Hawaii - day 1

Saturday, Dec 11: We have an early flight into Kona International Airport.

I think that round discolored spot on the clouds is a rainbow. It's definitely something on the clouds (not on the camera lens or the airplane window) and it follows the plane around.

The Kona airport is really interesting:

This is a waiting area! And that gate in the background to the right is, well, the gate. Everything is open to the air, and when you board the plane, you just exit through the gate onto the tarmac and there's a staircase they roll up to the airplane. It was kinda like this.

We rented a car at the airport and headed south, stopping for lunch at a McDonald's in Kailua. As we drove along the highway, there were some really pretty scenic outlooks...

...as well as some really desolate volcanic landscapes:

We stopped at the green sand beaches at South Point. The road down was only wide enough for a single car, but there were dirt shoulders you could go onto to let cars by in the opposite direction. Not many people there.

The green sand...wasn't that green. Maybe we took a wrong turn; we ended up at a boat launching area, and there was only a few patches of greenish sand.

Any green you see in this picture (below) is plants. The water is really pretty, though.

We saw this dried-up mud that was pretty cool--like a scale model of the lava flows we saw earlier. I guess there's some similarity in the fluid dynamics involved.

As we kept driving, we stopped at a few stores along the road. We got some postcards from an antique store, which also had these old 7-up bottles:

What kind of slogan is that? I don't know if I want my soda to like me...

We also stopped at a grocery store to get some drinks. There's a wide variety of brightly-colored soft drinks, all local.

On the suggestion of a Hawaiian friend, we also looked for poke, but the ahi they had looked questionable.

Our last stop for the day was a black sand beach (Punualu'u Beach):

There were two sea turtles lounging in a tide pool. People were pretty excited about them.

It got dark pretty soon, so we headed back.

There was also a wedding reception going on, which we accidentally stumbled into but managed to extricate ourselves before being called out on it.

For dinner, we went to a place called Restaurant Encore in Hilo. It was pretty good, but very salty. Fast-food style Japanese food, which I've never had before. There was also laulau (bottom left), which I really liked. It was served with macaroni salad, which seemed somewhat strange to me. Later in the trip, we got macaroni salad again at L&L Drive Inn, so I guess it's a Hawaiian thing.

We stayed at Hilo Hawaiian Hotel while we were on big island. I wasn't privy to the price, but the accommodations were decent. No wireless Internet, though, which is kinda lame in this day and age. There was a single Ethernet connection (from a cable modem in the room), and they charged $10 per computer per night (it must've logged MAC addresses).

There were lots of noisy frogs outside the hotel and throughout Hilo. We never actually saw any individual frogs, but apparently this is what they look like:

The sound is unmistakable...