Exploring Hilo

Today I woke up around 9 and made some tasty scrambled eggs with cheddar, Babybell cheese, and baked beans! The baked beans were a little sketchy because they’ve been in the fridge for a long time, but I haven’t been sick yet and they tasted fine. Plus I cooked them – no big deal!

I cleaned my room and set out all my hiking stuff to air out and dry. It’s so wet here that everything starts to smell mildewy and gross unless you put it out to dry and air out every day, so I’ve been working on keeping everything nice. My rain jacket already smells better!

Tommy invited Jake and I to the beach today, but Jake just wanted a lazy day so Tommy and I went around Hilo looking for cool places to go. We jumped off the big pedestal at Coconut Beach (see photo - it was probably about 15 feet high) and then headed down the coast towards Richardson St. Park, where we eventually ended up. I didn’t bring my snorkel stuff but the water was pretty murky so we just swam around and then hung out on the beach people watching. There are a lot of interesting people at the beaches here – hippies, families, really fit old people, really large people of all ages, etc… so it was a lot of fun just watching the sights.

We headed to the Hilo Zoo afterwards, which was pretty small but had some cool animals. Lots of monkeys and some native animals, as well as a WHITE TIGER! The tiger looked really pathetic though, very flabby fur and it seemed pretty lonely. I feel bad for all animals in zoos, but this guy seemed especially pathetic. They should get it a pet doggie or something… The blue macaw (see photo) was getting pretty frisky when we went up to its cage and it kept “laughing” and trying to bit us through the bars.

We also stopped by the Macadamia Nut farm which is really close to Hilo and we got lots of delicious samples. Apparently they usually sell bags of the defective chocolate-covered nuts, so they’re a lot cheaper and just as tasty! After all, your stomach doesn’t care what they look like! But since it was a Sunday, they’d sold out their weekend supply of the defective ones. Guess I’ll have to go back!

For dinner, we made chicken enchiladas. They were REALLY good, but super spicy because Tommy put a whole can of jalapenos in the sauce. Oy. I stuck it out and ate most of it though!! I’m getting better at handling really spicy food.

Sorry for the lack of pictures, folks, I forgot my camera this morning! I’ll work on putting more up and hopefully will have more visual aids in the coming days.