June 13, 2021

We left Kona yesterday and began the long drive to Hilo. It is about 80 miles but took a couple of hours. Driving across the island showed many different kinds of vegetation. At one point, it reminded me of EskDale. Just looked like the desert. This drive is miles and miles of nothing. No houses and no services. But Hilo is lush and green. They get a lot of rain here and you can tell. We checked in to our Air BnB which is nice and comfortable and headed into old Hilo to have some lunch. Hilo looks like a dying town with many boarded up stores and most of the shops in disrepair. This place is nothing like the towns we've visited on other Hawaiian islands. It is quiet and commercialism is literally completely absent. This was a thriving sugar town at one time but with the lost demand for Hawaiian sugar, due to being able to obtain it elsewhere at a much lower cost, this town looks like the land that time forgot. When you get away from the heart of the town, there are some more modern houses and when we googled it, 43,000 people do live here but you sure can't tell. After lunch, we did the waterfall tour. Saw the Rainbow Falls, the PeePee Falls and then the Wailuku Falls. Very beautiful and required almost no effort as you can drive to all of them. The flowers, especially the hibiscus are breathtaking and some of them are as big as my head. The trees, particularly the monkey tree and the banyan tree are like nothing you see anywhere else. The beaches here are not the sandy beaches of the other islands but the beauty is still there. After our trekking around, we came back to the hotel and swam and relaxed a while. Then we headed into Hilo for dinner. Hard to find a place to eat. The two restaurants we had identified as being great food were full and you couldn't get in without a reservation. The third restaurant took us only if we would sit at the bar....which we happily did at that point. I broke my no gluten diet and had a delicious pizza. Yum. Gluten is good stuff. We picked up cream and coffee at a local grocery store and then walked back to our car in the pouring rain. The rain set off a tree frog chorus which continued way into the night. Unbelievable. Pretty ugly really. Sounds almost electronic and kept me up much of the night. I guess paradise has frogs. 

June 14

Today we are headed to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Not a bad drive, about 30 miles and it went pretty smoothly. I read the history of the volcano to David while we drove. The volcano has a colorful and interesting history but at the moment, there are no lava flows. Our first hike was pretty ugly and uninteresting and I was wondering what all the fuss was about this place. But then we hiked the Kiluea-Iki trail which goes through the jungle right through the middle of the volcanic crater. It was beautiful and so unique. On the way, we went through the Thurston lava tube, also very unique and special. Beautiful hike and by the time we drove home, neither of us had really eaten a meal. We made nuts and granola bars work for breakfast and lunch today. We made a reservation tonight in the restaurant we couldn't get into last night. We'll see what we think but it will be nice to eat something besides nuts.