Night On The Summit

On our last day on the Big Island we took a tour of the western and northern shores. We didn't have all day and had to be back at the hotel by mid-day. Fortunately, this part of the island is sparsely populated so driving down the highway is noticeably easier and I could actually set the cruise control - something that mainlanders take for granted, but I rarely get to do on a little island full of people...

Something creative and unusual are the ways that Hawaiians create their graffiti. There is so much black lava flow that it makes a great palette for white stones! So people have arranged white rocks on the black lava along the highways. It seems more eco-friendly, but it seems to last as long as paint. Look closely at this picture and you can see many different "rock formation" graffitis.

We drove to several spots and took some hikes. One of the interesting spots we visited was the ancient Hawaiian Navigation stones. The location seemed to be deserted so DeAnna and I lingered a while.

Apparently these stones point the way to the rest of the Hawaiian islands as well as Tahiti, Samoa and other Pacific island chains! Here you can see Maui in the distance (and stones pointing the way)!

The rest of the drive was cattle country. You would have thought you were on the great plains were it not for the volcanic cinder cones and the ever-present ocean in the distance! Our trip took us in sight of Mauna Kea... more on THAT later!

Before heading back to the western shore, we HAD to jump over to the eastern shore to get some Malasadas from TEX. A Malasada is a Portugese sweet bread (a solid, spongy donut). These Malasadas are legendary in the entire state of Hawaii and for good reason! After lunch at TEX (which was more than just donuts), we headed back towards the hotel.

Along the way, we saw the prettiest trees that were in full bloom with purple flowers! But our reason for returning at mid-day was not for rest, but for another planned adventure - sunset on the summit of Mauna Kea!

DeAnna had reserved a tour to Mauna Kea and sunset among the observatories on the summit of the tallest volcano in the world! We met our tour guide in Kailua-Kona and enjoyed our ride as the driver told us interesting facts about the island and geology as he drove us along the saddle road between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.

After ascending to an elevation of over a mile, we stopped at an old sheep ranching encampment for a warm dinner. The tour included a parka and gloves for the evening - you'll see them in the following pictures. At the summit, there was still snow so the winter weather gear was appreciated! Here is a cabin (long abandoned) where Mark Twain stayed on his tour of the mountain long ago.

We were concerned about the cloud cover, fog and the thick VOG that we'd been seeing for the past 2 days, but just a few miles up the road, we cleared the clouds and the air was crystal clear and the sky was blue! We could see Mauna Loa in the distance. We stopped several times on the way up to see the view and take pictures.

Several miles from the summit, the paved road ended and we engaged the 4 wheel drive to traverse the gravel road back and forth up the mountain. Thinking about how they transported high precision astronomical instruments (including 10-meter diameter mirrors) up this road made the trip even more amazing! We had a little extra time, so our tour guide drove us off the road to a dish antenna - one of the very remote listening posts for the VLBA (Very Long Baseline Array) which is based in Arizona. The moon was rising in the east as the sun was setting in the west!

Finally, we reached the top! There were so many famous observatories that it was hard to take pictures of them all! DeAnna and I took many great pictures while we waited for the sun to actually set. Here is Joe holding the moon!

DeAnna taking a picture of the shadow of Mauna Kea stretching out to the horizon with the moon rising. As the night grew closer, the observatories moved and opened to equalize the temperature of the observatories with the night air.
I took a short movie tour of the summit so you could see where all the telescopes and tourists were located. Our vantage point put us looking directly over the Keck twin observatories at the setting sun!

I know it's boring, but it's my blog and exciting to me to see these shots of the observatories so take a look!




































Sunset finally came and it was stunning in the thin air at 13,796 feet above sea level. It felt as far away from Hawaii as you could get!



Before we left the summit, we got a companion to take our picture. At this point it was the first time in over a year that my hands were so cold I couldn't feel them (just like many days in Minnesota)!

We stopped on the way down and had hot chocolate and cookie while our guide did a mini-star party with a telescope. It was really fun to be up on Mauna Kea watching the stars... If you look closely at the picture, you can see the Southern Cross!
The trip back to the hotel was very long and we were asleep within minutes! It was a long, but rewarding day. We had a plane to catch in the morning and I had to report back to work. Our lives returned back to "normal" on Oahu. It's still strange to think that I "normally" live on Oahu! DeAnna did an amazing job of organizing our trip and we got to see so much thanks to her research and planning! Now, the blog can start looking like a blog again instead of a travelogue. Thanks for reading so far. Check in again soon for more updates from Paradise or wherever I happen to be!

Night of The Manta Ray

As indicated in the last post, our swimming adventures were over for the day - but not for the night! That's right, after an afternoon nap, we returned to the same marina to jump on a different boat and go night diving with manta rays! This time, we were actually on Neptune Charlie's boat and had a somewhat larger crowd of 8 tourists. Still, it was less than 1/2 the normal number of people for a dive (Thank goodness because the boat can handle 19 at a time).

As we left the harbor, the sun was already setting. Our destination was a place where several boats gather each night to try to attract manta rays (remember, they are wild animals and don't have to show). Turns out, the location is the same place we swam with the dolphins, but this time, the blue water was black!

Our companions hailed from all over and our guides were friendly. Donning our wet suits, we listened to the instructions and prepped our flashlights for the dive. Then it was as simple as a jump into the water and start swimming around our pink, floatable hula-hoop. As we held on to the hoop, it helped concentrate our light in one place, encouraging the manta rays to come visit.

So imagine 10 people floating around a giant hula hoop in dark water trying to keep their underwater flashlights pointed down waiting for giant sea creatures to come swimming up from the depths and you'll have a rough mental picture of the situation. Manta Rays eat plankton. So while we were certainly a tasty bunch, we weren't on the menu for the evening. Plankton are attracted to light and so when the lights are out, the plankton gather and the manta rays feast. As they feast, we get a close up view!

Almost as soon as we began jumping in, a manta ray came up to investigate our light! It was "Lefty" (all manta rays have unique markings, but Lefty's front fin-thing is broken so he's easy to spot.) As he approached, he swooped upside down and made several circles, getting closer and closer! Eventually, he swam away into the darkness. At this point there were only a few of us in the water, so it looked like a good night was ahead!

The group swam away from the boat to hover over a large group of scuba divers huddled around powerful lights on the bottom. So in this space we had divers on the bottom and snorkelers on the surface with manta rays in the middle. It was non-stop swooping and swimming - very exciting to watch. I spent most of my time trying to keep my camera from getting in the way when the manta rays came so close that they touched you!

The manta rays were so big that it was hard to get a full picture of them - we got a lot of shots straight down the mouth! But as interesting as these pictures are, I got a few really great movies where you can see how the manta rays moved and came so close to us!

This movie shows a couple of manta rays swooping to gather up plankton. You can see how close they get! I had to move my camera to keep from bumping them, but they didn't have any problem flapping against us!

In this movie, you can see how close the manta rays get to us and to each other. They seemed to swarm but they seldom ran into each other. It was an underwater dance with creatures that spanned from 8 feet across to as large as 12 feet across!


Eventually, there were many manta rays between the divers and the snorkelers! Some counted 10, but I thought there were 12 manta rays. Our guide was astounded at the number of manta rays that night! He said it was very rare to see that many.


I was the last one in the water, still watching the manta rays below me as everyone climbed on board the boat! It was a great way to end a fabulous day in Hawaii - but of course we had one more day to go.... and one more night!

Swimming With The Dolphins

Back in October, DeAnna's kids got her a package to swim with the dolphins. We would have cashed it in by now, but the package was for Neptune Charlie's and Neptune Charlie's is only on the Big Island. So this was the day we were going to swim! However, Neptune Charlie called and said we were the only people on the charter and he couldn't take his boat out for just one couple. DeAnna told him that this was our only chance to take a pre-paid trip and he arranged for us to go out on a private charter - or should I say Pirate Charter! Kudos to Neptune Charlie's!

Our captain was Mike Ho. He was very friendly and knowledgeable (I'm bummed that I didn't get his picture). We helped him get his boat into the water and headed out of the marina into the ocean off the western shore of Hawaii. I had visions of floating around in the shallow waters of a calm bay with smiling dolphins letting me pet them and snorkel alongside them. Maybe they would even let me grab their dorsal fin and tag along for a ride like they did in "Flipper". But we were in for much more adventure than that!

Our goal was to find a pod of wild dolphins join them for a swim... in open ocean waters... deep, trackless open ocean waters! Mike guided us along the shoreline to a place where dolphins sometimes frolic. He warned us that the search for dolphins might take a couple of hours, but we found some spinner dolphins within 20 minutes! "Jump in!" Mike said! Aside from the fact we weren't prepared to jump in, it occurred to me that I was jumping into the ocean from a boat among wild animals that attack sharks!

After a few minutes of putting on our wet suits and snorkel gear, I lashed my camera to my wrist and leaped from the boat - instantly losing my bearings and the direction of the dolphins. I surfaced and glanced back at the boat. Mike pointed and I turned to swim in that direction. DeAnna jumped in beside me and we swam for a while without seeing anything but clear blue water (no rocks or bottom - it was too deep).

Suddenly below us, I saw movement and several dolphins swam deep below us! They easily outswam us and seemed to enjoy staying out of reach and often out of camera range (we have countless pictures of beautiful blue water with hazy, blurry, dark blue shapes that only we would recognize as dolphins).

Still, we managed to get some really nifty shots and a couple of swell movies. It was clear that these were wild animals. They stayed together and kept a cautious distance. I dove down to try to get in the middle of them, but they easily swam deeper and faster.

It was HARD WORK to keep up with them and we frequently ended up far away from the boat with no dolphins in sight. At times like these, we took pictures of each other and waited for Mike to tell us where dolphins had surfaced.

Here is me diving down to take a picture of.....





... DeAnna on the surface! But there that's not why we were there!

Dolphins would eventually surface and we'd swim with them again. At one point I got fairly close to the dolphins and was taking a movie. I thought they were once again swimming out of reach until one swam up beside me! Turns out, I was really in the middle of them! It startled me so much I didn't keep the camera trained on the dolphins!


Eventually, two dolphins swam near us and swam slowly enough that we could follow them and take pictures. Both DeAnna and I were able to enjoy observing and photographing them. Mike figured they were mother and child. We thought they were a male and female couple. I liked our romantic idea better.

After a while, the aquatic couple drifted away and the terrestrial couple swam over to the boat to rest. Mike was very gracious and willing to take us out more, but we were pooped after about 3 hours of hard snorkeling!

We bade goodbye to Mike and, like this dolphin, went back to the hotel for a nap! After all, we were returning in about 5 hours for another swim in the ocean. This time with the Manta Rays... Read more about it in the next blog post!

Weekend on the Big Island

Blogging has almost become an endangered activity for me since Julia left. Work has gotten more intense and the demands of attending Master Black Belt class for myself have both sucked the time off my schedule. So I'm catching up now on things that happened almost a month ago. It's my goal this week to use my spare time to get to the point where I'm blogging for current events, but not before describing what happened on our trip to Hawaii - the Big Island!

DeAnna planned a trip to the big island for our anniversary which was on May 19th. It was a 3 day weekend for us, so we caught a ridiculously early flight out on Friday to Kona on the leeward side of the island (opposite Hilo). We were surprised that our hotel let us check in and drop off our bags, but we were checked-in and on our way by 7:30am!

Our objective on the first day was basically to tour the south side of the island ending up at Kilauea to see lava! Unfortunately, we arrived on the island on the worst days of VOG (Volcanic Organic Gasses) in recent memory. VOG looks like SMOG or for those folks from the plains states - a bad prairie fire. So while on most of our tour, we could not see anything but the nearby foothills of Mauna Loa or any of the mountains.

Still, we pressed on and first stopped by the ancient Hawaiian sacred site of Pu'uhonua o Honaunau. This place was where Hawaiian royalty lived and sacrifices were made. Large stone walls were hand-made near the surf on the lava shelf and a nice beach was nearby. A grass hut with carved wooden markers served as the priest's temple, a royal fishpond and burial place for kings make the site very interesting and peaceful - though there is more to the story...



Pu'uhonua o Honaunau is also known as the place of refuge. If anyone violated a law (kapu) like allowing their shadow to fall across the chief's shadow, they were put to death. But if they could make it to this place without being disemboweled, stabbed, burned or strangled, they could perform rituals and be forgiven. There were lots of interesting side notes about the place and a very friendly staff of two people who made DeAnna a grasshopper out of a palm frond.

Since there wasn't much to see looking back at the mountains, we admired the coastline. This is where you get authentic Kona Coffee and there are lots of little plantations with visitor's centers. We're not coffee drinkers, so we didn't stop - our next target was South Point - the TRUE most southern point in the USA (not the Florida Keys)! The road to South Point is pretty desolate, but the VOG was blowing in another direction, so the air was clear. There was a large wind farm with rusty turbines, but mostly just grassland until we reached the end of the road.

The water was very clear, but only accessible by jumping off a 50-foot cliff! Knowing how the currents can be, we kept well clear of the waves and scampered along the edge of the cliffs. If you look closely at this picture, you can see the wind farm to the left and the VOG-covered foothills of Mauna Loa.

So here I am standing as far south as I dared to stand (it was between waves). It was really kind of interesting to stand here thinking I was currently the most southern person in the United States. We took a bunch of pictures of course. No one was around to see us act goofy like tourists (as if I'd have cared anyway).

Here is a picture of the most southerly couple in the United States! The day was still young and remarkably we had cell phone signal, so I called my parents from South Point (it was late afternoon in the Eastern Time Zone).

After some more exploring, we jumped in the car and headed back to the highway to the Hana Hou deli- the most southern restaurant in the USA - for a sandwich and highly rated pie! Places like this could easily be missed without a good guidebook in this case, the ULTIMATE guidebook for all the Hawaiian Islands! Of course, some people might say not care about such things, but they never got any pictures, did they?



Back on the road to Kilauea, we made a quick stop at the Black Sand beach. It was tempting to take some sand, but we resisted. The sand was rough and the beach was rocky, very different from the many beautiful golden sand beaches we've visited.

Our next destination was the Kilauea caldera. I can't over emphasize the thickness of the VOG on that day. It made sightseeing virtually impossible. We stood at the edge of the crater and could barely see the floor. Many roads were closed because of the poor air quality so we decided to take in a couple of other sights before driving the long distance to possibly see some lava at the ocean's edge.

We toured the Thurston Lava Tube which is a tunnel created by flowing lava in ancient times. It was interesting, but kind of "touristy". Maybe it was the many tour buses that gave it away... Nonetheless, we pressed on our of the park to find the lava flow viewing area which was over an hour away!

As we came closer to the lava viewing area in Kalapana, we found lava across the road! This area was destroyed by lava in 1990 and the entire area of the island is covered in lava flows. It is strange to see pieces of civilization covered in lava rock! We arrived well before sunset but planned to stay after dark to see the lava flow. We overheard conversations that the viewing was spectacular after dark.

Once parked, we hiked about 1/2 a mile to the shoreline where we could easily see huge columns of steam rising into the sky. This was where the lava was flowing into the ocean. From our vantage point though it was a stretch for any camera lens - we were almost a mile away from the action, so we didn't get to feel the heat!

Still it was mesmerizing to watch the steam rise as we waited for dark. Sometimes, you could see a mini-tornado vortex spinning between the columns of steam! Darkness came slowly, but the crowds of people did not. The viewing area became jammed with people. Fortunately, we had arrived early enough to get a good parking spot and a good viewing spot with no obstructions. People snapped pictures constantly (as did we). Here are a few of the best photos we snapped that evening...



We walked back to our car in the dark and headed back to the other side of the island to our hotel. We decided to take the saddle road which snakes between the peaks of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea... it was the technically shortest route, but terribly a nerve-wracking drive in total darkness along marginal, twisting paths. Fortunately, there was little traffic (the smart people had all gone another route) and lots of lane reflectors... so many, that I wanted to get a picture!












Imagine driving 60 miles an hour on a twisting two-lane road in total darkness while holding a digital camera for a timed-exposure picture... This is what you get! (Imagine how DeAnna felt watching me do this...) We didn't get back to the hotel until very late so we immediately hit the bed because we had to get up early the next morning for more adventures! It was a long, full, exciting day!