If you’ve been following the blog, you know I’ve become OBSESSED with mochi. It’s harder to find than I thought it would be. Sure you can get it at some grocery stores, but truthfully a lot of that is just the mochi–there is no fruit or bean paste in it and who knows how fresh it is? Today we tried out a place in Ala Moana Center that is just a little cash-only kiosk in the food court. It’s called Kansai Yamato and it’s not bad! Mike didn’t love it, but I think it’s the best we’ve had on Oahu so far, which I guess isn’t saying too much. Don’t worry; I’ll keep looking for the best mochi on Oahu until we leave.
After work we met up with one of our friends for a little happy hour action at the Shirokiya Village Walk in Ala Moana Center. That place had just about everything you could want… except for decent mochi. The only mochi I could find was either fried or frozen. Bummer.
Before we all called it a night we went to Nitrogenie, where they somehow make the ice cream with nitrogen and the end result is a very, very dense and delicious ice cream treat. I got coffee flavor with bits of dark chocolate and it was heaven.
For our last day on Big Island, we started with breakfast at Huggo’s. It had good reviews online, was right on the water, and opened early. I got a breakfast bake and it was okay but I wouldn’t get it again. The best part about Huggo’s is its location on the water–I saw dolphins swimming in the distance for about 10 minutes during our meal. It was awesome!
Snorkel Bob’s is right next door so we headed over to rent snorkel gear. This place is a huge improvement from the last place we rented; the equipment was in much better shape and the employee who helped us was a lot more knowledgeable. We only paid a few bucks more and they even let us borrow some defogger for our goggles. There’s a location on Oahu that we’ll probably rent from next time.
We snorkeled Kahalu’u Bay first and it was out of this world. We saw half a dozen sea turtles–and they got pretty close to us. I actually had to swim away from a couple to give them space (they’re endangered and you are NOT allowed to touch them; I didn’t want to risk bumping into one during a rough wave). There were a ton of fish everywhere but there were also very large rocky areas that were too tall to swim over. We snorkeled around for about an hour and decided to check out another spot.
We went to Anaeho’omalu Bay because it was on the way to Hawi, but visibility there was TERRIBLE. I couldn’t see more than two feet in front of me. We tried a few spots, but the whole beach was pretty murky. We did see an eel hiding out under a bridge on the way to the beach, so that was pretty cool.
We ended our day with a visit to Hawi, which is a cool little town full of local shops and restaurants. We bought some gifts for people and did a lot of walking around. We also ate at Sushi Rock, which I can’t recommend highly enough. Our server was awesome. The food was awesome. The drinks… were awesome! Everything was so good.
After a very, very long day of flying, hiking, and eating our way around the Big Island we needed to sleep in just a little. Once we were conscious/functional, we polished off the rest of our mochi and headed into town to visit Kona Mountain Coffee for some mind-blowing cold brew coffee at a disturbingly affordable price (the price we paid at Kona for the best cold brew coffee I’ve ever had = what we pay for the garbage iced coffee we buy in our building’s McDonald’s when we run out and are desperate).
We drove into “downtown” Kona to check out the shops, but it was still a bit early and not much was open so we opted for breakfast at Bongo Ben’s, where we sat at the restaurant’s edge and looked out onto the main road/the beach. I got huevos rancheros and they were a joy and a delight. After that we shopped and walked around for a while–one place we visited was a fruit stand where a woman whose English was not amazing somehow up-sold us from one papaya to two papayas, two rambutans, a mangosteen, and about six limes without us realizing it until the fruit was in the bag. We popped into Humpy’s for a quick beer overlooking the beach before heading back to the Airbnb for Mike’s fantasy football draft.
Originally I was going to tool around the island by myself while Mike drafted, but I was tired and had a little bit of sunburn from the volcano hike and ended up sort of half-napping instead. Sometimes you just need to relax. I attempted to cut up the fruit from the stand, but I completely butchered it. We ate it anyway and frankly–like much of the fruit I’ve purchased on the islands–it was meh, which is something that has surprised me. The pineapple and the rambutans we’ve had were good, but we’ve had papaya, mango, and dragon fruit here that have not been nearly as tasty as what I regularly get on the mainland. The mind boggles.
Once the draft was over we headed over to Kona Brewing Company’s pub/brewery for a few beer flights and some dinner. We got poke for an appetizer and it was a gigantic portion that I was not expecting–it was delicious. The pizza we ordered looked better than it tasted, but I was hungry so it hit the spot. Mostly.
Mike has done a lot of traveling to the neighbor islands for work, but today marked my first jaunt to another locale in the archipelago. We got up obscenely early and hopped on a plane to the Big Island–at least we got to watch the sunrise in the air!
We picked up our rental car and arrived at our Airbnb sometime around seven in the morning, fully intending to drop off our bags and go explore. But we talked ourselves out of leaving anything because we needed most of our stuff for our adventure. This was the first of many times I’m sure we annoyed our host, but he hid his annoyance well.
At our host’s recommendation we ate breakfast at Pine Tree Cafe. Mike had the loco moco and I had the corned beef hash and everything was delicious. We also sampled some 100 percent Kona coffee, and it was goooood–I even drank it hot, which I never do.
Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park was our first stop of the day. When we arrived we talked to a ranger to try to get a feel for the best route to take to see some lava flow. She tried to get us to hike out to some center where there’s steam coming out of a hole in the ground, but it was in the opposite direction of the lava flow so we skipped that stop.
Y’all, the hike out to see the lava flow was no joke. It was probably about 8.5 miles round trip and it is like walking on a cast-iron skillet on an open flame for four hours. All the old, hardened lava is black, which radiates crazy amounts of heat. There are no trees or really any forms of shade; it’s just a wide open trail that gets full Hawaii sun exposure.
See that little puff of steam way, way in the distance? That’s where we hiked… from where I stood to take this picture.
The first three miles of the hike were gravel, which got a little old after a while because it was loose and made it hard to get a good pace, which we both wanted to do because after about the first mile of flat, black nothingness–you get in a hurry to get to the good stuff. About a half mile beyond the three-mile mark we noticed a lot of folks were walking out onto the hardened lava, so we followed suit. Lava rock is nothing to trifle with. It crunches like glass under your feet and if you fall on it, it will slice you to ribbons. Fortunately neither of us fell as we wandered, but the lava was super uneven and there were big faults in it that we could easily have fallen into.
That thin line of string isn’t keeping anyone out.
We ended up ducking under the rope to go into the Nope Zone, which is inadvisable because the earth is hot enough there that it can shift and sinkholes can be a thing, but we saw a large crowd gathered to watch the lava flow and figured YOLOHA.
It didn’t photograph well, but you could see the hot lava coming down the side of the cliff and there were huge puffs of steam every time a wave would crash into the lava on the shore. We chatted with some other folks before the vog (volcanic fog) got to be too much to bear. The hike back seemed even longer than the hike out, probably because it was now hotter and we were pretty wiped from our early flight and hike out.
We ventured into Hilo for dinner at Hilo Burger Joint. It had a nice selection of beer and some pretty stellar burgers to boot. The downside to not being close to our Airbnb is that we were still in our sweaty hiking gear, but Mike and I did manage to wipe all the volcano dust off of ourselves in the restroom at the burger place.
On the way out of Hilo we hit up Two Ladies Kitchen for some mochi because that’s literally the only place in Hawaii you can buy their mochi. I have never had mochi before this trip, but I’m pretty confident when I say Two Ladies’ mochi is probably the best I’ll ever get my hands on unless we travel to Japan.The strawberry, tsumami (not a typo), and peach were delicious. My absolute favorite is still the Okinawan sweet potato mochi, though. It may have changed my life.
I don’t particularly care for the phrase “date night” because it implies that Mike and I have to schedule time and/or make an effort to have a nice night out when the reality is that our lifestyle affords us the opportunity to enjoy each other’s company at the drop of a hat for as long as we like. But tonight we did drinks and then dinner and a movie so it felt right to call it a date night. Even if I don’t like the terminology. 😛
In typical Mike-and-Jess fashion, we planned nothing for our excursion into Waikiki so we walked onto the strip before any happy hours had officially started. Because we’re here for another month, we’re trying to only go out when things are somewhat affordable so we walked around looking at things until happy hour started.
Actually, we wandered around looking for one specific bar for so long that happy hour had started when we finally found it. Mai Tai Bar at the Royal Hawaiian is right on the beach; it serves free, delicious snacks in the form of peanuts coated in rice cracker and wasabi (pictured above); and its drinks are marvelous. After enjoying our drinks and snacks, we frolicked on the beach for a minute before heading to the bar at Sky Waikiki, which was a little more upscale than I was prepared for. You pretty much couldn’t sit anywhere outside unless you bought bottle service/reserved a spot. There were two high-tops (sans chairs) that were awkwardly close to each other for us commoners, and folks had already huddled around those. We went inside and had a decent cocktail while we hung out.
On the swanky side of Sky Waikiki before relegating ourselves to the regular folk section for drinks.
Sometime last week Mike and I promised each other we’d watch a movie that’s been in our Netflix queue for probably years–Jiro Dreams of Sushi—while we gorged on our own bargain basement sushi. Tonight was that night. We bought the baller platter from Aloha Sushi (which was still less than $40 and an obscene amount of food for two people, because America) and watched a documentary about a man who was so obsessed with his career as a sushi chef he had a terrible relationship with his sons and possibly killed and/or estranged his wife. We don’t know what happened to her because the doc never told us anything about her. She was just a vessel for his children and also their caretaker while while he was working 16-hour days at his restaurant, I guess. I’m now much more interested in her story than anyone depicted in the film.
Hawaii Eight-Oh! 