Hawaii report - Day 1

[kmusser]

Yay, it’s our first real day in Hawaii. We stumble down to the hotel breakfast buffet which is decent. While we still have hotel parking we take a brief walk around downtown Kona. The Hulihe’e Palace is just down the street, but is sadly closed due to reconstruction. We do poke our heads in the Mokuaikaua Church – oldest Christian church in Hawaii – they have a nifty replica of the tall ship that brought the first missionaries here. Anyway, back to retrieve the car and one to our top priority for visiting Hawaii, that’s right, Costco – well we do stock up there, but what I meant to say was coffee, after the Costco stop we head south out of town and into Kona coffee country. We end up stopping at two farms, Greenwell and Bayview and I hang out while Zammis tastes and stocks up. We also stop at what’s called the Painted Church, a small church so named because the interior is painted up in the style of an early medieval European church – very neat, sadly we didn’t get any interior photos.

From there it’s on to Pu’uhonua o Honaunau, or the Place of Refuge which was a fascinating site – part of it was old royal grounds that would’ve been forbidden to commoners before King Kamehameha II outlawed the kapu system in 1820. Punishment for breaking a kapu was death, and one way of escaping punishment was by reaching the Place of Refuge where one could become cleansed. The Pu’uhonua was sanctified by the burial of chiefs. That burial site as well as the massive stone wall separating the royal grounds from the Pu’uhonua is still maintained. Also there are traditional game boards carved into some of the stones :-) Rules to the one I’m sitting at in the pictures can be found here.

Finally we figure we better get going if we’re going to find our Hobbit House before dark. We’ll be staying near the town of Na’alehu for the rest of the trip. The house is up a somewhat scary road – we’re glad we got the recommended 4WD for the trip – we meet one of our hosts on the way down and the other is waiting for us when we make it the house. The house is absolutely gorgeous – really the pictures don’t do it justice, it does indeed look like something right out of the Shire (I think we got nicer exterior shots than their website in our pictures though). Anyway, we unload, make some dinner, and then test out that bathtub for two before turning in for the night.

Comments

[auror.livejournal.com]

I envy that bathtub.