February 10, 2025

While searching for activities to do, this one Island Tour kept popping up and it had amazing reviews, although a little pricey, I felt like it would be a good way for us to see the whole island and have someone do the driving for us, giving Nick a break.  Since we were staying at an Airbnb, we had to make our way to a nearby hotel for our pick up.  Upon arriving at the Marriott we were surprised to find this part of town very populated and the hotel itself to be more resort like, Nick quickly noticed they had a coffee shop, so he grabbed us drinks and a delicious muffin and shortly we were picked up by our host for the day, Stephen.  We joined the other 8 members of our tour, and needless to say we brought the median age of this tour way down.  One of the “younger’ guys on the tour, proudly shared with me that when he hit 60 his motion sickness went away.  Him and his wife were from Portland, very nice couple, there was also a couple from Indiana celebrating their 50th! Anniversary, another couple from Canada, and yes they were definitely from Canada, Eh, and another couple from outside of Chicago who tried his best to talk politics with him, but I quickly shut that down for him.

Our first stop of the day was a coffee farm, about 20 minutes outside of bustling Kona, Bayview Farms, all of the coffee on Kona is handpicked, hence the reason for its priciness.  The views from the coffee farm were beautiful as it looked out over the ocean, we were able to sample some coffees (3 different kinds) and explore their tiny gift shop before we were off to our next destination, which might have been one of my favorites of the whole day, the United States’ Southern Most Bakery, being four minutes north of the equator, we were able to try malasadas, Hawaiian donuts.  Nick made the selections and he made some wise choices, we had one with vanilla cream, topped with chocolate, passion fruit, taro and guava.

Our next stop after our bellies full with donuts was to the Panaluu Black Sand Beach, where we were able to walk along where lava once met the ocean, where to our surprise they also had a few sea turtles who were making their way from the sea into land.  Down a ways there we a ton of families spending their day at the beach, it was definitely a different experience from the normal white sand beaches that we are used to.  Although when in Iceland we also visit a beach that was black, but those were more stones than sand.  After enjoying sometime walking along the black sand beach and some large lava rock, we made our way back to our luxury Mercedes van, and off to what I was anticipating was going to be the most exciting stop of the day, Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park.  We arrived and were treated to a lunch from Stephen that consisted of rice, teriyaki chicken, fried fish, and the remainder of our donuts from our earlier stop, which was a good call to save.  Once we had finished our lunches, we ventured into the park store to get my stamp for my National Parks passport book and then made our way over to the Volcano House, which was a combination of a hotel, restaurant, gift shops and a viewing platform for the volcano.  Up until the day prior to our arrival, it was active and you could see lava erupting from the top, unfortunately during our visit there was no active lava, but there was plenty of smoke coming up through it, and is smelled of sulfur.  After we were done viewing the volcano at that point, Stephen drove us down to the lava tube, where we were able to take a short hike down and make our way through where once lava flowed.  Seeing all of the lava during our drives, walking through the lava tube, it’s crazy to think that people inhabit this island and at any minute destruction could happen to their lives and homes (but I guess that really could be anywhere given Mother Earth).  

The rest of our day was more sightseeing, making our way to the East side of the Island, driving through Hilo, stopping off at Rainbow Falls, which was a let down as there were no rainbows at the bottom of the falls given the lack of sun when we arrived.  We also visited ‘Akaka Falls State Park, during this visit there were two different paths that you could take, Nick and I chose to take the longer one with more stairs that would also take you to another waterfall, unfortunately the view of this one was not the greatest, it was pretty far across the ravine and really overgrown, but once we got to ‘Akaka, it was pretty impressive, twice as tall as Niagara Falls, but not nearly the width.  

The last stop on our tour for the day before making our way back to Kona was Waipi’o Valley Lookout, per Stefan they most picturesque on the entire Big Island, unfortunately at this point the clouds had rolled in so I don’t think that it was as beautiful as it usually is, but still pretty.  Not necessarily as pretty as the views that we had on our hike the other day near the coast in Kaua’i.  The roads down to the valley are limited to only the people who live down there, which are just a handful of farms who have lived there for many years and continue to pass along their homes and farms, mostly farming taro on the land.

The day was a long one, after our last stop, we still had about an hour plus drive back to Kona, first to drop off some of our friends at their hotel, but we then made it way back to our stop and were dropped off around 7:00 pm.  Since we had already paid for a full days parking, we decided to leave the car where it was, walk along the coast a little bit and then decided to return to Kona Brewery for another round of pepperoni rolls before we headed out tomorrow.  We shared the fish tacos and finished our evening with pineapple upside down cake with pineapple gelato, the Hawaiians really do know how to do pineapple!

All in all, we had a good day, the tour was okay, definitely something that we could have done ourselves and nothing we saw was off the beaten path.  It was nice to be driven around the island, but I would have had that anyways.  I think for older couples who aren’t as comfortable driving, this tour would have be perfect, although I did learn some interesting facts about the island, I do think that it would have been a little more enjoyable with just the two of us navigating on our own.