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Sunday, March 23, 2008

The Beautiful Black Sand Beach of Punalu'u


This beautiful beach was one of our favorite spots on the Big Island. It was over on the Volcano National Park side of the island and the black lava rock has become an amazingly beautiful beach. The sand was not super fine (more like the size of coffee grinds) but it somehow felt cleaner that way.



Isaac liked digging his little toes into the sand, but wasn't quite sure what to think of the cold ocean water.


Since he was born in October, and it has been winter for most of his life, he has not spent much time outside; except when he was all bundled up for walks. (Here he is on one of our early Feb. walks.)

We were thinking that he was pretty lucky to be getting his first experience with ocean water in Hawaii. (On a black sand beach, no less.) But he felt differently!


He was not very happy with us at first; and he let us know. (I love his face in this family shot.)


Perhaps because the black sand provides a nice camouflage. This beach is a popular feeding and resting spot for Sea Turtles. We saw 4 or 5 during the hour or two that we spent there. We saw some when we went in with our snorkel gear, some near the shore feeding by the rocks, and this one just crawled up onto the sand to rest in the sun.


Isaac liked watching the turtles from Daddy's arms. Especially if he kept his feet out of the water.

From the lookout point on the rocks just below the beach we could see spray and occasional tails of the migrating whales. Isaac just has eyes for his daddy with the camera.

Hawaii is definitely an amazing and beautiful place. Stay tuned for more pictures and travel-log over the next couple of weeks.

(Since we were in Hawaii for 9 days, and have a digital camera with 2 GB of memory, we were not very selective in our picture taking (taking several shots of the same thing to make sure we at least got one good one). When we got home we realized that we had taken over 950 pictures during our trip! It has been quite a project to sort out/organize and trim down. Don't worry, it takes far too long to upload pictures to blogger for me to post more than just the highlights. ;)

6 comments:

Scrappy said...

I love Isaac's little face in the family picture, too. The black sand is beautiful. I would love to see that some day.
What a fun family vacation!

Michal said...

later, he'll love the claim that his first beach was a black sand beach in hawaii. but he clearly didn't appreciate that in the moment.

Anonymous said...

Wow that baby looks like his Daddy when he's screaming. Except Isaac is cute when he's crying. Your pictures are great, we love the sea turtle.
Fawn

Malia said...

Those pictures are awesome! We miss having you here! We got some friends hooked on spades so we have someone to play with now... and of course it was girls vs boys, we played 2 games girls won the first and boys took the second! I'm looking forward to more posts from you!

Forest said...

Boy that black sand is really black!

mahina said...

i always loved the black sand beaches! probably because we never saw them growing up in newport beach! they are amazing and beautiful! i want to go back!