Day 5, Thursday 18th June
It was very windy this morning and I had to tie my hair up (not a pretty site!) Hapuna Beach was our destination for today, so we packed up our picnic bag and beach chairs and off we went.
Hapuna Beach was, indeed, a most beautiful beach (although not as beautiful as Kailua on Oahu, in my opinion), but we were absolutely sand blasted! It really got to be very uncomfortable after a while and we, reluctantly, packed up and hiked back up to the car. It might've been windy, but it was also mighty hot!
We decided to drive up to the 'top of the island', to Hawi. A very 'hippy' type of little town it turned out to be. We sat outside Tropical Dreams for ice-cream - but there was very little else of interest to us, apart from searching for a bin to put our rubbish. 'What's that?' I asked. It was a tropical rain shower. It was so sudden, it shocked me!
The area around Waikoloa and the Kohala resorts, is barren and dry. There is lava absolutely everywhere and people come out to 'graffiti' it with coral. There are thousands of these little messages dotted around. We had thought we had left the tropical vegetation behind us, when we left the Windward side. But up here, past Hawi, it was back! And it was beautiful. We had missed it! We drove on to the Pololu Lookout, which is, essentially, at the other side of the mountains from Waipio Valley.
We drove back to our condo, past gorgeous rainbows, took a couple photos on the lani and then went up to King's Shops, which were much posher than Queen's - Tiffany etc. We stopped to watch some young girls doing hula and then drove to Queen's food court for Arby's, before returning to the condo for our usual David Letterman show!
