We tried to do a bunch of things, but life conspired against us. No photos today. Having said that, this was a fun day!
We woke up and slept in until 7am local time. (This should make adjusting to Vancouver time much easier…) Cluck-cluck, our resident chicken, decided to try her hand at cawing this morning and woke me up. Thankfully, as yesterday was a gong-show of altitude and pressure changes, I passed out last night quickly. As Miranda said “I was mid-sentence when I heard you fall asleep.” It was nice.
Packed our stuff up – it had been scattered around the room this time pretty badly. John, our host, knocked on our window-door and told us that he’d gone easy on us, but that I was going to have to learn how to pick papaya’s. He had a long stick with a basket on the end, and on the end of the basket was a claw. You reach up into the papaya tree with the stick and pick at the papaya with the claw and it falls into the basket. Genius!
I don’t know if I mentioned this yet, but “Dolphin View” was (and still is…) my favourite place we stayed at on the Big Island. John talked to much, but he was attentive and didn’t bug me like Jacqueline in Honokaa did. He is a middle aged hippy, with a house that he’s split up into 3-4 rental units, and a small property filled with fruit trees that he picks regularly. Not a bad life, really.
Miranda and I took off, only to stop at the nearest intersection to figure out where on earth we were going next. We wanted to head south to some beaches there, but we also wanted to rent SUPs or kayaks and head out on the water. The book implied that the best place for this was downtown Kona, so we headed there.
Had some lunch at Bubba Gump’s (fried shrimp, garlic shrimp, cajun shrimp…) and then walked along the beach until we came to a place that looked like it might help us out. Went in, and we were informed that the State had given a surf advisory and that if anyone was going to rent equipment, it was their heads. She recommended a place near our hotel that might be good though, as it didn’t have the surf breaking on its shore. We took a long walk back to our car and headed down that way.
No place to be found, we decided to check into our hotel early. Our room wasn’t available yet, so we started to hand out bags away and get changed for some water fun and…our room was ready just as we were walking away from the hotel. When we were done organizing, we just went down to the pool instead.
“Done organizing” is a euphemism. This place is nice, real nice, but we had a ton of things go wrong. It’s a maze of buildings and pools and stairwells and gantries, such that we had a hell of a time finding our room. We thought we might check out the spa, but we couldn’t find any information on it. So we go to use the telephone, but that’s broken. Miranda walks back to the front desk and they send a person us. The internet is working for me, but not for her, so she calls the front desk (phone has been fixed) and they shunt her off to a person to fix it. We’re both pretty irritated at this point. Pool time.
The pool is nice. There are waiters around bringing drinks, it’s big and the water slide is pretty decent.
Back in the room, we take a shower and the bath tub drain won’t open. Takes a person to pull the mechanism apart to get it to drain. That’s 3 failures in this one room, not including the maze to get here (which is a big fail in my mind).
The restaurant downstairs is nice and has a good view of sunset (I don’t think any place in this town has a bad view of it), but they can’t seat us until…7:45. It’s about 5:30. What the hell? It turns out that the restaurant is mostly “bar seating” with a smaller menu and you can sit where ever you like. Totally weird, but we had a decent (somewhat tasteless) pizza and some spring rolls and watched the sun go down again.
Back at our hotel room, playing some Agricola again and writing this blog post. 🙂
Tomorrow we’re planning to shop a bit, have breakfast in bed and then…on an airplane at 10:45pm. Looking forward to seeing my cats again!