The last time we drove Saddle Road across the Big Island of Hawaii it was 1979, unpaved and car rental companies didn’t allow you to take their cars on this road. We read the fine print after we drove it. Today, with GPS on rental cars we couldn’t get away with it, but there would be no need to. The Saddle Road between Kona and Hilo, now styled as the Daniel K. Inouye Highway (State Highway 200), is paved, four-lane and the only road on the Big Island with a 60 mile per hour speed limit.
That’s the route Karen took to get us to the volcano. The road goes through several climates as it climbs 6600 feet from the semi-arid Kona Coast to the Rainforests of Hilo. Along the way Karen pointed out different rock formations, flowers and trees growing in relative fresh lava flows, a heard of wild goats and the volcanic plume from Kilauea.
On the way back we drove the road along the south shore stopping at Punaluʻu Black Sand Beach, palm shaded and home to Green Sea Turtles.
The drive shows us some magnificent views of the coastline, and we drove past a golf course that has been allowed to grow as golf has become a less popular sport and as water supply becomes a bigger problem. Many of the homes we passed have cisterns to hold rainwater.
There are few loops that can take you through so many climate zones in such a brief time. We did not get into snow but were told that a few days earlier there had been 10 inches of snow above 10,000 feet on both of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea mountains on the big Island. We could see the top of Mauna Kea with its big telescopes but no snow.
Karen dropped us at a hotel near the tender in Kona where we got a glimpse of Kamakahonu where King Kamehameha I finished his days from 1812 to 1819. The current temple is from 1972 and is a two-thirds scale model of the original. It sits before a beach and is framed by a Marriott brand hotel. Our tender leaves from the Kailua pier where Hawaiian cowboys drove cattle into the ocean to be hoisted onto boats in deeper water. The pier now hosts tour boats and fishermen who really do look like they are “sittin’ on the dock of the bay,” lines in the water, texting.
