HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND
By Kelly Moran
Southbound [part 1 of 2]
Ka’u is the biggest district on this, the biggest Hawaiian island, and you get there by driving south from Hilo, Puna or Kona. The spaces are mostly wide-open, so getting from place-of-interest to place-of-interest takes a bit of time. But spending a couple of days in Ka’u will give you new insights into why people love this most remote segment of the Big Island.
DAY 1
From Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, Hwy 11 takes you south through a dry landscape, the makai side of which is appropriately called “the Ka’u desert.” On the mauka side, Mauna Loa’s steep palis stay green the year-round in a dry-land forest microclimate where rainfall is minimal, but capturing the moisture of clouds and fog enables trees both native and man-planted to grow tall.
A Tibetan Buddhist temple nestles there too, in Wood Valley, mauka of the town of Pahala. The Dalai Lama has been there twice, and a room for him is always kept available, should he ever arrive unexpectedly.
[The Tibetan Buddhist temple in Wood Valley, mauka of the town of Pahala.]
Visitors are welcome, but leave a donation if you enter the temple. And overnight accommodations are available for folks who wish to stay for a day or two of meditation and chanting.
[Tibetan Buddhists in Ka’u are committed to world peace, and have twice hosted the Dalai Lama in their temple.]
Casual visitors to Ka’u, however, or those who are intrigued by a glimpse of an earlier era, may want to stay in one of the nearby sugar-era homes now operated as vacation rentals by Pahala Plantation Cottages. And you can take a coffee break on the way back to Pahala from Wood Valley, with a stop at the Ka’u Coffee Mill.
[After an preliminary drying on the concrete floor (right) of the Ka’u Coffee Mill, in Pahala, coffee beans undergo a secondary drying in wooden trays.]
Continuing south, the county’s Punalu’u Beach Park has a palm-fringed black sand beach that’s the widest and most picturesque on the island.
[The black sand beach at Punalu’u; looking south toward the main pavilion, on a calm day.]
When sugar production ended, in the early 1990s, the plantation owner built a resort behind the beach, but only a few of its condos survive.
[An old wooden bridge over the pond at Punalu’u Beach Park is one of the few remnants of what its builders once hoped would be a resort.]
Local folks tend to camp and cluster on the north side of the park, near a cool, brackish pond, where the trees are tallest but the beach is steepest.
[A brackish pond behind the beach and the palms at Punalu’u Beach Park most likely was first built or improved by pre-contact Hawaiians as a fishpond.]
The beach on the sunnier south side has a gentler slope, restrooms, a big (rentable) pavilion and a paved parking lot. Sea turtles (honu) are an endangered species; if you see one waddle out of the sea to bask on the warm sand, look, but don’t touch.
[Look – but don’t touch – the wild sea-turtles (honu) that sun themselves on the beach at Punalu’u.]
The beach at Whittington Beach Park, a few miles farther south, is rockier and not as easily swimmable as the one at Punalu’u, but it boasts a bigger, more photogenic pond. And fewer people go there. In the 19th century it was Ka’u’s seaport, then called Honuapo, where interisland steamships anchored in the bay.
[The “beach” at Whittington Beach Park is not as easily swimmable as at Punalu’u, but fewer people go there, and the scenery is spectacular.]
Looking mauka from the water’s edge, you see Mauna Loa edge-on; yet even in that narrow profile, the immensity of the volcano will astonish you.
The town of Na’alehu, with close-by Waiohinu, is the largest population center in Ka’u. It has a supermarket, a bank, and most famously the Punalu’u Bakery – a must-stop for pastry lovers – from where you’ll also want to take home their justly famous “sweet bread” that makes a terrific French toast.
There’s more to see in Ka’u, but that should be enough for one day. I suggest you go even further south the next day, and what you’ll see there will be the subject of my next blog.