Day 4: The Big Island, April 28, 2010

On Day 4 we went south a bit to Pu'uhonua o Honaunau National Park, or Place of Refuge. This was the site of a palace and temple complex.

The replica of Hale-o-Keawe, the royal mausoleum:

Hawaiians in the sixteenth century under Kamehameha followed a complex system of laws. A person could be executed for relatively minor offenses, unless he managed to swim across the shark-infested waters of Kealakekua Bay to the Place of Refuge. If the offender reached the shores of the Place of Refuge, he was absolved of his crimes.

The park provided a pamphlet with a self-guided tour around the site. I acted as tour guide and read about each of the designated spots.

Carved wooden figures (kapu ki'i) watching over the grounds and warning away those who might try to invade from the sea



Carving the kapu ki'i


Marissa and Taylor
Jason
Lorraine and Steve
Lorraine and Steve apparently feeling the influence of the kapu ki'i
Behind a wall and past the Hale-o-Keawe is an expanse of black lava rock with altars and the remains of a foundation


Also, honu!

Love.

The bay off the Place of Refuge is a well-known snorkeling destination.
And if you pay to get into the National Park, they will let you park there even if you're snorkeling. After walking through the park on a warm and muggy day, jumping into the water was a welcome relief.

I wound up mostly snorkeling by myself since I inadvertently left Jason behind. He said he tried to keep up with me, but couldn't. Whoops. Sometimes I forget I'm a good swimmer.

Jason's typical view of me, swimming away, often down toward the bottom

I love going deep and being beneath the water.

If you look at a map of the snorkeling area (like the one in this book (which is a fantastic book, by the way. More on that in a future post)), there are two areas to snorkel: one that's deeper and for all levels of snorkeler, and one that's more advanced because it is shallow and you run the risk of a wave crashing you into the reef if you're not careful. After I paddled around the deep part for a bit (and it did get pretty deep. Probably at least 30 or 40 feet or more if you swam out), I headed for the advanced area.

Hawaiian greetings via cinder blocks at the bottom of the bay:
There were fish everywhere in the bay, but I think the majority of them congregated in the shallow area, moving up and down, back and forth on the waves as they came in. So I joined the fish, bobbing up and down over the rocks and swimming through the caverns in between the rock walls. It was great! Seriously, I could stay in the water, swimming with the fish, pretty much all day.

So I went and found Jason and brought him (and the camera) back to the shallow area.

Then we told Jason's dad and little brother to go check it out, which they did, and Jason's dad wound up getting smashed into the rocks and cut up a bit. Eek. I felt bad about that.

We didn't see any sharks despite the Place of Refuge materials that said the Hawaiian people had to swim across the "shark-infested waters" to get to the Place of Refuge. But there are spinner dolphins in the area and we saw a few of them toward the end of our swim, leaping and spinning out of the water. We saw even more a couple of days later, which I'll write about later.

Lorraine took a picture of us all, post-snorkeling
Gratuitous happy Anya shot
On our way back to the condo, we stopped at St. Benedict's Painted Church.

The pretty graveyard in front of the church. It looked peaceful.
I wanted to do a bit of shopping for some family and friends and the Young Women, so Steve, Lorraine, Marissa and I headed down Ali'i Drive to the shops. I think some of the best things were in the big outdoor farmers market. I found some cute trinkets and when we came back a couple of days later they had avocados as big as my head. We should have been shopping there for produce the whole time we were on the Big Island.

After shopping, we walked out behind the shops to the ocean and posed for some pictures.
Another lovely Hawaiian sunset.