I'm back in the U.S. of A. where tap water is safe to drink. It just tastes horrible. I've spent more funny looking green money on bottled water here in paradise than anywhere else on the trip. Almost everything is more expensive here, but painfully more for someone who has been in Vietnam and New Zealand.
In four days of cycling around the Big Island, I covered 280 miles and 16,800ft of elevation gain. That's a lot of climbing. The day I rode up to and through Volcano National Park included one 22 mile stretch of continuous up, climbing 3600ft into the mist. Because of the wet conditions, I rode the twelve mile crater rim route without taking a single photograph. I already have great photos of the park including one of a rainbow inside the cauldera which I took on Wheeling Hawai'i in March, 1999. I learned that, for the moment, the lava wasn't flowing into the sea so the chance of duplicating one of my all time favorite experiences of watching steam explosions throw red hot lava into the night sky was nil.
I was able to duplicate another of my favorite things to do in Hawai'i quite satisfactorily however. I purchased 13 aloha shirts with the faint hope of getting more in Honolulu. Some are somewhat conservative, at least for me. Some are right up there with the loudest shirts I've ever seen. They have to be heard to be believed.
But back to the serious stuff of bicycling. The day from Hilo (HEE low) to Hawi (ha VEE), the Ironman's turn around point at the north end of the Big Island, was a physically challenging day covering 85 miles and included 6300ft of climbing. For all the people who bailed out in Singapore, they missed what some riders were calling one of the five best days of Odyssey2000�.
The morning started with a double rainbow and a ride along incredibly scenic, sometimes moss covered, tropical side roads through palm and bamboo forests passing myriad waterfalls. Like the day up to Volcano, there was a 20 mile stretch of mostly up as the route climbed out of the rainforest and into the open range of Parker Ranch, the biggest ranch in the world (or at least the U.S.). After Waimea, the town with a dry side and a wet side, the route turned UP the dry side of the Kohala Mountains. There was a ferocious sidewind which blew me into oncoming traffic once, grabbed hold of my fairing and pushed me up the mountain a couple of times, and made the downhill more of an adventure than normally expected. The mist coming over the top of the mountains occasionally reached down to get me a little damp, and often provided a faint rainbow backdrop to the desert scenery.
I had ridden from Hilo to Hawi in two days on Wheeling Hawai'i and can't imagine I could have completed it as easily as I did in one day if I hadn't spent the past year riding my bicycle all over the globe. Unlike Baja, where I collapsed in my tent soon after dinner, in Hawi I relaxed for awhile reading and writing before getting into my tent for the last time. In the morning, my usual tent packing procedure was not needed. I didn't have to carefully fold the tent and rainfly and compress them in a stuff sack. The REI dome tent had served well enough for a year but wasn't needed anymore. Before leaving for Kona, I threw my tent in a garbage can.
The final riding day to Kona was a relative piece of cake highlighted by spotting spouting whales off the coast. The rest of the relatively flat ride through the lava fields so familiar to Ironman Triathlon participants and viewers was an exercise in fast but easy spinning that took only four hours.
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were spent in quiet sunbaked Kona. We had a gift exchange on the 24th wherein everyone who wanted to participate contributed a gift then drew a number. In numerical order, each could open a gift or "steal" a gift previously opened by another participant. One unlucky person had four gifts stolen as she kept opening packages with jewelry which seemed to be a popular thing to steal. Since there were 61 people, there was a time saving rule that no item could be stolen more than twice. The most surprising items to gender resentment when stolen were a duck and a Barbie. In all, a fun way to spend Christmas Eve.
Keeping the rubber down and the spirits high,
Bruce