To Kailua (and beyond)

(I think this post just sat around as a draft for a long time accidentally... so here it is now!)

Traveling 20 miles north from Honaunau to Kailua-Kona is crazy. You leave the jungle and enter a desert, trade Coqui frogs for noisy pigeons, and apparently give up healthy bananas for infected ones...

Just for comparison

                Honaunau                                                                  Kailua-Kona

But we also saw this, so the trade from jungle to urban desert wasn't all bad:

We are staying right on Ali'i Drive, which is the main tourist drag. Mostly there are the same black, rocky beaches as Honaunau, but some have a bit of a twist. Here, you can see someone used lava rocks to build up a hot tub...










...an idea that would be romantic and alluring, if not for the graffiti, 12 scary looking smokers awkwardly staring at us from behind, and the warning that a giant octopus will likely reach out of the ocean and tip you over.















We miss a lot about being on the jungl-y side of the island, but here is one thing we don't miss:

And even though we didn't have all the ducks and chickens, cats and dogs, chameleons and garden spiders, I was very glad to see that the geckos here are almost as abundant!

We were very excited to get to some other beaches and snorkeling sites, so we drove an hour farther north to Mauna Kea Beach. White sand, turquoise water, and coral reef! It was the first (and only) real "beach" we visited.

And that's it! Then we flew home and moved all our stuff from Durham, NC to Roanoke, VA.