Hawaii Day Four

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Another strange, half-thwarted, half-magical day on the Big Island. This was our day to drive all the way to the Volcano National Park, stopping at the famous Punalu'u black sand beach. Both were a bust (in different ways), but chance encounters led to a great experience along the way.

Before heading out we bought some picnic food (a combination of fresh mangoes, bananas, and cherimoyas from the local farmer's market, and fried chicken from Safeway), and stopped briefly at a local coffeehouse where I was finally able to make a blog post (though I had to borrow an electric socket at the real estate agent next door). At the coffeehouse the barista girl recommended taking a detour to South Point, which she said had scenic cliffs.

First there was the long drive around the bottom of the Big Island, retracing our route from the day before and continuing further. It poured rain on and off as we drove. The scratch coffee jungle gave way to macadamia orchards, to black swaths of bare lava fields, to grasslands, back to jungle: a rapid series of microclimates alternating too fast to keep track of. Towns were tiny, much was uninhabited. Some parts seemed to remind us of other places we'd been -- Arizona, Connecticut -- as if donning momentary phantoms from our brains, but a second look would pierce the illusion and reveal a land totally alien. Sara and I compared notes on whether we liked the Big Island. We came to the conclusion that we wouldn't want to live here, and that it certainly didn't live up to the standard image of Hawaii, but nevertheless there was a strong reality to it. It was no theme park: aside from the water sports it wasn't really a tourist destination at all; rather it was a visit to an impoverished corner of the USA where people eked out a hard living from a harsh and fascinating land.

We were on a wary lookout for the turnoff to South Point, not trusting Hawaii's road signs, but we needn't have worried: the Point itself appeared ahead of us as a gigantic ironing-board-shaped plateau, yellow-walled, starting at our level and running horizontally seaward while the rest of the land sloped away alongside it. It was like the prow of a ship extending from an enormous launching slip. We took the turnoff and were immediately in a different world, the single-lane road running through tamed grasslands, thin woods, horse and dairy farms. Eventually we did descend, through a wild rolling prarie of windswept yellow turf, with here and there tortured single trees shredded backwards by the wind, the wall of ocean approaching far ahead. The land seemed totally empty as far as the eye could see to left or right, but it too was farmed; every ten miles or so a cluster of salt-eaten tin shacks went by in a barbed-wire enclosure, marking the center for wandering cows, goats, and horses.

Things then got surreal: in the midst of this hardscrabble prarie we passed a NASA deep-space tracking station, its huge radio dishes aimed obliquely off Earth; then, a few miles further, the little road ran through the rusted-out remains of an abandoned and derelict wind farm. A more modern one was visible operating far below, closer to the coast (the ocean was still miles away), but nothing could improve on these huge rust-streaked stems with frozen or missing propellors, planted amid blown-down barbed-wire fences and chewing cows. Sara and I weren't sure what world we were in -- we half-expected to find some shotgun-toting farmer building a moon rocket in his barn out here.

We finally started to run out of peninsula, and the road narrowed down to a single car-width, dirt shoulders on each side for passing. The paved strip got older and rougher, and eventually petered out altogether into craters and yellow dirt, and we were at the cliffs.

The cliffs (the Southernmost point of the United States) were not only incredibly scenic, but it turned out they were quite popular with the locals -- for cliff-jumping! We were eating our picnic and wondering what these wooden platforms built over the lip were for, when five or six jeeps and trucks came dust-storming down the road, and a whole bunch of twenty-year-old guys and girls leaped out, ran to the edge, and started psyching themselves up for the jump. We wound up watching and talking with them for an hour or so, along with some other tourists who were there. The drop was a good forty feet, I'd guess, into deep clear blue water, the cliffs being hollowed out underneath so the jumpers landed far from land. Getting back up was an act of daring too: there was a ladder hung from one platform, but it ended several feet above the water, so they had to time the swells, put their feet on a strung rope that was nearby, seize the bottom rung with their hands on the uplift and pull themselves up from there. It was thrilling to watch, and Sara and I both snapped lots of pictures. Sara especially got some fantastic action shots of the kids in mid-leap.

The area also had a big open blowhole a few dozen feet back from the edge, where you could look down and see the ocean surging and fizzing in the underground rocky cave, with great echoing sounds like a plunger working.

South Point was the highlight of the day. Back on the road we drove another long distance to the Punalu'u black sand beach, an anticlimax. (The whole island is black lava rock, why wouldn't the sand be black? And why would you go to a beach that makes you look like you've been playing in an ash dump anyway?) It was fun to be completely in sync with Sara; we both looked at it for five minutes, said "Yep," and moved on. The best part here was a wild black cat that frequented the trash can at the parking area, leaping up and nosing in with his black tail waving. He seemed the mischievous spirit of the beach, happily collecting spoils from all the lured tourists.

Then we drove even further to the Volcano National Park, and this was the worst of all. We arrived at twilight, as planned, but it was hard to tell, because the closer we got the more we were enveloped in a purple-black miasma of the vog. It got so we could hardly see a thing to either side. The smell started to get to us, and as a soupy darkness fell we wondered about the wisdom of driving towards a volcano. Then, when we got to the gate, it turned out that the park was mostly closed because of high sulfur dioxide levels. You could still go in, but they were warning people against it, especially those with respiratory problems. Since we'd come all this way we paid our $10, but Sara has had athsma in the past, and we'd hardly gone a mile past the Visitor's Center in the swirling dark (past big flashing signs and mounted placards warning us away) when she declared a turnaround. I was happy to oblige. We had one glimpse of a steam forest (mysterious white smoke rising here and there on a hillside of stunted pines in the fog dusk) and then we were speeding back down the mountain Northward, trying to reach breathable air, laughing about the idea of a National Park of toxic gases.

Night fell eerily early, pitch darkness at 6:30, which we heard later was normal for the Southern island, the mountain and cloudbank blocking the sunset. But it just added to our sense of the surreal on the two hours' drive back to Kailua.

A failed day? Well, not really. It wasn't the usual vacationing, but it was weirdly magical and educational. The Island is showing unexpected stuff to us.

--Matt