Hawaii

During the five days we spent at sea between San Diego and Honolulu the wind blew consistently, never went over a force seven and didn’t go forward of the beam, ideal passage weather for a sailboat. On this big cruise ship, it’s hard sometimes to get a sense of the wind and waves, we just seem to glide quietly and effortlessly along, some days there are whitecaps and other days there aren’t, the only visible measure of change from one day to the next.

We were to visit three of the Hawaiian Islands on this cruise: Oahu (Honolulu), Maui (Lahaina) and Hawaii (Hilo), the Big Island. First stop was Oahu. All the iconic Hawaiian images were there: surfers at Waikiki Beach, Diamond Head, long vistas of surf and palm trees, tropical flowers and grand hotels.

A couple of what we’d thought were Hawaiian icons turned out not to be so. Did you know that macadamia nuts originated in Australia and pineapples actually originated in Uruguay and aren’t even grown much in Hawaii anymore? Another surprise was the Hawaiian addiction to Spam (a cheap canned meat product made of pork, fat and fillers that is the butt of jokes in many countries). They eat huge amounts of it and have special dishes like spam fritters, spam misubi and even add the flavour to other things, like macadamia nuts.

Honolulu was the longest stop of the cruise and we had two full days to explore. We toured around Honolulu the first day. After getting our bearings we were then able get on a local bus which went all the way around the island for just $2.50. We turned it into a full day excursion, stopping on the north shore at Shark Bay to have a picnic lunch and go for a snorkel which was great, lots of colourful fish just offshore. On the way back we stopped in at the Dole Plantation to try some of their famous pineapple whip which was very nice. The whole island seemed very busy and even with just 1500 miles of road on the entire island, there was a ten lane expressway in Honolulu along with displays of road rage downtown, probably not a place we’d like to go back to.

Next up was the island of Maui. We stopped at a small town, Lahaina and were tendered into shore from the mother ship. It was a quaint place, but, not much other than shopping was available.

We pushed on to the Big Island of Hawaii and the town of Hilo. This seemed to be more to our liking with lots of natural sights to explore. We were highly anticipating seeing our first volcano. Shore excursions from the boat were all booked and were way too expensive anyway, so, we thought we’d rent a car. Of course, the world famous Ironman triathlon was on in Kona and there wasn’t a rental car to be had on the island. We ended up renting a two seater moving van and had a laugh driving that around! We did visit the lava fields and active volcanoes of the National Park and it was amazing.

There were three, or, four more things we would like to have gone to see (for example, a green sand beach, one of only four in the world), but, just ran out of time and had to return to the ship. A future visit may be in order.

Although the volcanoes in the daylight were fascinating, the real show is at night and you can walk to the active lava flow, fly over in a helicopter, or, take a boat to where the flows are calving into the sea. We were resigned and disappointed to not be able to see any of this as we were leaving in late afternoon. However, once underway, Captain Henk announced that we’d be going right by the lava flow around eight p.m. and he’d try and get in close so we could have a good look.  This made us think of the Costa Concordia disaster and we were hoping there wouldn’t be a repeat, but, the water was very deep right up to the lava flow and we got in as close as just a couple of boat lengths off. It was a spectacular sight and very exciting! It was hard to judge just how far off we were, but, we could see the surf breaking on the shore in the dark, so, we were very close. A quick pivot turn took us back out and away from the large cloud of toxic gases that were gathered to leeward of the flames and heat.