Day 4: Hookena to Manuka State Park

November 20, 2014

Flash: We are again thrown off a bit by lack of cell signal for posting each day. As I type right now, we are in Ocean View, very early morning. Our concern about water has turned out so far to be not critical, and there are two large markets in this place. Still, we reacted by buying yet another litre! There is still not enough signal or time to post photos, but here is the test report on what has now become yesterday. Sorry for all the typos that are still in it.

--------------

We woke up at 4:30 a.m. to be sure to make the climb off the beach and back to Hwy 11 before the sun would come to make it a lot harder. Breaking camp in the dark, we tried to take care not to flash lights on any surrounding tents. As we set off we found that one of our bike headlights had discharged in the time between getting ready for the trip and actually doing it. No matter, we still had lots of other lighting.

The road betweeen the highway and the beach is 6 km long, and most of it is pushing territory as you try to go up. We are carrying 14 liters of water, and just that weighs 35 pounds! Gads. But we need it, because there will be no potable ewater for us for a couple of days now. At the top of the hill there is actually a set of spigots (mostly unmarked) that offer drinlking water for the local population. So in principle we could have dragged less water up the hill.

The road, which had tended down from Captain Cook, now entered a pattern of ups and downs. For Dodie, who had struggled to be comfortable with the knees just lying in the tent, this was a big obstacle. In fact, our progress was so slow that we began to wonder if our cycling days are ending. Actually, we began to wonder if we needed to find a fast way back to civilisation, rather than proceed further, into the Kau desert. As usual, though, we just responded by plodding forward. With the early start, even very slow progress would bring us to Manuka State Park quite early.

A big feature of this part of the road is the presence of huge a'a lava flows, originating from the Southwest Rift Zone of the main Mauna Loa volcano. These flows all happened in the 20th century, but their power is still very evident. On the other hand, there are lots of places where the rough lva has broken down, and is beginning to look vaguely soil-like. Large tracts of this land are for sale, but the pieces do not seem to be moving very fast, jusging bythe seathered and overgrown nature of the for sale signs.

We had expected to find no supplies or water for the next long stretch, but we did come up a roadside self serve fruit stand. Here, none of the fruit had the shiny look of supermarket stuff, with the most common colour, from oranges to passion fruit being a dull yellow. Authentic and great! Two exceptions were the hairy red rambutans, and quite orange tangerines. We bought what we could, within the limits of needing small change or bills to put in the tin box, and felt quite restored by eating this excellent produce.

There was also fruit to be found by the roadside, to some extent. Guava is the most readily found. But we also saw a giant avocado tree, and papaya. Neither of these was ripe, or accessible, unfortunately. There were also coffee trees, particularly just at the top of the Hookena Road. The cherry on these was far more plump and red than that we had watched being accepted at Royal Kona, so we felt rather smug about the quality of "our" plantation. (Actually, a codffee tree ultimately yields about a pound a na half of coffee, worth $75, so "our" approximately ten trees represented a possible windfall of $750. All we would have to do would be to pick, process, roast, and market it! Ok, ok, we just plodded on.

The road eventually led us through huge planting of Macadamia nut trees. At one viewpoint we could see these extending what looked like miles, down to the coast. Passing through this orchard reminded us of cycling through a similar giant plantation of pecan, near Las Cruces, New Mexico. Just as there, there was a lot of No Trespassing signage, but also a certain amount of product lying by the road. It is always interesting to see famous crops like this, all prepared and disguised at the supermarkets back home, in their natural state.

The Manuka State Park features some absolutely lovely shelters with tables underneath, and large BBQs beside. The tables gave us a hard time, though, because they are chained to the floor and interfere with placing a tent under the shelter. Having the tent under the shelter will be a big plus, because the fly really restricts ventilation, and last night we were lying there just gasping in the hot still air.

There is a little bit of water here, but a local we asked pointed out that is comes from unsanitised or filtered cisterns. So we are glad we carried our 14 liters along. We drank 6 liters of this during theday, and expect no water sources tomorrow, so we will not be using any water for cooking tonight.

We expect it to be a little cooler up here on the ridge than it was down by the beach. Tomorrow, our route does take us down, and then the next day it's a climb up to Volcano village. We are still hanging in there, and are not changing any plans for this trip or planned other ones, yet. But we will see how it goes, day by day. Meanwhile, we must say, the environment here is supremely gorgeous and interesting, and there are no regrets about having come to this wonderful place.

And oh, so far we have seen no sign of any rangers to check our permit, or to throw us out of our carefully chosen and arranged shelter!