Oh no, we suddenly were way past the half-way point in our vacation and we had so much left to do! One thing that had been very high on our list was to see the beautiful windward coast of the island, the Hāmākua coast. And what we most wanted to see there was the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden, and Waipiʻo Valley. And we wanted to see waterfalls. The best, we were told, was the ʻAkaka Falls. Could we get over to the other side of the Saddle Road and see all three of these in one day?
Oh, and arguably more important than any of these things, we needed to visit the Big Island Brewhaus and Tako [sic] in Waimea, which we had already identified as our kind of town. Jeez, this was almost enough to make you want to go back to bed!
But we didn’t go back to bed, we did the frozen yogurt breakfast thing one more time (the last of the granola, great timing), and saddled up for the Saddle Road and beyond. Another morning on our balcony, then packing up for a day of everything, then getting smacked in the face by the heat and humidity up on the 4th floor of the Ocean Tower, and then down the long perp walk to the refilling station and freedom. Several people stopped by and said seriously, “You’re going out into the wide world again? Don’t you realize you’re safe here?” We kneed them in the macadamia nuts.
This time it was back up the Waikoloa Road for the 3-mile transit over to the Daniel K. Inouye Highway (a.k.a. route 200, or the new Saddle Road), where we shot up into the sky, past just a few early-morning cars on another bright, beautiful day. The clouds were doing their thing in the stiff Northeast trade wind, streaming off Mauna Loa down towards the leeward side of the Island. We were up on top of the world again, with the surprising cinder cones, the Army base, and then the road downhill past more and more red plants and succulents.
It started raining again of course, on our way down mountain. We were watching for the turnoff to the North side of Hilo, and with some confusion we found it. The sun came back out (it had never been that far away) and the neighborhood turned more and more suburban, but we were still rolling steeply downhill. Finally we got into the city itself and there was Jackie Rey’s Hilo location! Looked a lot more upscale than what we had been at last night.
We turned left when we got to the ocean, up the coast, back on the Hawaiʻian Belt Road, known as route 19 here. We were looking for Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden in lovely Onomea Bay, and we needed some help from the Google Maps lady since the road there was closed! She stunningly had no difficulty at all with Hawaiʻian place names and had us turned around and approaching it from the North soon enough.
HTBG is nestled into a beautiful niche in the cliffs on the Hāmākua coast and is a marvel. It was the vision of a retired couple (Dan and Pauline Lutkenhouse, Pauline is still alive), and they succeeded in hacking an incredible place out of that wild, hard coast. It’s an overflowing garden of tropical plants in a natural valley, leading down to an impossibly picturesque cove in the wilds of the windward side of Hawaiʻi. They used to ship sugar out of the harbor, but the sugar plantations are long gone and just the scenery remains.
On other vacations, we’ve seemed to get to places before the crowds, but on this vacation we were often right at the cusp of the crowds. As described, finding the way in took some doing, but we were on the right road and then we realized we were in a formation of 5 cars, all heading for this magical place. We got one of the last parking spaces in their small lot, in what might become the shady side later on (we hoped), and then checked out their gift shop and bathrooms.
Sarah got a shirt, but there wasn’t much else there that was appealing besides entrance tickets. They had free loaner umbrellas and were encouraging people to buy mosquito repellent and water when they bought their tickets. We declined all three since we were already prepared. Little sidelight here: we read that several places on Hawaiʻi called for mandatory bug spray, and so we were equipped. But in every place with a mosquito/bug warning (like the depths of the tropical garden), when we got there, we just laughed. The few bugs that were there were much more interested in the flowers and the fallen fruit than us. This was supposed to be serious bug country?? Had these people ever been to Maine in June? Jeez, we could have given cute names to the few mosquitoes we saw.
Anyway, we got our tickets (@$20 but well worth it), sprayed and sunscreened, and started down the steep walkway into the gardens. And we were instantly surrounded by marvels. I don’t know how to describe how wonderful that place was. It had about half and half “domestic” plants and “exotic” plants, but Hawaiʻi is the newest land on Earth, so really everything there is exotic, including people. Whatever, this is just an incredible spot and I’m not equipped to describe the plants, trees, and bushes that we saw, let alone the mosses surrounding the graceful waterfall in the stream that has formed the gorge. If you’re ever in the area, this is a place you have to see. The guidebook said that people spent as much as 2 hours there. We finally emerged after three hours and had to tear ourselves away.
Though I’m not going to try to describe the plants we saw, I’ll make one exception, the Monkeypod trees. Some of these specimens (they must have been very old) were the tree that’s always been lurking at the back of my dreams. I just stood there and stared up, at a loss for words. The canopies are massive and enveloping and they reach from horizon to horizon, but they’re translucent and the sun shines through. And they’re so subtly green and yellow brown and … no, none of this is coming anywhere near describing them. They reminded me of the man in the yellow hat.
OMG, after a long morning down that winding garden path, with Onomea Bay just blissing us out when we got down the steep gorge to it (I would have loved to go kayaking there), we made it back up the hill to the parking lot in the tropical heat and humidity. The sun was blaring straight down and the humidity was peaking. We were pretty tired and hungry at that point but there was nowhere to sit out of the sun. We got our PB&G sandwiches out of the car and wolfed them down, while standing in what shade we could get out of the overhanging plants in the parking lot. What a morning that had been!
OK, time to start up Hector, crank the air conditioning, and head on up the raw Hāmākua coast. Next stop was ʻAkaka Falls State Park, way up mauka to the left, through miles of yellow and hilly old sugar-cane land that now just held a few lazy cows.
Pulled in there and took all our valuables out of the car (except the water, which was probably actually the most valuable), and cracked the windows. The guidebook had told us that at many places in Hawaiʻi you don’t want to leave anything valuable in your car, and in fact you want to leave it unlocked so toughs don’t feel the need to break in, looking for things to steal. We left the doors unlocked at ʻAkaka Falls as advised, and this may have been wise. For some reason, this State Park seemed to attract a different kind of tourist than we’d seen elsewhere. Most of the visitors seemed to be locals or people vacationing on the cheap.
Paid our $5 parking fee to the lazy ticket guy, who didn’t like to be disturbed by people actually paying the admission price. And then we had another wonderful time dropping into their valley and seeing Kahūnā Falls and the wonderful ʻAkaka Falls itself. This is a free-dropping waterfall of 420 feet in an incredibly lush tropical setting, closed in by lava cliffs and surrounded by steep, steep slopes of light green plants.
To tell you the truth, we’d seen so many incredible things that another waterfall was not hugely exciting for me. I’ve seen waterfalls and this was not a large volume of water, though it was an impressive drop. The most fun thing was the plant life along the trail. We saw the most incredible banyan tree there, like a medieval village unto itself. It was so dominant it even spanned the trail and dropped some large roots down, over on the other side.
There was a little bit of people watching delight too:
- Young man, struggling to put the experience into words: “You ever been zip-lining?”
- Eager girlfriend, stunned that he said anything at all: “No!”
- Young man, dismissively: “Drop your phone, and it’s *gone.*”
OK, we got back to the parking lot and Hector was doing all right. A couple of feral cats hung around, perhaps waiting to see if we’d leave any food. But we didn’t.
Next up was Waipiʻo Valley, way up the coast. Well it wasn’t way, way up. Hilo to Waimea is just 55 miles, so these sights were in stunning proximity. Going up the coast was a lovely drive, a succession of bridges spanning impossible valleys with the ocean swelling off to the right. It seemed that every time we glimpsed the ocean, or got a full view, it was at a different angle. Must be that it was us that was at the different angle, and the ocean stayed static … maybe. As mentioned, we were always going up or down, and sometimes this got confusing.
Anyway, the Belt Road (route 19) curved off to the West in the charming town of Honoka'a, and we stayed straight, continuing up the coast. It was at about this point that I decided I needed a cup of coffee, bad. I don’t know what it was, but I was suddenly falling asleep, like Dorothy in the poppy fields. And that’s not good when you’re driving up a vertiginous coast you’ve never navigated before.
We stopped at a diner in the charming town of Honoka'a and they offered to make a pot of coffee, but I declined, thinking that there must be a place that already had some coffee ready for me. We parked right in the middle of TCTO Honoka'a and walked a block or two, and there it was, Hina Rae’s Café. I asked Hina (or her stunt double) if she had an iced coffee and she admitted that she did. I got a large and Sarah and Dave both got regulars, all black. And she had them ready in a cat’s whisker. We were probably the last customers of the day there and she already showed some signs about closing up soon, but this was the most mellow, low pressure place you could imagine. We tipped her and thanked her profusely, then got back in the car and got back on the road. We sipped our coffees and noticed that not only were they incredibly good, she had made them with coffee ice cubes!
You can read a lot of hype about Waipiʻo Valley, it’s supposedly one of the most beautiful places on Earth. To really experience it you need to go down into it and ideally hike over towards the next valley. This part of the Hāmākua coast extends up into the Kohala Forest Preserve that we’d been at on Saturday, and if you hiked a bit more (and spent a few nights), you’d come out in beautiful Pololū Valley, where we’d been Saturday.
We knew we wouldn’t have anywhere near enough time to hike down into it (or drive into it if we’d had 4-wheel drive). But we were totally happy looking at it from the overlook and imagining what it must be like. There was a little park at the overlook and the views were fantastic. Several people were just standing there staring, like they were never going to move, and we joined them for a while. A couple of feral cats were there too, wishing the people would just leave and leave some scraps of food behind. There were a couple of local families eating dinner at the picnic tables in the shade, but we tourists mostly got in and got out.
Wow, this was another beautiful spot. I don’t know if it was shame on us that we didn’t spend much time there. We just snapped a few pictures and then left. We had come all the way across the world (a quarter of the world, geographically) to see this, and it definitely made it somewhere up on our list of greatest Hawaiʻi hits. But we saw it and left … we had other things to do.
The other things we had to do were to get to Waimea for dinner and then at some point get back off the mountain (we knew Waimea was not at the top but was definitely on Kohala, having been through there the other day), and get back to sea level on the other side of the Island.
The first thing we had to do was to get back through the charming town of Honoka'a. We made a sharp right in town and climbed the hill up towards the Belt Road. Once we got back there it wasn’t too much farther into Waimea (the Belt Road was now known as the Mamalahoa Highway), though it suddenly became rush hour and cars were streaming out of town. We had the GPS set to the Big Island Brewhaus and Tako but by the time we got there the parking lot was full! Luckily they had signs telling us to go a few streets over and park under the cherry trees and that’s what we did, though that was pretty full up too.
Suddenly very windy and a bit chilly on the slopes of Kohala when we left the car, but when we got to the Brewhaus they had a table indoors that was just right.
Yikes, this was another excellent restaurant, though if you don’t like beer you might not think so. Besides having a few clues that the owner was a Deadhead, they had a great list of their own beers and an eclectic menu. I got an ahi pizza, because who’d ever heard of an ahi pizza?? And it was fantastic. I also loved their Pelagic IPA, and we also tried their Overboard IPA, Hoptopia IPA, Dark Sabbath tripel, and White Mountain Porter (Mauna Kea means white mountain), which is made with coconut and Kona coffee and is amazing.
Oh boy, we didn’t want to leave once again. But we finally got out of there and found our car a few streets over under the now almost dusky cherry trees. It was still kind of chilly up on the mountain, though by New England standards maybe not. Got back in the car and headed down the hill towards the coast and WOW!
We were steaming down the hill with Kohala behind us and suddenly realized what we were looking at. There were multiple dark clouds streaming by in the early evening light, with the sun getting near the horizon out to the West. But they were timed to afford us views of all the mountains around us. Behind us was the bulk of Kohala, the steep mountain with impossibly green slopes. To our left was Mauna Kea and we could see all the way up to the top, where the observatories gleamed in the light. At just about 11:00 was the massive, massive bulk of Mauna Loa, stretching up into the sky and somehow fading into the distance. In the foreground was the suddenly revealed bulk of Hualālai. We hadn’t ever seen the whole mountain until that point, because it was always shrouded by the clouds spun off by Mauna Loa, but that evening it was naked. And to the right we were getting the classic, spectral view of Haleakalā across the strait, 80 miles away on Maui. We were in the middle of 5 majestic mountains, all bathed in the evening light. This was *the* most breathtaking sight of the whole vacation, and pretty close to the most beautiful I’ve ever seen in nature.
Well, what can you say after something like that? We got back to the Waikoloa Road turnoff and sped downhill to the Resort. Do you think any of these people down here had looked up and marveled at the mountains that afternoon? Well, maybe. Anyway, we had to walk the Museum Walkway like all of them.
OK, back to our room and it was still barely light. Time for some gawking out over the Pacific while we calmed down, and then another rummy game to put us to sleep.
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