive (one of the top 10 dives in the world) was out of this world!
It was nearly 10pm by the time we were done. Thankfully, Quinn’s Almost by the Sea was still open on the Kona strip. Ordered the ono fish and chips. It was very tasty, but I gotta say, ono is a little too meaty for me. After two days of no-alcohol restriction because we had to dive, it was such a pleasure to slurp my Lava Java, a pina colada concoction.
Tuesday:
After a long day the day before, we were exhausted and slept in. By the time we had finished cooking and making breakfast, and got ready to go, it was 10am. Destination: Akaka Falls and Waipo Valley, on the other side of the mountain. We left the desert-like landscape behind and found ourselves in the tropics after a 1.5 hour drive. We were somewhat pressed for time, since we had signed up for a laua in the evening, and so didn’t get to do any hikes. Bleah. It was a little silly actually – we spent most of the day in the car. But I was still tired from the day before, and didn’t mind napping in between admiring the moving scenery.
We were stuck in the peak hour traffic on the way to the luau, but as it turned out, we didn’t miss much. The Island Breeze Luau was recommended by S’s friend who is from Hawaii, but I wouldn’t forward it on to anyone else. It was cheesy, with dances and overpriced average fare, but I suppose at least we should try it just once, since everyone inevitably asks, did you go to a luau?
Afterwards, we strolled along the strip to Huggo’s On the Rocks for a drink. Enjoyed the evening sea breeze and sounds of waves crashing onto the rocks. Kahakai Rd totally reminds me of the beach strip in Phuket, only less crowded and without peddlers hawking cheap souvenirs.
Wednesday:
Off to the east side of the island for a full day’s adventure.
Checklist: Macadamia Nut Plantation (don’t make a special trip out there); Volcanoes National Park (great hikes on the crater floor; too bad no new flow); Punaluu Black Sand Beach (where we spotted half a dozen green turtles – green not for the color of their shell, but for the color of their fat).
We hit up Kona Brewing Company for dinner. Standard pub grub, but we were there primarily for their beers. Loved the sampler. I had a Pipeline Porter that was brewed with Kona coffee, and you could distinctly taste the dark, smooth coffee. Mmm!
Thursday:
We bundled off E&S and David to the airport, where they continued their second leg of their Hawaiian tour in Oahu. Jeff and I much prefer the tranquility of Big Island, and so bade them farewell.
Our destination was the Captain Cook Monument. It’s an out of the way location – to get there, you either have to hike (long and hot hike down a steep drop off) or get there by boat. Via boat, you could sign up for a snorkel charter, a kayaking tour, or simply rent your own kayak. We chose the latter option since it was most flexible, cheaper, and infinitely more adventurous. A cursory check for kayak rental shops led us to Kona Boys, where they helped strapped on the kayak onto our car, and sent us on the way with a cooler and a dry sack. $67 for a 24 hour rental. Not a bad deal at all.
Great fun out at Captain Cook. It’s one of the prime snorkeling spots. Add dolphins in the mix, and you can’t get any better than that.
After, we drove up the slopes to our B&B, Lilikoii Inn. It’s amazing how the vegetation is so green just 2000 feet above the coast. Lilikoii (Hawaiian for passion fruit) Inn is set on a steep hill on a 3-acre coffee plantation. It’s airy and breezy, and the air feels about 10 degrees cooler than at the bottom of the hill. There’s a long verandah on the main floor which looks out onto the bay – perfect spot for watching the sunsets. Our room, the Lilikoii room, is spacious with french doors that open out onto the deck. We arrived an hour before the usual check-in time of 3pm, but our hosts, Shai and Trina were most welcoming. They gave us large bowls of steaming vegetable soup and a heaping plate of bread and chips to dip with their home-grown and homemade guacamole. Afterwards, to warm up from the chill (it had started to pour), we soaked in the outdoor jacuzzi surrounded by lush ferns.
In the evening, after the rain stopped, we cleaned up and headed downtown to Original Thai, a restaurant Shai highly recommended. The food was phenomenal! We ordered a medium spicy seafood tom yum soup, and it was choked full of ginger, lemongrass, and fresh seafood. For our mains, we had a tofu Pad Thai and a Siam Ahi fish that was most delicately seasoned. Definitely one of the best Thai restaurants in the States! Several other Hawaiians we’ve met while diving have also raved about the Thai food on this island; on the other hand, they say that Chinese food leaves much to be desired.
Friday:
One of the highlights of the Lilikoii B&B experience is the amazing breakfast whipped by Shai, a retired chef from San Francisco. But we had to skip breakfast that morning, as we had to go on another dive. Nonetheless, Shai still laid out some homegrown and brewed Kona coffee, and a most delicious passion fruit shake for us, along with his famous guacamole.
Another morning of amazing dives. Although the reef in Hawaii is not as colorful as in the Great Barrier Reef and elsewhere, approximately 25% of the marine life is endemic (i.e. can only be found here). John P. Hoover’s excellent guide to Hawaii’s fishes was most educational in explaining how this came to be (see bottom quote). We spotted the Bandit Angelfish, one of the species endemic to Hawaii.
Bandit Angelfish
It was so sad climbing up the boat after my last dive. I wanted the moment to last as long as possible, and was the last diver out of the water; I used up almost all my air!
After we’d settled our accounts at the dive shop and bade final farewells to the awesome crew, we stopped by Da Poke Shack for a quick bite. Great fresh poke (raw fish salad served in Hawaii)!
We then spent the rest of the day unwinding at our breezy B&B. Shai made us the best smoothies with ingredients all from his backyard – ginger, coconut, banana, passion fruit…
Saturday:
Awoke to breakfast on the lanai (Hawaiian for covered porch) – it was as delicious as the other guests had raved! Fresh fruit juice and coffee, homemade granola served on super sweet half papaya, avocado spread, and a generous plate of spinach frittatas. I was too stuffed to finish my meal but it was absolutely delicious!
And now we only have a few more hours to spend on this magical sunny island, before we face the brutal Chicago winter. It’s hard to imagine that in a week, I’ll be most likely cross country skiing in a white winter wonderland, and the feeling of sun on my skin will be but a memory.
John P. Hoover, introducing Hawaii’s fishes:
“The Hawaiian Islands are the tops of a dramatic undersea mountain range stretching 1,500 miles from Kure Atoll in the northwest to the island of Hawaii in the southeast. This range rises from great depths and is separated from all others by distances of more than 1,000 miles. Sometime in the past, the ancestors of all Hawaiian shallow-water marine species must have crossed this gap, which is far greater than the distances between any other Pacific Islands and their nearest neighbors.
Scientists believe that most tropical marine life – even that of the remote Caribbean – originated near what is now Indonesia and the Philippines. More marine species are found in these ancient seas than anywhere else, and the number decreases markedly as one moves away. Shallow-water animals and plants spread slowly from this “center of dispersal”, moving from island to island or along the shores of continents. When they reached the great oceanic gaps, some managed to cross.
Although large ocean-going fishes can swim these distances, how do small reef fish cross them? They do not swim, they drift. Most fish begin life as minute larvae which are carried varying distances by ocean currents before settling in a suitable habitat to mature. If there is no suitable habitat, they perish.
The ancestors of Hawaii shore and reef fishes drifted in a larvae. But only species with long-lasting larval stages made it; those with short larval stages died before they arrived. Ocean currents did not move them fast enough. Distance acted as a natural filter.
Crossing the gap, of course, was the only first challenge. having arrived in Hawaiian waters, a species still had to find favorable habitat and suitable food. Lacking these it would not survive. To reproduce, it had to arrive in numbers sufficient for males and females to mature at the same time and find each other. Because of these winnowing effects, far fewer marine species occur in Hawaai than in Indo-Pacific locations. Indeed, whole groups of animals common in those areas are absent from Hawaiian shallow-water fauna.
Among the fishes that never reached Hawaii, for example, are the colorful anemonefishes, found almost everywhere else in the tropical Indo-Pacific. Amenomonefishes never reached Hawaii because their larval stage lasts only about a week. Moray eels and surgeonfishes, on the other hand, drift as larvae for months and are here in abundance. As might be expected, the number of inshore fish species in Hawaii down to 600 ft (about 680) is considerably less than the number found in other Pacific locations such as Micronesia (1,400), or the Philippines (2,000).
Isolation, however, has worked two ways. Although improverishing Hawaii’s fauna on the one hand, it has enriched it on the other. The great distance between Hawaii and other islands made possible the emergence of many new species. The occurrence of unique species in a limited geographical area is called endemism.
About 25% of Hawaiian fish species are endemic. Few places have a comparable percentage.
