Papakolea

This morning we drove to South Point, parked the car, and set out for Papakolea - the green sand beach. According to the guidebook, it's only 2.5 miles each way, but the walk seemed to take forever. I think it's the fairly unchanging scenery and the rutted dusty roads. I wasn't keeping track, but based on the time stamps on the pictures, I think it took us around an hour to walk to the beach. This isn't as bad as it sounds -- we arrived at the beach around five minutes after a couple that had driven the entire way in a Jeep and had left before us.



The sand really is green, and here are a few closeups:



And Zoe's green-sandy exploits:



The beach is quite steep, and the water breaks quickly and with a lot of power, so swimming was not really an option.

After about an hour, more people started showing up and Zoe had had enough, so we started the hike back




The trail head leading down to the beach looked like a Jeep commercial! After another hour of walking, we ended up back at the parking lot. Since we hadn't looked at the time stamps yet, I accidentally sandbagged a few people and told them the hike was 40 minutes. Oops! I talked to two guys who had set up a shave ice-mobile in the lot though, and they told me that there is a guy that shuttles tired people back and forth from the lot for a small fee, so I don't feel as bad.

We stopped at the fruit stand with the awesome pasisonfruit-lemonade, and I bought two awesome white sapote, a bunch of bananas, and a star apple.


The star apple was pretty delciious -- a kind of smooth pudding texture with a sweet, but not cloyingly so, vanilla flavor