Our first camp spot after leaving Hawaii Volcanoes National Park was reserved at a county park at Milolii, on the dry (yippie!) west coast. It's amazing how much the ecosystem changes in a few miles. We left what felt like rainforest in the park; by the time we were in Punaluu it was starting to dry out; south point was dry, but green; but Milolii was coastal desert country.
The coast highway is up at about 300 m or so, and it seemed like it was carved mostly out of the side of Mauna Loa. When we reached the turn off to Milolii, we wound down and down, and soon we were winding our way through what felt like fresh lava flows. We passed a sign that said we were entering the tsunami evacuation zone, and kept going down until we got to the end of the road at the village of Milolii. The county park at which we were camping didn't amount to much; a small bit of rocky coast, a few picnic tables, a basketball court, toilets, and a pavilion in case of rain. There was no obvious place to pitch a tent. We were on a 30 m or so wide piece of waterfront, hemmed in by a house on one side and lava and a small bay on the other. But it was camp, it was dry, and we had had a good day. We pitched the tent, fired up Sid's stove and heated water for dinner, and got out the bananagrams. Dona whupped me, but I made a note in my brain (the notepad I carry around) to ask Christy the Wordsmith about the rules for forming words with prefixes and suffixes. We went to sleep to the sound of the ocean washing over lava rocks.
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| Milolii Coast |
We awoke the next morning to a beautiful clear day and Yellow-billed Cardinals hopping around.
I was impressed with how the local fishermen launch and retrieve their boats in the small spaces available on these rocky shores, even when there is a swell running all the time. They drive up, back their trailer into the water, hop in, start the motor, back the boat off the trailer, and thread their way out of harm's way. Their partner / driver has already pulled the trailer out of the water by then, aided by 4WD, a necessity I suspect. Coming back in, they wait a little ways out until their partner has backed the trailer into the water, then they cautiously motor in and drive onto the trailer, hop out, secure the boat, and pull it out. The whole process takes less than a minute.
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| Yellow Billed Cardinal |
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| Xxx Finch |
We decided to catch breakfast at a local restaurant somewhere up the road, so we packed up the tent and sleeping bags and headed out. We wandered up the coast until we found a fruit stand with smoothies, which we decided sounded like a good start on breakfast.
We continued on up the coast to Puuhonua O Honaunau, another of Ram's recommendations.
This page last updated on 2013-10-23.
