We started day 3 by leaving Volcano and traveling through Hilo, ending up at the Hilo Tropical Botanical Gardens. It was a lovely trip that Alex memorialized by taking a picture of (what seemed like) every single orchid in the garden. We particularly enjoyed the exhibit about the founders of the garden, and how they transformed a big valley full of trash into a botanical garden. Outside the garden there’s a museum exhibiting various things they found — they even found an unmarked grave! (Which still sits undisturbed within the botanical garden.) Below is about 1% of the photos Alex took of the garden:
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| We saw a vision of the FSM! #blessed |
After visiting the garden, we made a long-awaited stop to get lunch and shave ice, then returned to Hilo for our Mauna Kea tour. This was probably the best food we’ve had so far on the trip - Hawaii is not a culinary destination.
On the way we saw a family of chickens with their chicks — wild chickens are quickly becoming the bison of Hawaii for us. We learned that one reason there are so many chickens on Hawaii is the lack of predatory land animals such as coyotes — feral cats, of which there are many, for the same reason, seem to be the largest predator around. We also stopped at Rainbow Falls, where we saw a banyan tree that was honestly a lot cooler than the waterfall itself. Banyans are impressive:
The summit of Manua Kea is very high and very chilly, so we acclimated for an hour at the visitors center (which sits a mere 9200 feet above sea level), during which a fight broke out between a grumpy Australian tourist and a family who thought it was a good idea to take a 2-year-old to]the mountain — thankfully, bloodshed was averted. No news on how the 2-year old fared at 14,000 feet.
The slopes of Manua Kea are mostly barren, although there is some endangered silver sword, as well as one particular species of insect that eats insect corpses that have been blown onto the mountain by the trade winds. It seems like a difficult way to live.
At the summit of Mauna Kea we saw a really cool sunset above the clouds, while shivering behind a porta-potty and surrounded by orange-jumpsuited Japanese tourists — according to our guide, 4 of the 7 licensed Mauna Kea tour companies are Japanese. We then went down for our star tour. The skies at Manua Kea are clear 300 nights a year — we were apparently there on one of the remaining 65, and had views of only part of the sky, but our tour guide was still able to show us many constellations. We also learned some Hawaiian constellations, such as the Star Lei (aka Auriga) and Maui’s Fishhook (aka Scorpio).
Also, there was hot chocolate. We then returned to our hotel, which had macadamia nuts for us, which is how I learned that these trees we saw all over Hawaii:
Are macadamias, which would explain the frequency of macadamia nut related signage:
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