Hawaii-The Big Island Day 1 & 2

While on the Big Island, we stayed at an awesome resort in Waikoloa Village. The Big Island is an interesting place. They have lots of animals and there are signs warning of donkeys crossing everywhere. There are several ranches with cows, horses and sheep and we saw goats all over the place. We stayed on the north west side which is the dry side of the island and it was just tons of black volcanic rock. The first day we went to a couple of beaches. The first beach we went to was Anaueho'omalu beach.

 It was a great beach but didn't have a lot of waves and the snorkeling wasn't very good so we packed up and headed to another beach. We ended up at Puako beach and it was gorgeous. The current was strong, but the snorkeling was great. The visibility was fantastic and we saw lots of colorful fish. It was fun being able to snorkel again.

 On our second day on the Big Island we drove all over the island. We started at Akaka Falls.

 It was a short hike through a lush jungle full of exotic flowers like these.

 The amazing waterfall.

 Our next stop was at Rainbow Falls. Their was no rainbow that day, but it was beautiful none-the-less.

 Then we went to the Big Island Candies factory and store. It was amazing. They let you test taste any of their candies that you want. They had chocolate dipped coconut shortbread, passion fruit cream dipped in white chocolate and then dark chocolate, all kinds of cookies, every kind of yummy macadamia nut combination you can come up with and more. Needless to say, we all bought a lot of things. Then we went to the Mauna Loa macadamia nut factory. It ended up being a short self guided tour with a gift shop at the end. They also let you taste taste and I fell in love with the butter candy macadamia nuts.

Next we went to the volcano.

You would assume that the above picture is what we saw, but that is actually a picture of a picture I took at the museum at the volcano park, lol. Below is what we actually saw....pretty much nothing.  The vog (and yes I mean vog, no typo) was thick and wet and smelled and you couldn't see more than a few feet in front of you. It was also cold. 

Since they still made us pay to get in, we decided to go the museum and I am glad we did. It had some cool things. The picture below was my favorite. It looks like hair, so they call it Pele's hair (Pele is the Hawaiian Volcano Goddess), but it is actually thin strands of volcanic glass.

They had a display from the green sand beach as well. It is green because of the sulfur from the volcano.

We had planned on staying at the volcano park for the rest of the day but only stayed for about 30 minutes. Since we had to drive around the rest of the island to get back to our resort we decided to do a little sight seeing. We stopped at Puluuau Beach on the south side, which is a black sand beach.
It is a popular spot for sea turtles to come up and nest. There weren't any turtles there unfortunately, but they had these signs everywhere.

The last place that we visited for the day was the Place of Refuge in Pu'uhonua o Honaunau. In ancient Hawaii, if you broke ANY law (as silly as a forbidden food) the punishment was death. But if you made it to a place of refuge (they had several on the island) then you would be pardoned. This one had been rebuilt to look like it did at that time. We got there just at sunset, which made for some beautiful pictures.