This post used to contain pictures, but due to new storage limitations from WordPress, I had to fix the problem and decided to create a new blog that works as an archive for all the posts from my two years in California. This full post can be found here.

This morning was so boring! No rain, but it was cloudy. Our plan for the day was to take a look at the pool area here on the hotel and then take the bus to a beach south of here. The bus only goes once every two hours and we just missed the one at 10:40am, so we spent that extra time by the pool. The sun was slowly coming out from behind the clouds and it actually was a nice day after that. There is a lagoon on the hotel properties too. But the pool isn’t anything special, it is very small. But it is right next to the ocean.

We took the bus, $2 each ride (it was better on both Oahu and Maui where the tickets lasted 4 hours after purchase and where you could by day passes). For 20 minutes until we reached Kahaluu. I thought the stop before sounded nice, Magic Sands/White Sands until the shuttle driver yesterday told us that that beach is called Magic Sands because the sand completely disappears from the beach sometimes because of the waves. So we took the beach park instead. It was tiny, but it was a beach at least. There are hardly any beaches here! The sand was a mix between white and black sand, so it was pretty cool. But what made my day was in the water. First of all, the snorkeling there was better than at Hanauma Bay on Oahu. The coral was much nicer and it was more colorful fishes. I didn’t see any turtles, even if there were a lot of signs on the beach telling us to not touch the turtles. When I got out of the water I asked one of the volunteers at the beach about turtles, and he said it was very common to see them there and pointed out towards a tide pool where people were pointing and taking pictures. I walked out there with my camera and there were four (4!!) turtles in the extremely shallow water eating things of the rocks. They weren’t very big, maybe like 4dm. But it was turtles! I spent a lot of time out there taking pictures of them, Caroline got tired pretty fast, haha!

The rest of the day we just lay at the beach working on our tans. About 1 hour before the bus came it started raining so the last 30 minutes, when it was pouring down and impossible to stay at the beach, we were under a roof just waiting for time to fly by.

On the bus back we saw the sunset out in the water and on the other side, towards the mountain were two big rainbows! So beautiful. The sunset was amazing, as it was yesterday. It’s like the colors here are different than on the other islands. It gets way more orange and pink or whatever that color is called. After the sun was set, when we were walking towards a restaurant the sky was all pink and the water all purple. I don’t think I’ve ever seen water with that color, it was incredible.

We actually had dinner out tonight again, but that was the last time for sure. I totally forgot that I wanted to eat an Hawaiian pizza on Hawaii. So we found a restaurant eventually that served pineapple pizza and that pizza was the best pizza I’ve had this year! It was Kaluau Pork on it with a hot/sweet sauce. Soo good. When we got back to the hotel we tried getting access to the internet but it didn’t work. This hotel sucks! We spent a lot more money here than on the hostels, and the hostels had internet. Stupid hotel!! It’s not that I’m addicted to internet, but with it I can see my Swedish account balance. And there isn’t any Starbucks around here either… Stupid!

I’m thinking about maybe buying internet for 24 hours on Saturday so I can post everything before going back to Sweden. It’s $10 per 24 hours.

Tomorrow morning we are gonna call Enterprise to rent a car for Friday and after that walk north for a while to a nice white sand beach. I’m also gonna check if there are any other nice beaches more south of here. The bus goes pretty far south. Let’s hope the sun is out tomorrow!

2014-01-29, 20:36

The lagoon we have at the hotel. The pool area. Part of the outdoor lobby. Kahaluu Beach Park. Honu, Hawaiian Green Sea Turtle HAPPY! These were just babies and just a third the size of the ones we saw on Waikiki Beach, Oahu. The sunsets on Big Island really are much prettier than on the other islands.