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Photos from Makalawena Beach on Big Island
Words cannot truly convey the experience of traversing to Makalawena Beach. Well, they probably could but I would be up until midnight, and that is way past my bedtime. Besides, after a day in the sun, you have no idea what a toll it takes on your body unless you are a roofer, and then I have 4 words for you: find a better trade. Only desperate people get up there in the hot sun to play with asphalt shingles and tar.
I will say this is my defense of saying nothing. It is well worth the trip to Makalawena Beach. First, you enter Kekaha Kai State Park and you really need a four-wheel or SUV to drive that road. Otherwise you walk. But since I have a Subaru Forester, we were in luck. We could drive.
Then you walk a half mile or so to the beach, and we saw no monk seals. To get to Makalawena Beach, which is billed as the prettiest and most beautiful beach in West Hawaii, you then must walk down another half mile of lava. Some of it is sand, but going over the lava rocks, well, I seem to have not taken any photos of that. For a good reason.
It was a glorious day, high of 79, stiff breezes and magnificent surf. Hope you enjoy the pictorial journey. There is a close up of Mauna Kea with snow and a pufferfish at the end. Believe it or not, all shot with an iPhone XR.
I need to add that last photo is a pufferfish. It had washed ashore in the tide. Anita, my friend, was busy looking for a cowry shell for me when I pointed into the distance at this fish and said WHAT IS THAT? See, when you’re searching for something, you might find something else. I knew it was a pufferfish as I had actually caught a pufferfish in Florida.
Somehow it was tossed ashore by the strong surf at Makalawena. We assumed it was dead. It was not moving. I emptied out my lunch bag, and got mayonnaise all over my white shorts, but we packed up that pufferfish and headed back to Kailua Kona. Anita planned to make a blowfish lantern from it.
Weird twist, though. Anita texted that when she got home on Ali’i, she discovered the fish was alive. WTH? So she rushed to the ocean, dropped it into the water, and it regained consciousness. Swam away. How f-ing weird is that? Like suspended animation.
Mahai’lua Beach at Kekaha Kai State Park
You have to really want to visit Mahai’lua Beach to drive down the road to get there. To say the road is unimproved is to put it mildly. In fact, there is a sign about halfway down the road that warns you are entering an unimproved road, just in case you didn’t know. However, the road to the unimproved road is also unimproved, so it makes you wonder how much worse can it get.
Wasn’t bad in my Subaru SUV, but some of the people who care about their suspension (or maybe their kidneys) had turned around and headed back to the highway. It’s about a 15-minute drive, averaging somewhere between 5 and 10 miles per hour. But who is in a hurry? This is Hawaii! You’ll get to Mahai’lua Beach. Eventually.
Mahai’lua Beach is long and wide, with beautiful sand. This is not the most beautiful beach in the Kekaha Kai State Park. There is another beach, but it is a longer walk. From the parking lot, it is about a 1/2 mile walk to the beach, through a gate to a path.
Beyond that beach, you need to navigate another 1/2 mile over lava beds and lava rock to reach the most beautiful beach, known as Makalawena Beach. Best white sand beach in West Hawaii. But we did not reach that beach since it was already mid afternoon, and the walk in hot sun over lava did not appeal to my husband. But we will go there another day.
Waves were high and surf was up the day we were at Makai’lui Beach. We could watch the surfers way off in the distance patiently wait for the best waves. On occasion, there were sets of waves rolling on top of each other. I almost jumped in the water with all of my clothes on but then I realized after the beach, we had to stop at Wal-Mart to exchange a propane tank.
The sun must have made me dizzy because as I stood in line at Wal-Mart to pay for an exchange, I could have sworn the clerk kept talking about cocaine to the guy in front of me. I was thinking, hey, can’t she see I’m standing right here? She shouldn’t be discussing a cocaine transaction in the middle of the store.
When I shared this interaction with my husband, he began to parody JJ Cale’s song, Cocaine: if you want to grill meat, you’ve got to take her out, propane.
This is the same Hawaiian monk seal that we spotted in the small lagoon during our tour a few years ago of the Kona Natural Energy Laboratory. We have only two Hawaiian monk seals on the Big Island, and we found both of them this week at Mahai’lua Beach.
Fortunately, there are volunteers who put up signs and rope off the areas to keep tourists and beachgoers away from the Hawaiian monk seals. The monk seals are an endangered species and endemic to the islands, meaning they are found no place else in the world.
It is also possible to hike about 7 miles south to reach Kua Bay, another popular yet secluded location for a beach. At least Kua Bay is a place you can drive on a paved surface to reach.
