Cycling Hawaii Day One. Kailua-Kona to Waiohinu (57 miles).
Our first night in Hawai’i was spent at Arnott’s Lodge, run by an Australian who swore he had Scottish connections somewhere in the Falkirk area! It’s a backpackers’ hostel but has some nice private rooms, ceiling fan and lots of glass, just what you need in the hot climate. We sat outside on the first morning, basking in very hot sunshine, playing with the cat and watching red Cardinal birds in the trees before heading over to Kona to pick up the bike from HP Bike Works, the shop that handles the Iron Man triathlon.
So the first night with the bike was at Patey’s Place in Kona, bit of a cheap backpackers’ hostel and not as nice as Arnott’s and it was extremely hot and humid all night as the “Kona wind” was blowing, which comes up from the south and makes it unbearable here in the summer. The main wind is from the north east though, the Trade Wind, or the “trades” as the locals call it and it keeps the island fairly cool the rest of the time. Well, cool means 85deg! We had a huge spider as a guest in the room that night and as it looked like a Brown Recluse, which can be quite deadly, I unfortunately had to despatch it and we slept with the windows closed that night, hence the humidity. So, it was an early start at 7am and I cycled through the quiet Kona streets and up onto HWY 11 and left up Lako Street, where there’s a 24hr garage and I could load up with banana cake and brownies and then head off right, up Wailua Road. This is a narrow path at the start, turning right off Lako Street and parallels HWY 11, passing through quiet groups of very expensive looking houses and has some nice view of Kona and the Pacific. Lots of tropical vegetation and the occasional mongoose darting into the undergrowth. Tons of the local birds which I saw everywhere, the little Zebra Dove, about the size of a Blackbird and the larger, pigeon sized Spotted Dove plus the very common Mynah Bird. The only time I’ve seen one of these was in a cage in Bridge of Orchy. Here they’re everywhere! As are great bunches of green bananas ready to drop from the drooping shady trees. There are also very large turkeys roaming free through the gardens and apparently they’re a plague here, with sometimes up to a dozen on a roof at a time! I passed a few locals out walking the dog in the early morning cool and only had one brush with a halfwit in a 4x4 but he was the exception during the trip.
Wailua Road starts at the “Kona Vistas” stone wall on Lako Street and runs for about 4 miles to a right turn back onto HWY 11. Plenty of interesting houses along the route, with some stunning views of the Pacific and one I saw under construction was actually of Aluminium frame. I suspect they cost considerably more than our new house on Skye!
Back on HWY 11, it’s a bit of a pull up to 1450ft but it’s back to the extremely good shoulder system. This is just great and made the trip I think, as I didn’t have to continually look back over my shoulder to see if a nutter was approaching at 70mph. Instead, I cycled near the inside of the shoulder, which is mostly about 10-15ft wide, clean and smooth. You can just forget about the traffic when you’re on a good shoulder and concentrate on the scenery. This was what really made cycling here far better than cycling at home. That and warm weather and friendly, courteous drivers. The speed limits are low and everyone, except the odd loony obey them. They are strange however, mostly 55mph but lowering to 35mph out on the open road. Now and again though, especially on the Hamakua Coast road, the shoulders stop at bridges and you have to ride up a short ramp onto the parapet, which is rough and uneven and on some of the Hamakua bridges, you’re higher than the Erskine bridge, with the parapet below handlebar height – exciting!
Back on HWY 11, it’s down through Honalo, where the shoulder becomes very narrow and you have to watch for parked cars pulling out, while screaming downhill at 40mph with a cracking Kona Wind at your back! The road got quieter and quieter the further I got from Kona and by the time I hit the Higashi store it was deserted. The only point was the height of the vegetation at the sides of the road, so there’s not really much to see apart from very high tropical veg on the seaward side of the road and big lava cliffs on the other and the heat of the sun bounces off the smooth tarmac which makes me sweat profusely and I was glad of the Camelback Rogue which had 2 litres of water, plus two 1.5l water bottles on the bike, enough to reach Waiohinu, just using the bottles to top up the Camelback.
Passed through Captain Cook, high above the Ocean, through the Kona Coffee zone, the only place in America where coffee is grown, the trees covered in the white spaghetti-like coffee blossoms as it was harvest time. Apparently Hawai’i has only recently got the right to export coffee to mainland America, how’s that for free market trade and all that?!
Once out of the veg zone, it’s the lava zone of 1950, where the lava covered everything and it’s now a wasteland of mostly a’a lava. Here, there is no soil at all and the heat is intense as you plod uphill, vast bristly a’a flows on the left, the blue hazy Pacific on the right. I passed an old chap with full touring kit going the other way, resplendant in a full grey beard. He must have been baking!
You pass the McCandless ranch, a gigantic cattle ranch and home to most of the land deeds on Hawai’i. It’s also home to the last two Alala crows alive. That’s a theme of Hawai’i – everything’s endangered except the human population. There are two birds left alive in the wild and they’re sitting up a tree on the McCandless ranch, a large tract of land formed basically by shafting the Hawai’ian people and stealing their land. The Hawai’ians didn’t have a concept of land ownership. If you didn’t like the local chief’s planning laws, you just upped sticks and moved to a more ameniable plot of land. Then the white man came and it all changed forever.
Cycling up through Ocean View, into a strong headwind, over vast lava flows in extreme heat, passing the gated communities and car loads of Japanese tourists, 2000ft above the Pacific. It’s a large retired population up there as the houses were cheap but without insurance as it was impossible to get – the whole area of Ocean View is a Cat 1 lava area, as it’s right in the path of the Mauna Loa eruptions. We later met a photographer lady who lives in Ocean View and she was sorting all her negatives into boxes and making sure they were easy to find as they were expecting Mauna Loa to erupt in the not too distant future. She just wanted to grab the negatives and run should the lava come in the middle of the night.
The summit of the road is at 2100ft and then it’s a screaming descent down the zig-zags, past a nice wee coffee house on the left. As the shoulder was a bit mucky here I “took the lane” as they say here and kept out in the road. Not a problem as the road is pretty quiet anyway and the strength of the headwind meant I didn’t pick up too much speed down this part.
Right turn at the bottom and down the road to Macadamia Meadows B&B. A luxury $1m house run by a very nice couple indeed and incorporating a Macadamia nut farm which you get a tour of in the morning, as well as some nuts to crack open and have for breakfast. It took me about 5hrs for the ride and I immediately jumped into the pool at the B&B and lazed with Dawn in the warm sunshine before driving down to South Point and walking out in broilling heat to the green sand beach. That was serious heat and I forgot my Tilley hat, back at the B&B so it was a real effort to stagger back to the car I can tell you!
The B&B is superb. Big airy wooden house, few internal walls and cool inside with the rooms downstairs behind some tropical trees and looking down the big grassy garden. Superb en-suite room that night. Waoihinu is a level 6 lava zone, which means it’s pretty safe, with 9 being the safest (remember, Ocean View is a level 1!). The hills above Waiohinu are stunningly green and grassy and look like providing fantastic walking but the access laws here are draconian. Basically, a load of whites turned up, shafted the locals, stole the land and put up loads of “Kapu” signs, which means “forbidden” and was presumably written as “Kapu” to make sure the locals understood who owned the land. Plus ca change, eh? I suspect you might meet with a shotgun totting idiot up there as it’s prime cattle country and not for Joe Bloggs and the local rambling club.
Anyway, Charlene, who’s from Canada and her ex coffee salesman husband Cortney, will regale you with stories of the area over a tropical breakfast of papaya, sausages, waffles and Kona coffee, before taking you on a small tour of the Macadamia Nut trees in the garden, with a liberal sprinkling of history thrown in. Just don’t put the margerine in your coffee, like I did, as it looks like a lump of cream!
We ate in the Shaka restaraunt in Na’alehu, run by a chap who had been to Kyle of Lochalsh once but hadn’t gone over to Skye! The steaks weren’t great though. Not a patch on the one in the hotel in San Fransisco on the way over.
There are plenty of places to stock up on goodies in Na’alehu, especially the Bake Shop, which I continually got mixed up with Bike Shop, which there isn’t!