Hawaii Day 2

February 21, 2022

On Monday (Feb 21) we started the day by hiking up to Moana Falls. I love the jungle and this was pure jungle. It had recently rained, so the trail was also fairly muddy but I loved it because I was wearing shorts and flip flops so I felt like I was one with nature.

We followed the stream up the side of the mountain and enjoyed the views of small waterfalls and thick green vegetation.

There was also a ton of people but what can you expect, this is Hawaii and the trail is an easy one.

It wasn’t long before we reached the falls and it was definitely worth the effort. The trail ended about a hundred yards from the falls but no one paid any attention to the barriers and we all went down to the water’s edge. It was hot and we would have loved to hop into the pools but everything we read and anyone we talked to warned us that this waterfall had a nasty parasite in it that could make us sick. Since it was our first day we decided not to take a chance. If it had been our last day I would have been right in there but alas. We stood by and watched.

We were going to hike the Likeke waterfall but it was getting late and we still had things to do and places to go. First on the list was lunch.

It was presidents day and the place Lisa wanted to go to was closed so we went to a place called the Liliha bakery. It was famous for their coco puffs which is like a cream puff with a delicious chocolate pudding inside and a coconut topping. That description doesn’t do it justice. They were delicious.

While there we saw that they had Loco Moco’s on the menu. Lyndsey had told us about them so we had to try them out too. They were rice topped with gravy topped with a hamburger topped with an egg. It is way better than it sounds. Very filling.

Next was snorkeling. We had heard from everyone that the place we went snorkeling eighteen years ago has become so commercialized that it is not long fun. Lyndsey suggested we go to Electric Beach instead. Since Kira and Justin seemed to have had so much fun the previous week on the west coast we decided to go for it.

Well, it was a bit of a bust. Lyndsey forgot to mention that to see any wildlife we should follow the discharge pipe from the power plant and where the warm water is discharged there is an entire ecosystem developed. Our GPS took us to a beach about a mile north of the power plant. We was a beautiful beach and nice warm water but not fish. We didn’t stay too long there but now it was too late to do anything else but too early to go home so we fired up an app Lisa had put on here phone and tool a walking tour of downtown Honolulu.

We saw a lot of interesting places but I’ll only mention a couple of the more interesting places.

This is the Iolani Palace. King Kamihamaha III, also known as the “Merry Monarch” decided he needed to get out more so he travelled around the world. He was actually the first leader of any nation to do that in the history of mankind. Upon his return he decided it was beneath him to go back to living in a grass hut so he built this palace. It was one of the first buildings in the world to have electricity and flushing toilets and in fact it had electricity before the Whitehouse did. It is the only Royal Palace in the United States. Needless to say, his subjects who were still living in grass huts next door weren’t too thrilled with the extravagance.

Speaking of King Kamihamaha, he was the first ruler in Hawaii to unite all of the islands. He slaughtered a lot of people to do that but his timing was good because if he hadn’t, the islands may have been divided up between several different nations today.

One of his descendants thought it was time to have a statue
made of King Kam so they commissioned this statue. It was made in England but unfortunately on the way back the ship sank in shallow water near Argentina. Fortunately, the king who commissioned it had insured it so they started right away on a second statue identical to the first.

Meanwhile, the natives of the Falkland Islands recovered the statue and it arrived in Hawaii even before the second was finished so now they had two statues. The first one is now on the big Island and this one is the second one.

The first missionaries arrived in Hawaii in 1820. King Kam was thrilled to have them and built them a church right away. Unfortunately it burned down after a few years so they built another one. This one rotted away after a few years so they built a third one. When it too rotted away they decided they needed a more permanent solution and built this church with 14,000 blocks cut from the local coral reef. I wonder what the environmentalists would have to say if we tried to do that today?

It was now getting late so we headed to a little restaurant called The Side Street Inn. The food was delicious but in my mind it wasn’t as fancy as the prices suggested it should be. We split an order of pork chops and had an appetizer of mushrooms. We took most of it home and had it for breakfast later in the week.

It was a long day and we were very tired. I slept well.