Big Island Dreams

 

 It's been a while!

Climbing down the outside stair ramp from the airplane at the Kona airport, I was relieved that no air personnel needed to use their recent mask-fu training on me or anyone else. Now that they know they can slug us, they don’t feel the need to employ the “pretty please” voice when they tell you “Mask OVER the nose”).

Kona airport is small, and therefore completely manageable. In a few minutes, I was in my tiny rental Chevy and on the way to the Saddle Road (aka Daniel K. Inoue Hwy, but nobody calls it that). The day was overcast, humid and in the 80s.

It’s been more than 25 years since I last set foot on the big island, and I wanted to revisit a few of the things that thrilled me then. I had forgotten that this is the newest of the Hawaiian Islands, and much of the land surface is covered with gritty lava. The black ground was dotted with crowns of bright golden grass – the kind landscapers pay a bunch for a bunch.

The land changes coming up from Kona on the Saddle Road. More of a tinge of green, small trees and…goats. Wee feral goats graze on the wayside, and an occasional tusked pig makes an appearance. Coming from the mainland, the vast emptiness of this plain, on the slopes of Mauna Kea, looking south to Mauna Loa is breathtaking. You can see the enormous bases of both mountains, totally obscured by clouds.

More than halfway to Hilo, near the road to the Observatory Station, the terrain changes again. I’ve been passing through wispy clouds for a few minutes, and now they’re turned to chilly rain. And a forest of tall trees whips past my windows. From there, dropping down into Hilo, which still looks like Hawaii to me. Green growth everywhere, Houses on stilts for air circulation, sun-faded buildings, slickness kept to a minimum.

Along Kamehameha Blvd

Of course, it’s not all old-school. My first stop was at a faintly clinical Macy’s to use the facilities.

 

 

Herring is your Friend

I ate so much herring in Amsterdam that I won’t be able to approach small fish for some time. 

Herring is everywhere, and my preferred style was to have the bony little guys tucked into soft white bread, sprinkled with chopped onions and pickles (you can get it without the bread, stuffed with onions and pickles, lowered into the mouth from overhead--but that was a little more Dutch than I could handle).

Netherlanders also have a way with baked goods; the breakfast pastries were uniformly great, and there’s a “sausage roll” I became addicted to (when I got back from Italy, it was the first thing I went for): it’s either a round sausage or sausage meat inside a wrapping of flaky puff pastry. It makes Philadelphia’s cheesesteak look positively healthy, and leaves your hands and face glowing with spicy grease.

A great cup of coffee is everywhere in the Netherlands; Dutch  sea trade in the 17th century imported and popularized the drink, and one of the first customers was Lloyds of London when it was a cafe, before Lloyds got into the much more lucrative insurance business.

Asian food here refers to Indonesian or Thai—I found myself longing for good old-fashioned Chinese. I wasn’t able to find a single Chinese restaurant until my last day in the university town of Leiden (and it was excellent).