Hawaii Jan 7

Today was the first full day on the Big Island, and man was it a good one. We went to this national park recommended by Loomis. I think this was where native royalty lived, but Bae can correct me if I’m wrong. There were a lot of reconstructed huts along with a THIC wall. This wall was made of basalt rocks that just fit together…12 ft high and 16 ft thick. Nuts.

This entire area was really nice. White sand with the lava rocks blended in.

There were also tide pools attached to this park, so we walked out there and saw a lot of cool animals. No octopi, sadly.

This national park was really sweet, but the wall was really the highlight. It’s crazy that people built this a few hundred years ago without any glue. Just one giant rectangular prism of a lego set…except there were no instructions (probably).

From this park, we were able to walk to the famous 2-Step or Two Step beach.

Before we got to that beach, though, we were ambushed by a bunch of feral goats. Interestingly, Tom Brady was not amongst them. Bae got a video of them:

Someone needs to tell us if there are actual mountain goats on this island. A lot of the reviews of hikes in the area say stuff like, “The mountain goats were amazing!”, but I’m pretty sure they are talking about these feral goats. Please advise.

Anyway, we saw like a million fish and it was fantastic. Father Freedom and I both took a lot of video, which we made into the video below:

The best part of this event for me was the sea turtle that almost ran into me. It was trying to leave the beach, and being harassed by two Japanese kids (yes, I’m sure they were Japanese). This caused the turtle to head right for me. I stood still and got a good video of it almost hitting me. I probably weight 2-3 tons. Probably. Bae was able to follow it out from a safe distance. Super neat.

After a few hours of snorkeling, we absolutely needed to get some lunch. We went back up past Captain Cook to get some big boy burgers. They were delicious. We crushed some coffee after that at this Donkey Balls place.

That coffee was pretty tasty, but man, 8oz of it cost $25. That’s not too far off from the price of silver…probably.

After we grabbed some coffee, we headed back to the airbnb. We were pretty spent from walking and swimming all day, so some of us slept while my dad and I worked on that fish video above. We also got him set up with his own video action, and his ipad just straight up made this video for him. Pretty creepy, if you ask me.

We were still pretty full from lunch, so we ended up just drinking beer for dinner. Tomorrow is a swim with some big ole manta rays, so get ready for that. I’ll leave you with this selfied I tried to take. I took 4 and this was the only one that I didn’t block with my hand.