Day 6 - Excursion, Tour around the Island

Today we are touring the Island with Jack's Tours.  Jack's tour has been specializing in providing tours and transportation on the Big Island for over 40 years. Dung's company hired them and customized the tour to our needs.  A standard tour of the whole island is 12 hours long but Dung's company cut a lot of stops that are too commercialized such as souvenirs and gifts shops and narrowed it down to a 9 hours trip, which is still a pretty long day!.

An important aspect to know is the Big Island of Hawaii is not easily driven around. The loop encompasses more than 200 miles and stopping to see attractions makes the trip much longer so don't try to drive around the island on your own.  Go with a tour and they know what there are doing and the bus is also very comfortable.

7:00AM

Time to board the bus...

Dung and I distributing 2 bottles of water per person while Sammy is opening the door.

Dung's hire two large buses and a mini bus for the whole group.

Our tour guide.  We actually really like him!  He is a very good story teller and he took really good care of us.  In turn we all chipped in and gave him a very good tip.

He always finishes a sentence with the word "Ya" and it was pretty funny.

The tour bus picked us up at the resort and we started to drive to the north coast next, stopping a few places before driving to Hilo, the next obvious stop is Volcanoes National Park, lunch, Black sand beach and  a drive to the southern coast, stopping for a coffee break and then we are on your way back to our resort...

The first stop for breakfast.  This place are famous for Malasada ( Portugese donuts).

We bought a box full of different type of Malasada.  They are actually pretty good and to me they tasted it like a donut but maybe it was lighter.

Bus is driving... lots of green vegetation on the road.

Yep, a game of cards in the bus...

Because there are not a lot of space in the bus, the guys are improvising and looks like they can play, no problem.

View of the road ahead from the bus...

2nd stop -Pe’epe’e Falls

Pe'e Pe'e Falls (pronounced Peh-eh Peh-eh Falls) , do not pronounce "pee pee", is fed by the Wailuku River which also feeds Rainbow Falls further down river.  Getting an up close view of Pe'e Pe'e requires a short hike down a hill and some rock skipping but since we are on a short watch we could look at it from the top. The flow is determined by rainfall. The multi-spouted falls fills up a small pool at the base. 

Spencer, Huyen and Phuc

There are a lot of trees around.

Lunch time....

The driver dropped us off at the lawn of the main park  and we all sat down on the lawn to have lunch.

Lunch was provided by Dung's company.  We all had a sandwich, a bag of chip, and a cookie by Subway and on top of that we also have a piece of Musubi (Japanese snack, Musubi is composed of a block of rice with a slice of grilled Spam or roasted Chicken in the middle, and nori (seaweed) wrapping to hold it together. Of course all the Asian went for the Musubi first then we ate our sandwich afterward.

Lunch is now over and the kids were just resting a bit!

R

We are hopping on the bus for our next destination...

Next... Museum/Volcano