The Big Island Part 1

Well, it's been a while since I've written again, and I've actually been busy working (I know, it's a shocker). A little less than a month ago now, Brynn and I went on an all-day trip/tour to the Big Island of Hawaii.

The Big Island, (actually named Hawaii, as opposed to Oahu, where we are), is much more sparsely populated in comparison to Oahu, and part of the reason for this is the fact that the island is home to active volcanoes. This was the biggest reason we actually wanted to go, so that we could see the volcanoes potentially.

The tour started with a pretty early pick up. At 6:15 am, the tour group and their smaller tour bus (about 20 people at most) arrived to pick us up for our ride to the airport. It was only about a 30-40 minute ride to the airport, and we were ready to wait for our short flight.

It was a little less than an hour until our flight, and the irony was not lost on me that the wait would be longer than the flight. From Honolulu, the flight to Hilo Airport is only about 40 minutes long. We then arrived there around 9:15, and were greeted by what can only be described as a tiny airport.

We walked to the tour guide, who proceeded to inform us that we needed to get our boarding passes for our return flights before the tour would get started. After a bit of frustration, we were able to get the passes, and proceeded to wait on a similarly small bus as the rest of the group joined us.

We were a bit surprised as the bus left the airport with only about 15 people on it, despite a capacity of probably 25. The tour guide informed us that our first stop was the Big Island Candies, a business that would allow us to see them make a bunch of sweet treats. What we did not realize at the time was that the bus was dropping us off here, and leaving us there while they went to go pick up some other tourists from Maui for our tour as well. The inside of the place was realistically, only going to take up about 15 minutes of our time. However, the bus did not return until almost an hour later. Needless to say, there were quite a few concerned looks from the tour group who had been sitting there. This did, however, give me the opportunity to take a picture of the cool scenery that could be seen from the building. The land just kind of rolls slowly upward, and makes for a really cool effect.

Once the tour bus finally picked us up again, we were taken past Hilo's hotel row. It consists of about 6-10 hotels at most, but the interesting part was the fact that on the other side of the street were a number of banyan trees. Each of the trees had a small sign in front of them, notating who had planted the tree. There were quite a few famous people (Amelia Earhart, Richard Nixon), but to us the most interesting one was the tree with a sign in front of it noting James S. McCandless. We haven't been able to determine if he was related to Brynn's family, but apparently he was a fairly important figure in the early part of the 20th century on the Big Island.

We were then brought to Lili'uokalani Park, which is a Japanese garden set up right on the coastline of Hilo Bay. Not a lot to say necessarily about the place, but the pictures came out extremely nice.

Ground Level view of a small lake in the Park

The view from ground level of a small bridge

After a stop at a small farmers market, we were on our way to our next attraction, Rainbow Falls.

The park where the falls are located actually had a few different interesting things to it. With some lucky timing, we were able to get a really great shot of a small gecko hanging out there.

In addition, there was also an extremely large banyan tree in the park, which has actually rooted itself in multiple locations at this point.

After finishing up our time in the park, we then went to Volcano Country Club for our scheduled lunch. I'm not going to get into this too much, but the essentials are this: the food was not that great, the service was even worse, and was really not a very good feeling overall.

The second half of our trip will be in the next post.