On the next day of our honeymoon, the 2nd November, we slept in, and then had a buffet breakfast in the resort restaurant.  We ate breakfast in the resort restaurant every day at the Mauna Kea.  Every day we sat outside, and enjoyed the view of the Mauna Kea beach.

After breakfast, we decided to go to the Green Sand Beach.  This is where our day started to go all wrong.  We had misunderstood just how far it actually was to get there, because we still had the mindset that we were on Maui island – but we weren’t, we were on the Big Island.  The Green Sand Beach is famous for having green sand.  It was also down the completely opposite end of the island from where we were staying.  We should have realised not just how far away the other end of the island was, but how slow and windy the road to get there was.  We possibly would have been okay for time if we didn’t decide to stop off at Walmart to see what it was like, and if we ate fast-food for lunch rather than another restaurant.   Our collective consensus was that we’d be fine for time, so we stopped off in Kailua-Kona for lunch.  We had passed through this town at some point beforehand at night for dinner, and wanted to go back for lunch in the day time.

Below is a photo of Morven with our Mustang, parking next to a typical sized truck that lots of people drive on the Big Island.

Below is our attempt at contributing to the “People of Walmart” collection of photos that seem to exist on the internet.

We couldn’t believe that Walmart even has food stores within the Walmart.

Enjoying lunch on the main street of Kuilua-Kona, with an ocean view.

When we finally got to the parking lot area for the Green Sand Beach, we soon discovered that the ‘short 30 minute walk’ to the Green Sand Beach was actually well over a 60 minute walk.  It began to get really dark really quickly, and there was no moon out.  As you can see in the photo below, it was very cloudy.  There were very minimal street lights on the island, because they interfere with the Mauna Kea observatory up on the mountain top.  All of these factors lead to a very rapid and dark nightfall.  Despite running as fast as we could to get there before dark, we eventually decided to turn back before actually getting to the Green Sand Beach.  We had both tripped over (look at Morven’s knees), and Tom had foolishly worn his thongs, which did not work very well when walking through dunes upon dunes of soft, soft sand.  We did manage to find some sand though that was greenish, and so we consider ourselves to have made it close enough to the Green Sand Beach!

As we were turning back, I noticed a bunch of Japanese tourists dressed up very nicely, with big expensive cameras, continuing to walk towards the Green Sand Beach.  I tried to convince them that it was about to get extremely dark, although they didn’t listen.  I pointed out to them that none of them had torches, none of them had phones with reception, they had no water, they didn’t know how far away the beach was, and that the terrain was dangerous in the light let alone the dark.  Despite my advice, they continued on.  Morven and I started to struggle to see where we were going, so I used the camera, and held the shoot button down half way to trigger the red light.  This gave us just enough light to see where the trail was.  Sometimes I would take a photo with the flash to get some long-range sight of where we were going, to check that we were on the trail.  Some Germans (with torches, because Germans are smart) caught up with us, and shared their torch light with us.  They also showed us photos that they took of the Green Sand Beach, and it didn’t look much greener than what we saw, so we were happy.  The Germans had spoken to another lady who had suffered from a jellyfish sting from walking on the sand, which ruined her day.

Despite not making it, and being frustrated because we had taken so much time to get there, we were happy enough with what we had seen.  We would definitely have benefited from paying the extra few dollars to hire a GPS with our rental car, as we would have better realised how much more time we had to go to reach our destination, and wouldn’t have spent so much time walking around Walmart.  We also nearly had our first marital dispute navigating the last few turns to the Green Sand Beach carpark area, which a GPS would have prevented.  Still, we were happily married on the way home, although Tom was very sick of driving, and frustrated by tourists that drove really slowly.

On the way home we had no choice but to have McDonalds (due to time constraints as it was getting late) and we felt dirty and fat for eating it afterwards.  We can totally understand why so many people in the USA are fat, as we found it literally impossible to find healthy food that was either cheap or convenient, let alone healthy food that was cheap and convenient.

 

More honeymoon blogging to come.