Day Six -
After a good breakfast with a nice French Couple at the Manago Hotel in the Captain Cook area we took off south past Ocean View to the new house where we would be staying for a night to drop off our things. We got to the house with no problem, unloaded and looked around, there were three pineapples growing wild right next to the drive way (never would see that in Denver). We got back in the car and drove for about an hour and a half to just out side Hilo (pronounced He-Lo) to see the Akaka waterfalls. It was a ten minute walk from the parking lot to the main waterfall but there were smaller ones along the way, all were very beautiful, the main waterfall was probably 75 to 100 feet from the top of the fall to the volcano pool below.
On the way back to the house near South Point we stopped at a ice cream shop and had some great home made volcano ice cream (I recommend the wild ginger flavor). When driving around the island you really get to see a different world (especially if you live in Colorado or another dry state), but there are two sides to the island and 11 out of 13 climate zones, the Kona side is the dry side and gets around 50 inches of water a year (Denver may get around 12 inches in a wet year) and the Hilo side will get close to 200 inches a year, big difference. So the landscape is very different, for example South Point looks like it should be the coast of Australia or South Africa, and the dry side of the volcano looks a little like the mountains in Colorado but with way different plants and way more black rocks (so maybe nothing like Colorado but it a mountain). Where as the wet side look like what I imagine a rain forest would look like, wet, lush, and full of exotic plants and animals. It was really quite beautiful in every sense of the word.
Back at the house we grilled up some chicken and made a nice salad, and as the sun was setting I sat out and read the last Harry Potter book (which I started on the way to Hawaii) and smoked, it was a great night, I even got attacked by a giant moth that I named Mothera.
Day Seven -
So this day started off with a smoke and finding a dying centipede which made me a little sad but it looked pretty old for an insect and probably had a good life growing up and living in Hawaii. But the day went on and we had our selves a nice time. We went to see the place of refuge and got to learn all about that which I will now tell you about. So back in the day before us Houlies (pronounced Howlies, also it's basically the not so nice term for tourist) arrived on the island the way the law worked was that if you broke a Kapu (law or sin) you would be killed. That is unless you made it to the place of refuge which you pretty much had to fight off the whole tribe to get to and then swim this cove, once there no one could spill blood there so you'd hang out until the priest absolved you of your sin or "Kapu".
Then we were off to the Greenwell Coffee Farm for a nice little tour of the coffee farm and processing area, we learned all about coffee and how it was grown, like it takes a new tree two years before it produces any fruit. You see coffee starts as a fruit about the size of a cranberry and close to the same color, it is then picked and stripped of it's outer layer where the bean is covered in sugar naturally and at this point does not taste anything at all. If you don't start processing the coffee the day after it's picked then it will begin to ferment and go bad because it's a fruit (crazy huh). Any way after it's been husked it is soaked in water for around 17 hours to remove all the sugar, then they are set out in the sun to dry for three days (by the way the bean it self is green and that's what gets shipped all around the world).
At the coffee farm I got the chance to play with a wild chameleon who was just hanging out in a orange tree, and there was a family of them, like ten of them just hanging out and eating bugs. It was really cool, they were kind of hard to see until you found them, but shit that's how they roll. They also had a dog that walked around all day eating avocados, he was such a chill dog.
Anyway we left the farm and headed north towards the airport and we stopped at a white sand beach next to the energy plant where this huge centipede crawled up my leg and then jumped on the other leg before I got him off (it seems to be my day for the centipedes). Ate some diner at the Kona Brewing Co. and went off to the Kona airport for a five and a half hour flight to LA.
SPOON
After a good breakfast with a nice French Couple at the Manago Hotel in the Captain Cook area we took off south past Ocean View to the new house where we would be staying for a night to drop off our things. We got to the house with no problem, unloaded and looked around, there were three pineapples growing wild right next to the drive way (never would see that in Denver). We got back in the car and drove for about an hour and a half to just out side Hilo (pronounced He-Lo) to see the Akaka waterfalls. It was a ten minute walk from the parking lot to the main waterfall but there were smaller ones along the way, all were very beautiful, the main waterfall was probably 75 to 100 feet from the top of the fall to the volcano pool below.
On the way back to the house near South Point we stopped at a ice cream shop and had some great home made volcano ice cream (I recommend the wild ginger flavor). When driving around the island you really get to see a different world (especially if you live in Colorado or another dry state), but there are two sides to the island and 11 out of 13 climate zones, the Kona side is the dry side and gets around 50 inches of water a year (Denver may get around 12 inches in a wet year) and the Hilo side will get close to 200 inches a year, big difference. So the landscape is very different, for example South Point looks like it should be the coast of Australia or South Africa, and the dry side of the volcano looks a little like the mountains in Colorado but with way different plants and way more black rocks (so maybe nothing like Colorado but it a mountain). Where as the wet side look like what I imagine a rain forest would look like, wet, lush, and full of exotic plants and animals. It was really quite beautiful in every sense of the word.
Back at the house we grilled up some chicken and made a nice salad, and as the sun was setting I sat out and read the last Harry Potter book (which I started on the way to Hawaii) and smoked, it was a great night, I even got attacked by a giant moth that I named Mothera.
Day Seven -
So this day started off with a smoke and finding a dying centipede which made me a little sad but it looked pretty old for an insect and probably had a good life growing up and living in Hawaii. But the day went on and we had our selves a nice time. We went to see the place of refuge and got to learn all about that which I will now tell you about. So back in the day before us Houlies (pronounced Howlies, also it's basically the not so nice term for tourist) arrived on the island the way the law worked was that if you broke a Kapu (law or sin) you would be killed. That is unless you made it to the place of refuge which you pretty much had to fight off the whole tribe to get to and then swim this cove, once there no one could spill blood there so you'd hang out until the priest absolved you of your sin or "Kapu".
Then we were off to the Greenwell Coffee Farm for a nice little tour of the coffee farm and processing area, we learned all about coffee and how it was grown, like it takes a new tree two years before it produces any fruit. You see coffee starts as a fruit about the size of a cranberry and close to the same color, it is then picked and stripped of it's outer layer where the bean is covered in sugar naturally and at this point does not taste anything at all. If you don't start processing the coffee the day after it's picked then it will begin to ferment and go bad because it's a fruit (crazy huh). Any way after it's been husked it is soaked in water for around 17 hours to remove all the sugar, then they are set out in the sun to dry for three days (by the way the bean it self is green and that's what gets shipped all around the world).
At the coffee farm I got the chance to play with a wild chameleon who was just hanging out in a orange tree, and there was a family of them, like ten of them just hanging out and eating bugs. It was really cool, they were kind of hard to see until you found them, but shit that's how they roll. They also had a dog that walked around all day eating avocados, he was such a chill dog.
Anyway we left the farm and headed north towards the airport and we stopped at a white sand beach next to the energy plant where this huge centipede crawled up my leg and then jumped on the other leg before I got him off (it seems to be my day for the centipedes). Ate some diner at the Kona Brewing Co. and went off to the Kona airport for a five and a half hour flight to LA.
SPOON
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Thank you so much for your lovely comment on my new set in MR!!!
I really appreciate it!!
Kisses baby!
So how are you?