We started today with the resort’s Cultural Tour; as I expected, it was a walk around the restored royal fishpond at the edge of the beach. Pua was our guide again and gave us lots of information about the fishpond, the royals, and the lives of the people who lived here; we walked up to a recovered shrine and looked at pictographs that the locals had carved into the stone centuries ago.

It was a clear day – you could see some of the telescopes atop Mauna Kea with the naked eye (which did a better job of focusing than my camera did!).

After the tour, we drove into Kona to see Hulihe’e Palace, which was built for Kamehameha I and used by the Hawaiian royal family until the early 20th Century (well after Hawaii had been annexed by the United States).

We also saw where the Ironman swim starts (and the run finishes), just across the street from the Fish Hopper restaurant where we had a great lunch.

After lunch, we walked over to the Courtyard Hotel to see where King Kamehameha lived for the last few years of his life; there is a two-thirds model of ‘Ahu’ena Heiau, which was his personal chapel (more-or-less). The site is still considered sacred, so you can’t actually visit the replica.

Parking in Kona is hellishly expensive (we paid $15/hour plus random service charges), and residents are not happy about it. The docent at the palace said that locals have almost stopped patronizing the shops and restaurants because of the cost of parking; there’s still one free lot in downtown, but the parking companies have their eyes on it, too.

After touring Kona, we drove back south to Kealakekua to look at some of the stores there, especially the thrift shops. I resisted the urge to buy yet another aloha shirt!

We were supposed to see Kona Kozy‘s magic show tonight, but he had to cancel because we would have been the only audience and he really needs a few more people to have a good show. He invited us to come back and see the show as his guests next time we’re in the area…and we intend to!

This morning, we took a walk through parts of the Waikoloa Beach Resort we hadn’t previously seen. We could have walked a couple of miles each way on the sidewalk that runs in front of the Marriott, but that wouldn’t have been very interesting. Instead, we took the first “Shoreline Access” trail that we saw, which led us to a series of anchialine ponds that they’d built during the construction of the resort.

These anchialine pools have an underground connection through the porous lava to Anaeho’omalu Bay and respond to the tides there; their water is brackish (or so the signs say – I didn’t test it) and they’re loaded with small shrimp and snails, though I didn’t get close enough to photograph them.

The trail took us all the way to the shoreline of the bay, where I was close enough to photograph one of the little fishes swimming around.

The trail took us to the Hilton resort, which hosts a “Dolphin Quest” operation that lets guests swim with dolphins in one of the hotel pools. There were big signs facing the shoreline trail claiming that the dolphins are happy and benefit from the interaction, but I have my doubts.

We walked back to the Marriott along the shoreline trail.

When we got to the Marriott, we saw people peering intently into the water – there were sea turtles very near the shore.

When they built the Marriott, they perserved two royal fishponds, and fish still flock there (though I’m pretty sure they are no longer harvested).

We had lunch at Kona Brewing again on our way to South Point, the southernmost piece of land in the fifty United States (some territories are farther south). It was a long, slow drive with few places to stop (we did make a pit stop at Kai Loki, the southernmost bar and restaurant in the US), but it was worth the trip.

There’s an ancient Hawaiian heiau just a few hundred yards from the coast.

We walked to the edge of the sand (there were rocks and lava farther out, but the waves strongly discouraged us from getting any closer to the water than we did).

On the way back to the car, I caught sight of Pu’u Hou, a littoral cone formed during the 1868 eruption of Mauna Loa.

I thought about visiting the green sand beach nearby…but “nearby” would have involved a couple of miles of hiking, and it was already getting late, so we skipped it. Instead, we stopped at Paradise Meadows on South Point road to taste coffee and macadamia nuts and tour their farm, which let us see four parrots who had been abandoned by their previous owners.

We left with three bags of macadamia nuts, only two of which were chocolate-covered. I can’t say that it’s worth driving all the way to South Point to go to Paradise Meadows, but it’s a great place to stop along the way!