Another Best Beach

The question is unanswered: which is the most beautiful beach of all? Mike, our dive guide, suggested another possibility that we hope to check on. It's north of here, but closer than the beaches where we went yesterday. Unfortunately, no parking -- one has to walk to get there.

After our dive today, we sat for a while at the beach next to the boat harbor in the Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park. Last year we spent quite a few mornings on this beach, which offers a beautiful native-style shelter from the sun. A little offshore in the water is a royal fish trap from old Hawaiian times (visible in the photo above). Fish caught here were reserved for the king. Behind the small dune, there's an old fish pond, also from the pre-European era. Turtles bask on the sand all along the water's side. Today I was walking in the water when a large turtle surfaced next to me.

The Most Beautiful Beach in the World

So many beaches. So many claims at greatness. We love them all.
Click on the photos to see an enlarged view -- and decide which is the greatest!
(Some may still vote for Oval Beach near Saugatuk, MI!)

The first two photos show the early morning view from our condo
as outrigger canoes went by.

Puako Beach this morning -- we've been there many times.

Three views of our Mystery Beach just south of the renowned Hapuna Beach.
Our first visit was today, and its identity was a mystery to us.
We have finally determined that it's known as Beach 69 because that's the number of the marker along the narrow road that leads to it.

Hapuna Beach -- guidebooks call it best in the world.
It's a little too crowded, and we like the shade trees that
line our mystery beach a mile up the road.

The elusive Waipio Valley seen this afternoon from the overlook.

Captain Cook

South of Kona on the Big Island is the area called Captain Cook. Today and yesterday, we were in this area. This morning, we snorkeled at a beach next to the Pu'uhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park. We have loved looking at the fish and coral off this lava shore on a number of trips here. At left is a view of the snorkeling area. No underwater pics today!

A well-designed 2-lane highway leads to the heights above the Captain Cook area, including a small town called Keei. Below the highway, the drop to the ocean is steep. Small roads wind down the hillside to the water, and we took two different routes today and yesterday.

Modern farms and pleasant homes fill the hillsides. Several historic sites preserve the history of the local native Hawaiian people, who were of Polynesian ancestry.

In the late 18th century, tens of thousands of Hawaiians lived in this area. On Captain Cook's final voyage, he landed in a large bay, now called Kealakeua Bay. At first the natives welcomed him, identifying him as the incarnation of the god Lono. During a stay at this location, he re-equipped his ships. A seaman from the ships died, and was buried at a Hawaiian sacred temple called a heiau at one end of the bay.

The other end of the Bay is a site where we've often snorkeled and dived from boats. The coral and fish at the site are fabulous. Yesterday, we stopped briefly at the Heiau.
The pyramid next to the heiau commemorates the seaman's death.

The best-known event in Captain Cook's visit took place shortly after his peaceful stay -- when he returned, the natives were no longer celebrating the festival of the god Lono. They quarreled with Cook and his men, and in a disorderly set of events, they killed him and probably ate his flesh. Another monument at the other end of the bay commemorates this higher-profile death.

A bit south of the snorkeling beach (and a few miles from Kealakekua Bay) is the Pu'uhonua o Honaunau park, where a number of interesting sacred sites have been restored. In particular, a reconstructed temple has been under scaffolding for our last several visits, and is now quite beautiful. In front of this temple is a gorgeous sea vista, stretching past the snorkel beach towards Kona and up the mountainside towards the farm areas. A small sandy cove invites Hawaiian sea turtles to swim up and bask in the sun.

On the slopes of the mountain above the park and below the road are numerous coffee farms, which I wrote up yesterday: Coffee from Kona Lisa.

Other gourmet news from the area -- Evelyn and Tom loved a diner called "The Coffee Shack" which is particularly famous for its panoramic view of the water. As we drove by this morning, its parking lot was quite full -- I think its food is popular with locals. We were heading for lunch at the Keei Cafe, which I'll write about on my food blog (as I did last year when we also had a great lunch there.)



Yesterday, we also visited a site we had never managed to see before: the Painted Church, which is on Painted Church Road, one of the winding narrow roads that lead down the hillside. It's a Catholic church with folk-art type paintings and carved wood decor.

Diving!

As the sun was coming up over the mountain, our dive boat approached our first dive site today. The water was beautiful, and I enjoyed snorkeling while Len and 5 other divers went underwater with Mike of Aloha Diving, the best on earth! Here are some of the fish they saw:

Longfin Anthias -- a rare Hawaiian native.

Fried Egg Nudibranch

Soldier Fish

Whitemouth Eel -- click on the photo to see his teeth!

Here are a few more, beginning with three different hawkfish, and ending with a picture of Mike with a cleaner shrimp cleaning his mouth. When he told us he was going to do this, we thought it was just one of his usual teasing jokes. But he really takes out his regulator and lets the shrimp nibble his lips as they do to the large fish and eels that come to their cleaning station.

Fish of the day

The first two photos are of wrasse. The first is an immature yellow tail coris. The second is a dragon wrasse -- immature rock mover. The third photo is a sole, which was trying to be camouflaged but the camera flash put a shadow around him. Finally, there's a racoon fish who swam right up to pose for Len's camera.

A Turtle

New Camera, First U/W Photos

This Week's Reading

I read Daisetz Suzuki's Zen and Japanese Culture in 1985. I was trying to understand what I had seen at the Ryoanji Zen garden in Kyoto. At the time, I believe I found it quite impenetrable. It's still challenging, but I think I've made progress. For several years after that, I read books on Japan, both fiction and nonfiction, and I think I absorbed quite a lot which stays with me now. I am thinking of revisiting this project, so I reread this book.

Considering that Suzuki wrote the book in the 1930s, during the rise of Japanese ultra-nationalism, and revised it in 1957, during the end of the Americanization and democratization of Japan, the book is interesting for a lot of things it doesn't say about Japanese warrior culture. He does have a great deal about Zen and swordsmanship. Consider:

What makes Swordsmanship come closer to Zen than any other art that has developed in Japan is that it involves the problem of death in the most immediately threatening manner. If the man makes one false movement he is doomed forever, and he has no time for conceptualization or calculated acts. Everything he does must come right out of his inner mechanism, which is not under the control of consciousness. [p. 182]

Suzuki here does not explicitly treat Zen gardens as part of the Zen culture. I think this is because he has quite a long discussion of Zen love of nature. The differentiation that westerners make between nature and gardens doesn't seem to exist in Zen. Who made the natural setting? is not a question for the Zen or Japanese mind. Maybe.

Here are quotes from the book:

What differentiates Zen from the arts is this: While the artists have to resort to the canvas and brush or mechanical instruments or some other mediums to express themselves, Zen has no need of things external, except "the body" in which the Zen-man is so to speak embodied. ... The Zen-man transforms his own life into a work of creation, which exists, as Christians might say, in the mind of God. [page 17]

...the experience of mere oneness is not enough for the real appreciation of Nature. This no doubt gives a philosophical foundation to the sentimentalism of the Nature-loving Japanese, who are thus helped to enter deeply into the secrets of their own aesthetic consciousness. [p. 354]

There's much more in this book, and in the many others of this author. A fascination with Buddhism has from time to time been fashionable in American and western thought. Suzuki discussed this trend as it applied to Thoreau and Emerson in the 19th century, and participated in the interest of westerners in the first 2/3 of the 20th century. I wonder if it will come around again soon.

Car Wash

Kent Lake

Martindale Beach and the working farm.