Day 8 - Kona on Friday

Today is actually our second day on the “big island”, but we are on the other side of the island. We are in Kona today. This is much more of a tourist location than Hilo, despite what our guide said yesterday. We had to use the lifeboats to get to shore since the water is to shallow for the ship to dock (they anchor and then ferry people back and forth to shore). Conversely Hilo has a deep port and everything that is shipped to this island is first offloaded in Hilo and then driven across the island. That is why gasoline is $3.40 in Hilo and $3.66 here in Kona (glad we are not buying gasoline in either place).

We had the buffet breakfast this morning to make sure we were in plenty of time “to tender”, only to discover that the swells were too high to safely board people and they had to move the ship further down the coast. Bottom line is that we were about 30 minutes late getting off the ship. The ride was interesting although they had as many people packed in as they could to try to get back on schedule. That was no problem for our first tour, but we had a short timeframe between tours and were a little concerned for awhile.

The first tour was a bus trip around part of the Kona area. The driver gave us lots of information (including saying that the shops near the pier were overpriced and telling us where some other places were). The first stop was actually at the Royal Kona Coffee Company and Museum. They had free samples of lots of different coffee flavors. Janet said they were good but David is not much of a coffee drinker. Most people agreed with Janet. Then we went to a National Park. It has a long unpronounceable name but basically is mean “the refuge” This is where people who broke ancient Hawaiian laws went to get forgiven by the high priests. The hard part is that it was guarded by fierce warriors trying to kill the person before they got inside. It sounds like a very serious version of “tag” with people trying to get to the home base. After that we went to a church which had been built near the shore by a Belgian priest, and then was moved into the hills when the parishioners could not get to the first site. This priest spent 6 years painting the inside of the church with murals that explained all of Christianity to the natives and caused their conversion. It is officially called St. Benedict’s but is referred to as the Painted Church. When they had to move the church, they moved it board by board to preserve the paintings. The surprising thing is that it was in 1904, the paintings were we done with house paint, and have not had to be retouched ever since. The church is very small with Hawaiian fabric for the altar cloths and leis on St. Joseph and Mary.

When we got back to Kona we went on a glass bottom boat tour. There is a shallow section along the shore with a reef. We saw lots of different fish through glass panels in the bottom of the boat. In Cancun we did something similar but it had lots of portholes below sea level. This was actually much easier to use and to see. We did not encounter any large fish, but there were lots of small fish and much coral. The guide gave us a good explanation of them.

Hawaii will be the site of the Ironman competition next month. There were signs up showing the starting and ending points (near the dock). We saw people practicing the swim course and there were people running and riding bicycles over many of the roads. We are sure that when they actually do this contest, it will goof up the whole area that day. We are glad to be here now instead of then.

We were back on the ship about 3:00 (another tender ride from shore) and we went to the Panorama Room to have a late lunch from the buffet - just to tide us over until dinner. Dinner was international which means there were specialty meals from lots of different countries. Each evening our waiter (John) goes through making recommendations and then we order whatever we wanted anyway - we don’t know if he thinks it is funny or frustrating. Anyway, tonight we both had the Surf & Turf.

Before dinner we attended a classical piano concert in one of the lounges. The pianist wasn’t anyone you might have heard of before, but he was good and it was peaceful hour.

After dinner we spent a quiet evening in the room.

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