25th Anniversary Adventure - Day Nine

There is no dock at Kona big enough for the ship, so we had to anchor off shore and tender into the port. It was so pretty. And the water was SO blue. 

We got to shore a little early before our excursion took off, so we wandered around the shore line and did a little shopping too. 

We met our tour back at the dock. There were just 8 of us on a big van and it was really nice. Our first stop was a hike to see turtles. We hiked through part of an old volcano field to get out to the beach. 

On our way to the next stop, we ended up driving by a United Methodist Church. Turns out there are 33 UMC churches on 4 of the Hawaii islands and the district office is actually in Honolulu. 

Kona is known for its coffee farms. There's no one big commercial farms here, but a ton of smaller ones. We stopped at one to taste and shop. We were supposed to walk through the fields but the rain came in. 

Our biggest stop and hike was the Cloud Forest hike. They call it that because we are were so far up the mountain that the clouds cover the mountain tops all the time. It's like a perpetual rainforest up there on the mountain edge. 

Those trees drop little blue balls and eventually the blue chips off and leaves this. 

These are rainbow eucalyptus trees. They stay at 50 degrees and were cool to the touch with condensation on the bark when you touched them. As the bark peels it shows off these rainbow colors. 

Before we boarded the ship we checked out a nearby bakery and picked up malasadas for Daryl to try. It's a special kind of doughnut without a hole that originally came from Portugal and is so popular in the islands - its the only kind of doughnut served there. They were pretty good!