Go Westie: Part 2

Admittedly, our posting pace has been flagging recently. Unfortunately, your beloved today's blogspot crew has been engaged occupationally and otherwise of late. However, to bridge the blog gap, here are some excerpts from an unfinished, relatively unedited travel piece I started ages ago. It's about a trip around the outside of Hawaii's big island in a white Westfalia pop-top.

Continuing from where we left off, your intrepid explorers pick up their ride...

"WHITEY"

After catching the Hele-On, a free shuttle bus ($1 per piece of luggage) that travels from the Western Kona side of the big island to Hilo Town in the East, we picked up our transportation in depot parking lot. There we met Gary Berg, proprietor of GB adventures, his wife, and blonde, surfer-haired son.

Gary is a man with an entrepreneurial plan. Gary is part of that neo-hippy, post-boomer generation that manages to reconcile hippy ideals and a commercial sensibility with a clean moral slate. Gary deals in vans. He owns a fleet of four VW campers, which he strives hard to keep in perfect running condition. He offers 24 hour roadside service should anything go awry. The man knows his Westies. Once we`d finished the paperwork, he went step by step through each feature with us. He showed us how to spin the passenger seat around so we could eat our dinner round table style. He reminded us to switch off the propane in transit so as to avoid being found asphyxiated roadside. He demonstrated the delicate art of bringing in the canvas pop-top so as to avoid any damage yet make sure that nary a flap is showing. He handed us our VW instruction manual, Big Island map, and the keys to “Whitey,” and kindly wished us well on our way.

HILO TOWN

Hilo is by far the largest community on the Eastern side of the island with a population of 40,000 and its own Walmart. Kamehameha Avenue, the town’s main tourist strip, has a small town Americana feel to it. That morning, the residents were doing their shopping and mingling with a smattering of tourists at the local farmer’s market. The locals tended to focus on the local produce—mangos, papaya, Maui sweet onions, and the like—while the tourists picked their way through bags of Kona coffee, bouquets of indigenous flowers, and “Hawaiian Bikini Inspector” tank-tops.

PUNALU’U

Once we’d gassed up and purchased alcohol, ahi tuna fillets ($3.99 a pound!), and other assorted groceries, we steered our 1988 Volkswagen Westfalia South and headed for our first destination, Punalu’u Beach. Punalu’u is renowned for two things—it’s bizarre, black, lava-borne sand and the endangered sea turtles that lay their eggs there. When we pulled into the crowded lot, we saw Punalu’u’s third feature—the non-indigenous tour buses that congregate there. Dozens of tourists, mostly American and Japanese had just offloaded in the parking lot. As we strolled down the beach, my bare feet and I came to the realization that black sand, for all its novelty, is really not so much sand as it is tiny, jagged, lava rocks. The faint scent of volcanic ash wafting through our nostrils, we made our way down to the beach to where the sea turtles were supposed to be.

There they were: two vaguely annoyed-looking hawksbill sea turtles sitting in the middle of a barren patch of black sand, mostly ignorant of the small circle of tourists that were alternately gawking or snapping photos of their beady-eyed visages. One thing that one discovers quickly about Hawaii is that it’s not particularly shy or subtle about its natural beauty. Hawaii’s natural wonders aren’t squirreled away under rocks, but rather on full, out in the open, explicit display at nearly all times. Dolphins swim along the coastline. Giant palms and ferns dot the roadside. One need only dip a snorkelled head into the water to spot yellow tang and angel fish darting behind finger coral.



We left the hawksbills to their 15 minutes of fame and made for the opposite end of the beach to survey the campsites. It was a sad lot. The few tents that were up were being buffeted about by the wind and were mere footsteps from the public bathroom and picnic area, on one side, and the crowded parking lot, on the other. We decided camping next to buses and Buicks was for dudes in pickups and the birds, and drove north along the coast in search of something a little more private.

To be continued...