Here we are arriving at Kona, our second port, on the Big Island of
Hawaii. Kona doesn’t have docking facilities for large cruise ships so it’s
necessary to go ashore in tenders (actually a couple of our ship’s lifeboats).
As luck would have it we disembarked just as hundreds of lean and
lanky athletes dashed into the water on the first leg of an Ironman triathlon –
a 2.4 mile swim in Kailua-Kona Bay (to be followed by a 112 mile bike ride
across the Hawaiian lava dessert and a marathon run along the coast). It wasn’t the famous Kona Ironman World
Championship, which is held in the fall, but they all looked like champions to
us.
Also on the Big Island, we toured the
previously mentioned lava beds, including walking through a huge lava tube in Hawaii
Volcanoes National Park, and Danny even agreed to participate in a precipitous
hike through a spectacular botanical garden… on condition that I go for a very
scary bike-ride on our second last day… or maybe I agreed to go on the
bike-ride only on condition that he see the garden.
