The Kona Tiki is a very small hotel, and the desk is only open until 7pm. When I arrived last night I found a note and the key to my room in the plant on the front desk - exactly where I was told it would be. Unfortunately after I found the right door, the key refused to cooperate. Back downstairs, I found another guest who told me which room the managers live in. Ernie helped me gain entry to the room. It's very odd, but the door is locked from the inside, there's a little pin that extrudes from the lock on the outside that prevents the key from entering the lock. All I had to do was push that little pin in, and like magic I was able to open the door with the key. And just to show how friendly this place is, the other guest invited me to sit in her room until I could find the manager. Very nice.
I went to sleep last night to the sound of waves crashing, and I woke up to the same sound. This would be a bad place to stay if you didn't like that sound; luckily I like it! I woke up for the first time this morning at 4am, but somehow I convinced my body that it would be a good thing to wake up at a good time for this time zone instead of my home time zone. I managed to get back to sleep until 7. Not bad considering the time change, and especially considering that I did manage to get a coupld of hours of sleep on the flight between Los Angeles and Kona. I was afraid that would really mess up my overnight sleep, but luckily it didn't. Who knows what tonight will bring though; I'm not crazy enough to believe that I'm over the time change already.
Breakfast was outside on the patio. Continental breakfast comes with the room - coffee, juice, fresh papaya and pineapple, along with bread and bagels for toast. No peanut butter - my staple breakfast food - but cream cheese for the bagels is OK too. It was also a chance to chat with the other guests. It's fun to find out what other people are planning for the day, and to see if there's something else that I hadn't come up with on my own. It's funny - this is a hotel, but it has more of the feel of a bed and breakfast. It only has 14 rooms, so the size probably contributes to that feeling. The managers are here for 3 months, and if they choose to they can return for the same 3 months next year. My experience wtih the people here has been the same on both of my visits. The managers are friendly and knowledgeable about the area, and the other guests have been great too.
One of my goals for this trip is to see and do some things that are new for me. I thought that might be difficult given that this is my fourth trip to this island. And no, I don't think it will be the last one!
I didn't plan anything special for today since I figured there was a good chance I wuold need a decent rest day. And by the end of the day I realized that taking it easy was a good thing to do. I haded out in the car this morning, with the plan of getting to someplace where I could do some walking. My first wander was a new one for me. I headed up Kaloko Drive, which is a heavily switchbacked road off the Hawaii Belt Road. (If yu have a map of Hawaii, this road is just a bit south of the Kona airport - but it starts from route 190 rather than the coast road.) I was hoping that I could find some place to walk at the top of the road because the map showed what appeared to be dirt roads up there heading in the general direction of the top of Hualalai - one of the (I believe) extinct volcanoes. As it turns out the land up there is all privately owned, so I wasn't able to do any walking. It was a beautiful drive though, much cooler at the top than it was when I started. And believe it or not I was happy that I wasn't on my bike because must of the drive was at a very steep grade.
Next stop was a beach park just south of the airport.
How low is low? This park is directly south of the airport - and I guess you could fly a kite pretty high with the normal wind here.
I parked the car and started walking south along a dirt road next to the beach. Could I have driven it? Maybe, but that probably wouldn't have been too smart given the sand and rocks. The only vehicles I saw back there were 4-wheel drive trucks carrying 1 or 2 people and their surfboards. A nice walk, with a chance to see shore birds, and to watch some folks surfing. As I headed back to the car, I figured it was a good time to do a grocery store run to pick up some food for lunch. That wasn't quite in the plans though because not too much further down the road I saw a sign for Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park. That was a new one for me, so of course I had to stop. The park isn't in its final state yet, but it's well worth a visit. I stopped at the visitor center for information and was told that it was a 20-minute walk to the beach and the main area of the park - or I could drive to the yacht club just a bit further down the road and have a less than 5 minute walk. Of course I chose to walk from the visitor center, and it was a good decision. It was open and very hot at first, but soon I was in the shade of some trees. That lasted until the shore. I headed down the beach to visit the sea turtles. There were a lot of them just off shore and although I did take some pictures I doubt that the turtles will show as anything other than a dark spot in the water. And of course they paid no attention at all to my request that they lift up their heads for a photo!
The sea turtles were definitely not cooperating with my attempts to take their pictures - but there's one here, really!
It really was time for some food by the time I was finished wandering in the park. On one of my first visits to Hawaii I got hooked on papayas. I do buy them at home when they look ripe, although I've had better luck there with papayas from Central American than those from Hawaii. That seems odd to me since they both have to travel a long distance to get to my table. But I'm in Hawaii, and the papaya in the grocery stores are local, ripe, and taste absolutely wonderful. Plus there's the added advantage of being inexpensive. I bought 2 papayas, and they cost a total of two dollars. Yum!
I wasn't quite done wandering for the day though. I left the car at the hotel and headed into Kailua Town on foot. I know - it's a little odd, but this place is called Kona, Kailua-Kona, Kailua Town, and who knows what else! It's mainly a tourist town, and I didn't need to shop for anything except books, so I made my way through Alii Drive pretty quickly. I did stop at the regularly held (4 days a week) craft fair & farmer's market. I talked to a woman at one of the craft stands for a while. It turns out that she and her husband lived in the Boston area while their daughter went to Northeastern Universite, and she was there during one of those awful snowstorms that we had back in the 1997/98 timeframe. We had a good laugh over that! My main goal for my walk was to get to Border's Books. Knowing that there was a Borders in Kona and another one in HIlo, I knew that I didn't have to figure out how many books I would go through on my vacation - a bookstore visit was definitely on my list of things to do today.
On my way back to the hotel I realized that I really didn't want to go out for dinner. Lazy? Probably, but I had already done my share of walking for the day. I stopped at a Thai restaurant and ordered food for dinner. I wasn't quite ready to eat, but it was nice to not need to go out again to find food. I knew that refrigerator and microwave in the room would come in handy!
I came back to the hotel and just sat out by the pool talking to people and watching the sun sink into the ocean. What a nice way to end the day... Funny, the pool here is located close enough to the ocean that sometimes it gets enough splash-over to be partially salt water.
The Ironman Triathlon was held here last weekend, and today I heard that the competitors weren't too happy with the wind. The cycling part of the race runs 112 mile, from Kona to Hawi and back again. With an out-and-back ride, you would expect to have a headwind on one leg and a tailwind in the other. It didn't work out nicely this year though, and they had headwinds in both directions. That's a really long way to ride with the wind working against you.
My first day in paradise? Yes, it absolutely was a good one!
Photos for today can be found in my Kona and the southwest coast photo gallery.
