Hawaii January 2010

At the end of January four of us went to Hawaii (Chad, Jon, Kyla and myself). We got a direct flight from Vancouver to Kona - which was great!! Here is a picture of the place we stayed in. We had the downstairs room.

I rented a wide angle lens for my camera for this trip. (10-22mm) This isn't the best picture, but I love how the wide angle gets the clouds in the sky. I will have to buy myself a wide angle in the near future.... South Point is the southern most point in the USA. This place is a favorite spot for the locals to fish.

Jon and Kyla at South Point. If you look you can see the wind turbines in the far distance. On our way to the Green Sand Beach, just past South Point. The hike there was mostly flat and can be driven with a 4X4. Some of the ruts are getting pretty deep though!! The green sand is made from olivine crystals.

At last we finally see our destination!! What a great site!!

The only 'hard' part of hiking to the Green Sand Beach was the final decent. Steps have been carved out in the rock making it pretty easy to reach the beach.

View of Pololu Valley from were we parked the car.

View of the valley as we hiked down. The black sand beach was beautiful. When Chad and I were here 3 years ago it was nothing but cobblestone rocks. There was a couple of people surfing and Jon and Kyla also went for a swim. The hike there and back was great. Too bad we didn't know that you can hike over into the next valley until the next day, otherwise we would have went.

One of the many rock lined trails down in the valley.

We had to get up early to meet our guide for our Marlin Fishing trip. Unfortunately we didn't catch anything though...

We say quite a few dolphins on the charter. The fish like to travel with the dolphins, so we spent quite a bit of time going back and forth through the dolphin pods. The dolphins loved to play in the wake.

Morning Glory growing on the barbwire fence.

Stairs going down into Kamaua Caves.

Kalakaua Park in Hilo.

The view just off of the Saddle Road on the way up to the top of Mauna Kea.

Well, we made it to the top of the mountain for the sunset!! And what a beautiful site!! I didn't get as many pictures of the sunset as I would have liked though. I didn't think to charge my battery and it was pretty low. So I was saving my battery to get some night shots of the moon and stars using a long exposure, but the Ranger ended up kicking us all off of the mountain! I just love the picture of Kyla and how the sun turned out!

Everyone but me went for a snorkel one morning. I skipped out as I did something to my ankle.... So I wandered around and took a few pictures with the morning light. Got to love that deep blue sky!!

And what is a trip to Kona without stopping at a coffee farm!! So off to Greenway Farms we went. We skipped out on the educational tour, but still managed to buy some coffee. After trying a sample pack at home, Chad has decided that the peaberry coffee is defiantly the best. The chameleon below was at the coffee farm in one of the citrus trees.

We went to the Volcano National Park, but I didn't take any great pictures to post. There was quite a bit of vog (volcanic smog) in the area and this limited us to were we could go. We did manage to hike into see the petrogyphs though.

There was a small store downtown run by a lady who had 2 chameleons. This one was the male, and the female was pregnant. Can't recall his name, but Jon was trying to convince the owner to get the chameleon his own facebook page.

A picture of the market place pretty much down town. Lots of fruit!!

Well, our last day in Hawaii so we decided to go downtown. Kyla and Jon went para sailing, apparently it was a blast!! So I am hoping to see their pictures.... We had to stop at Pauchos and Lefty's for Mai Tai's. And no, not all of the empty drinks on the table in front of me are mine. I think.....