Hilo Hawaii - Hilo Hatties, Mauna Loa Macadamia Nuts, Rainbow Falls & Akaka Falls - 3/9/08

So many tourist attractions and so little time. Thanks again Captain Smit.

The Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut planation is closed on Sunday. Good. I like to see workers get a day off each week. At least the factory was closed. The gift store was open. The road in from Route 11 is a typical narrow paved farm road called Macadamia Drive for some reason . It passes by some papaya orchards. We had never seen papaya growing before. Looking at aerial photographs of the orchards on Google Maps it is amazing how many trees are growing here (use coordinates 19.656940, -155.009190). It is 2.7 miles from Route 11 to the gift shop/factory.

The factory tour consisted of walking by windows that allow you to look into the factory and since we were pressed for time we skipped doing that. A factory is a factory is a factory. I would have liked to see the nut crushers in operations though. Macadamia nuts are very hard and require a lot of pressure to crack. We bought some shelled nuts and candy.

In the gift shop was one of the many pearl selling counters that we saw. These operations are somewhat of a scam in my opinion. They have prize drawings for what you think are real prizes. Everyone wins the drawing of course. The prize is 30-40-50% off a real cultured pearl. The mark, er, customer then personally selects an oyster from a plastic containers that is shaped like an oyster shell using wooden tong. The clerk, with lots of anticipatory sounds and words, sacrifices the poor oyster and lo and behold it contains a pearl or, worse, two of them. The pearl usually costs, after that big discount you 'won', about $5? What can the customer do with a genuine pearl that was in that oyster they had 'luckily' picked from the slimy pile in the bowl? Put it in a nice gold or silver setting!!! Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your outlook, they just happened to have some settings available for you. All kinds of settings, which the discount does not apply to. These settings seemed a bit over-priced to me but I am not a jeweler and don't play one on TV. Judge for yourself, before you open that oyster, whether what you are getting is anywhere close to worth it. One woman hit the 'jackpot' and found two pearls in her oysters, got super excited, and bought $500 worth of settings for those pearls while her husband looked on in what looked like disgust to me. I don't know what became of the poor mollusk that had lovingly produced those two pretty pearls.

Off to Hilo Hatties, a Hawaiian tradition, with the top down of course. Hilo Hatties is, to put it mildly, is a first class tourist trap. But you have to and will go there while in Hawaii. Pele will be mad if you don't. Besides they have a lot of nice stuff you can buy to hang in the closet or put on display on the mantel until your next garage sale. I actually enjoyed looking around in it. Hilo Hatties is getting serious competition from everyone's favorite store - Wal-Mart who have set up mini-Hilo Hatties in their Hawaiian stores. If you miss going to Hilo Hatties in Hilo, fear not, there is one or maybe two of them on every island. And in every port there are free shuttles conveniently parked right near ship's gangway as you get off the ship. The cruise line must get a kick-back from Hilo Hatties for directing customers to them. Hilo Hattie sounds like a character from South Pacific, the movie.

Inside Hilo Hatties we met up with our next door neighbors on the ship, Pat and Roy, and since they had just finished up with a ship excursion, we asked them if they wanted to ride around in our rented convertible with us to a couple of places. They couldn't say yes fast enough and so off we went, with the top down of course.

We went over to Rainbow Falls which is supposedly a big time attraction on the Big Island. It was your basic waterfall, water flowing over a lava ledge. Fairly high. Nice and semi-impressive. It is in a state park. There were a lot of teenagers hanging out in the parking lot for some reason. I got somewhat uncomfortable with the parking lot ambiance so we took some pictures and quickly moved on to Akaka Falls, with the top down.

There are two main roads on Hawaii Route 11 and Route 19 and the rental car shuttle bus driver said that if got lost, write down how we did it and give it to him because we would be the first people to do so. All the islands in Hawaii are pretty small actually. The total land mass makes it the 48th largest state. If you count ocean then it might be the largest. We drove through beautiful downtown Hilo. Hilo had been hit by two tsunamis in the past and the town now sits well back from the ocean. There is a Tsunami Museum in Hilo, but it is closed on Sunday too so we went out Route 19, looking for Akaka Falls State Park.

Route 19 is pretty cool. Ocean views, farms, and rain forest. We saw a sign for a scenic route and went down it. I love scenic routes. (The Apache Trail in Arizona is the scenic route to end all scenic routes.) The road less traveled narrowed up on us pretty fast, but it was definitely scenic. We came to one of those quintessential scenic viewpoints that had it all, Onomea Bay: height, ocean waves pounding on the rocks, beautiful non-native vegetation, blue water, clear skies, clean air, and lots of tourists sharing it all with us. It was beautiful, to tell the truth, which we always do unless talking about ducking and running from sniper fire, which we seem do in Bosnia every time we go there.

We passed, on the scenic route, the Hawaiian Tropical Botanical Gardens, another tourist must-see. We did not have the time to stop. Thanks again Captain Smit. We might have stopped since we like botanical gardens.

Finding our way back to Route 19 was interesting since there weren't any signs saying "Route 19 this way, Fool" for quite a ways. We found one finally and got back on Route 19. We also found the turn off to Akaka Falls.

Akaka Falls is one of the premier water falls on the island of Hawaii. It has it all - height, water, and surrounding beautiful trees and plants and it is so far out in the country high school kids do not go there. It is what Missourians call a 'good piece' up the mountain to the falls. We were now really pressed for time, thanks to Captain Smit, and almost turned around until we saw what looked like the park in the distance. I think all the land in this area was used to grow sugar cane at one time. That industry has been shut down for reasons I do not know and the land looked fallow to me. We could see patches of wild sugar cane growing along the road. All the sugar cane workers are now probably working in Hilo Hatties, selling Hawaiian shirts and cheap leis.

We got to the park, scoped out the long trail from the parking lot to the falls and decided we had better not take the hike and risk missing getting back on the ship. We snapped some pictures of the falls, which we could barely see through the trees and left. When we pulled up a mongoose came over to see if we had any rats with us. We didn't. Mongooses are an invasive species in Hawaii that have caused untold havoc on wildlife there. They kill birds and eat bird and turtle eggs. They were suppose to eat rats but don't.

So we headed back to the ship, with the top down. On the way down the mountain, we stopped in a little store that sold homemade pastries and ice cream. Since I had had pastries and lots of ice cream every day for the past 4 days at sea I passed on getting any. Roy, our happy passenger, loaded up with about $10 bucks worth of pastries for some reason. The pastries really looked good but not that good in my opinion (we spent 3 weeks in pastry heaven - France - last year).

This side of the Big Island was nice and interesting, but not a place I would want to spend time and treasure returning to. We will stop in Kona in a few days. It is on the opposite side of the Big Island. You can get to Kona from Hilo by taking Route 11, past the Volcanoes National Park, hopefully with the top down.

If you really like to explore the places you visit, one thing about cruising that is not good: you do not have time, even if the Captain does his job, to hike some trails or bike the roads or even walk around downtown meeting people, smelling things, and savoring the colors and textures of a new place. Getting out of the car and off the excursion buses and using the feet and legs God gave you is the best way to get away from being just another camera-toting tourist and being an adventurer. Getting off the ship takes time. Getting a car and taking it back take time. Fooling around in tourist traps like Hilo Hatties takes time. Eating takes time. It would have been great to use that time instead to hike Kilauea Iki crater or up to Akaka Falls. We could have used a good 10 hours in the Hilo area. We got around 6.