Saturday

We are exhausted from the trip and the plantation is quiet: the only sound the soft music and the occasional clink of glasses from the kitchen.  We drive back into Captain Cook, a retail strip about a mile long fronting a hinterland of gravel drives, banana palms and mango trees, and pick up a pizza from Patz Pies, a local hangout in a tiny retail/professional plaza painted dark green.  When we order the place is full, with a few sun-bleached and browned locals drawling by the front door and an older couple at one of the tables.  The locals look to be in their early 20s and a type that I never worked up to, never even crossed paths with, and now see them in my rear-view mirror as something more than strangers.  They probably snicker at me while I wait for the girl with long dreadlocks to take my order.

The pizza is big but thin, with great archipelagos of toasted cheese and chunks of Canadian bacon like monuments in the tide.  We eat the pie at home and drink some red wine we found at the Choice Market, a split-level from the late 60s with shops on the lower level, or the first right off Mamalahoah Highway, and all the life and traffic up behind, in the upper lot.  You walk in and the sweet smell of Asian groceries rushes out on the air conditioning.  To our great joy we find not only a decent selection of wine and beer just inside the door but liquor, plenty of it, and lots of rum:  my long residency in Oregon has made me unaware of the more relaxed liquor laws of many of the other 49 states.

We toast our luck over the pie and sleep like rocks.

We were led to believe from Michael's presentation the night before that breakfast would be mostly cold and mostly fruit, and we were prepared to accept this gladly as part of the way of things on the big island in general and at the plantation in particular, but we learn that his was a masterpiece of understatement.
The counter is covered with sliced fruit and looks like a stall at an open air market, with all kinds of local bread, boiled eggs, pancakes and some kind of shredded meat that he calls "kalua pork".  I learn this refers to the way it is cooked, literally underground on a bunch of hot rocks and banana leaves and covered all over with burlap.  It is excellent.  For a finisher there is fresh mango juice and kona coffee, smooth and rich with no bitter edge.  I think it is even better than the cold-brewed Tanzanian that I've had.

And then you drink your coffee and look at the bay and watch the tiny white lines and the cars like fire ants on the road and hear the doves and pheasant and just generally get into the feel of the thing.

Kailua-Kona is a sad whisper of a tourist trap, with a cracked and heaving terra cotta plaza that may have been handsome when Reagan was president and stores hawking warmed-over beach art and embarrassingly earnest inspirational posters.  Interspersed among the kitsch are serious boutiques that cater to well-heeled tourists that have been caught short and need what they need.  A few buidings in the center of town remember when the place was just a little fishing village and the seat of government for King Kamehameha, way back when he was just boss of the island.  Hulihe'e Palace is here, along with Kamakahonu, Kamehameha's residence, who unlike the palace has been obliterated by more modern structures.  

It's not a bad place to be, really, and it's pleasing to look down the alleys and streets at the volcano rock walls and enormous blossoming trees.  After a while you get to warm even to the suspect types that seem to lounge around the sea wall or sit with their backs to the coconut palms growing on the leeward side of it.  On a certain not-too-fresh stretch of Ali'i Drive we walk up to Fish Hopper bar.  I'm not sure which is hopping, the fish or the fisher, but the place is within view of the street and holds out big, overpriced tropical drinks, which is just what we need.  It's as they say, and we settle in at the bar and order a Mai Tai and a Zombie.  The barkeeps are friendly in a slick, efficient sort of way and I even chat with the guy about his brother who lives in Eugene or somewhere.  The drinks come and they are big and satisfyingly architectural, with great hunks of tropical fruit and palettes of pink and orange.  They taste good, too, with just enough rum to overcome the mountain of ice that they all seem to require.

Meredith and I talk about the the two trails that brought us together and the many steep drop-offs along the way; a good bar seems the place to do this, as the best of them are places of refuge; you sit with your drink and wonder at the many ways you could have gone down out there.  In Kona, in view of the Pacific, the symbolism is tripled.  Perhaps we are aware of this.  Either way, I feel that familiar sense of expansion as the rum moves in, that effect that turns everything into a map, but this time she and I are the ones walking beneath the little plaster mountains and glass lakes, pointing at each new wonder.

The drinks really are very good.