The original plan was to have us touring the northern tip of the Big Island, hiking and using binoculars to try to see whales off the coast. But….driving through that area the night before felt good. As in, we did it! 🙂 We didn’t really see too much that we wanted to be sure we saw again. And, we love love loved our time snorkeling the “real” Two-Step location and really felt like we needed to go back.
So we did!
After breakfast we headed back to Honaunau Bay, parking once again in the National Park parking lot. We planned on touring this historical sight after snorkeling. This time around we knew exactly where we needed to drop our stuff and hop in the water. I will say…. today was a lot more rough at the entry/exit point. The waves + the surge of the tidal change was pretty intense. I didn’t notice it as much in the beginning, but trying to exit was hard for me. Owen kind of ‘rode the surge’ and basically did a super-hero “jump” out onto the lava rocks. I knew right away that there was no way that would work for me!! Instead I chose to swim around to the right and pull myself up in a slightly more protected area. It was a longer swim, but worth it.
Once again Honaunau Bay did not disappoint! We immediately swam out to the coral ‘fingers’ that we had found the last time and enjoyed seeing huge schools of fish and beautiful corals. The best part, however, was having two sea turtles surprise us! They swam into our field of vision and then one of them started swimming up right towards us! She actually came up to the surface right in between us and we got to pop up above the water to see her take a gulp of air. It was sooooooo cool! Owen and I were kind of squealing to each other through our snorkels and smiling so big our masks almost popped off. It was so special!
After we had a picnic lunch and dried off, we headed to the nearby Hōnaunau National Historical Park where we had parked. We downloaded an interactive app and walked around learning all about the history of park which was a spiritual sanctuary protected by Lono, the God of life. The park was gorgeous with historical buildings interspersed with palm trees along the rocky shoreline. While there we had a local artist create a printed totem-like print for each of us too!
After chilling in the condo for about an hour — which went very, very FAST!! — we hopped in the car again to go view the sunset at the top of Mauna Kea (the dormant volcano in the middle of the Big Island.) We packed a cooler of food & drinks and in my little head we’d park at the visitors center, tailgate for a bit while we watch the sun go down and wait for the stars. In hindsight, how silly of me!! The drive over was very cloudy and even a little foggy. It was an hour drive so part of me was thinking “ugh this is such a bummer with the clouds!” Owen kept saying he thought the visitors center was above the clouds but I had a hard time believing he was right.
Spoiler: He was right! 🙂
We took a winding road higher and higher up until we were indeed above the clouds! When we pulled into the parking lot, however, we couldn’t see the sun at all! There were mountain peaks all around that blocked the view. I was bummed again until I realized that people were hiking UP THE MOUNTAINS to get to the summit to see the sunset. They looked like tiny ants. At that point we realized that we didn’t have a leisurely half-hour to watch sunset from the parking lot. We had a steep incline hike at over 10k feet to quickly overcome in order to even see the sunset!
Owen grabbed his asthma inhaler and a couple of oranges and we started hiking up the gravel path. It wasn’t actually that bad and once we got to the top, the view was spectacular. Like life-changing beauty…. cotton candy clouds swirling all around our feet….the sun setting slowly right in front of us. I think we both took a gazillion photos because everywhere you looked it was just so breathtaking. There were only about 30 or so people at the summit with us, so it felt like we were getting to experience something incredibly rare. Owen set up a time lapse on his phone and we found a nice rock to lean against to watch the sun set and nighttime roll in.
The dark sky was one of the best we’d ever seen. There were stars on top of stars — even the Milky Way was visible to the naked eye. The temperature dropped quickly and yet we still stayed up there enjoying the panorama view until we were almost the last ones there. We used a red light filter on our phones to navigate walking the steep trail back to our car and we couldn’t believe our luck at getting such a magical experience. It would have been the highlight of our entire trip except for what tomorrow ended up surprising us with!
