June 13

Happy anniversary to Andrew and Cheryl—38 year’s already!! 

Today we wanted to head south and east and catch a coupe of unique beaches, black sand beach and green sand beach! 

We first checked in as this is our last night in Hawaii—what an adventure! The three islands all were different and offered their own charm.  

Our Airbnb was a really good price but not really within walking distance of anything we wanted to do, so we hopped into the car and drove into town.  We checked out the various beaches available for later in the day, looked around at the different restaurant choices, and then finally settled on breakfast. I had the spinach omelette, and Andrew had the chorizo omelette. We both had the Kona coffee!! YUMMY!! We then hopped into the car and drove south and east. 

It is still so interesting to drive through lava fields. We stopped at one area to look at the sign and it clarified that the lighter lava is older and than the darker lava. But the lava that we were looking at was from 1907 and it was still pitch black and nothing growing in it. There are certain trees and bushes that do better at starting, and it takes a long time for things to to take root.  Everything is made of lava rock: landscape rocks, walls for years and along property lines. You name it and it’s mostly black lava rock!

We then drove down to the end of our journey so then we could work our way back. Punalu’u Beach Park, which is a black sand beach. The sand was black and soft.  It was also hot. :)

It’s known for its turtles. :-) And we were not disappointed. There were at least two turtles resting on the beach, although by the time we left there was only one resting. Apparently that’s what they do— they pull themselves up onto the sand to rest. There must’ve been a zillion of them in the water. We saw at least 20, sticking their heads up —they just look like they’re smiling—waving their little flippers. It was just so pretty.  We didn’t go to far into the water as it was pretty waves again today.  I believe there are highway warnings through the weekend.

Also at this beach was a non-salty pond that had beautiful purple water lilies growing on it. There are flowers everywhere here!!

There seems to be a definite difference in perhaps economy on this part of the island. There are a lot more less kept up areas I guess you could say. Maybe a little more littering, less upkeep of buildings and yards and things. 

And what’s with the abandoned cars? They are literally everywhere! 

We then drove and found a smaller paved road, aiming for Green Sand Beach and also the most southern point of Hawaii AND the United States. There are lots and lots and lots of ranches up in this area, even though it’s difficult to think of what the  owls and horses eat because the fields are so brown and dry. They have extreme fire watches right now.

We found the green sand beach trail head area, and we will admit we were smiling because there were some older big pick up trucks parked there. They had bars on the back, some had seats in the back, most were dirty. A young girl was asking if anyone wanted a ride the beach, at $20 per person round-trip. We smiled and just said no thank you and walked on. We needed to get some steps in and enjoy waking!  However, it turns out that the Green Sands Beach was NOT at the end of this first road at the ocean, but about 3 miles away. We didn’t think about it being that far when we started out. We walked over lots and lots of dirt (in this area it’s more dirt and the lava rocks are sort of underneath and hot and miss.  We did walk over lots of lava rock as well —it was closer to the edge near the ocean—ruts, intermittent and sparse grassy areas.  There was so much dust and it was a about 90 today! We just kept walking and walking and walking.  Those coming back just smiled.  One said it was about another 45 minutes, another said maybe about 15 to 20 minutes, and a third said we were about halfway!  We didn’t know exactly what to believe, but we kept going!! We’d see people ahead of us and they would just sort of disappear as they went around turns.  Those big old trucks would slowly bounce by, loaded with people.  Finally, in the distance, we saw those trucks. We knew then we were getting closer. The area of green sand was an amazing place, with cliffs probably 100 feet high. We had to climb down a ladder and steps sort of built into the rocks until we got down to the sand. It was a darker green with glittery parts to it so maybe Ranger colors! The waves were very, very violent today according to someone that was coming back up. They were pretty wild so we didn’t actually go into the water deeper than our knees.  It was powerful! Before we went down to the beach area, we made arrangements with one of those big truck drivers to take us back to our car. He only charged us half! :)

We bounced back to our car, imagining why our young driver took some of the routes that he did as we were heading back. Seems like there were many stretches of road that were less rigorous, but we bounced over holes and ditches and sometimes it felt we needed to lean to the opposite direction so we wouldn’t roll over! It was an adventure and worth it!

We drove out of the trail head area, drove a few miles. took a left and landed up at South Point Park, the southern most point of Hawaii and thus the Unites States! There were many people fishing and warnings to NOT cliff dive!! What?? I can’t even imagine that as there are so many rocks hidden under the surf and the waves are pretty unpredictable! 

We had a nice drive back to the beach we’d picked our early in the day except the waves were still very wavy. I had decided to just swim in the clothes that I was wearing, strange, yes, but they were so dirty from the dust that I was going to have to wash them anyway. The waves were very, very big and powerful. There were a lot of surfers out today because of this and it’s really neat to watch them. We didn’t go in too far; we pretty well stayed near the edge.

We headed back to change so we could find dinner and pack.  We had pork “wings” which were yummy and some soup.  We wandered around one more time and then headed back to discover several green lizards crawling up and around our apartment. Too cute! 

It’s an early wake up!  Next stop, the Philippines!