Hawai’i Big Island Trip Day13-18 part1

sunset at beach campground

The last five days of the trip, we camped at local park. The picture above is from camping site. The guide book says that there are no campers on weekdays and local people on weekends. Due to holiday season, there were many local people were camping. Actually there were ONLY local people there. Only a little far from Kona, there were few travelers.

Star fuits

One camper next to us lives there and he gave us fruits and vegetables from his yard. One of them was star fruits which I had never had. It was juicy and delicious.

Eggplants from farmer's makert in miso soup

 

 

We also brought fruits and vegetables from Hilo farmers markets. We got tomatos, avocados, mangoes, bananas, eggplants, papayas. They were REALLY tasty. We put vegetables in camping food, such as miso soup or Japanese curry.

Hilo Farmers market is really popular for both local and tourists. Really fresh and good vegetables, fruits are available. Not only that, some bento, and cooked goods are available. I bought home-made taro chips. They are delicious. Not like commercial chips, no salt added, so I was able to taste the original taro. 

 

Another important thing in Hawai'i is cats. 

As you may know, there are many, actually tremendous amounts of feral cats on all of Hawaiian islands.

Except for backpacking campsites, every campgrounds where car can access had feral cats. Most of the feral cats on Big Island are very cautious and they don’t get close to human beings. They are really adopted in the wild.

tabby at the campground

Only one cat was friendly. She was with us for the last five days of camping. The campsite was usually occupied with only local people. There were three cats at the campground, but only one, black and white, was friendly and two others, tabby and black, were really shy and never got very close to humans. I was able to take pictures of tabby, but the black one was always far away from human.

 

 The friendly black and white was always at our tent vestibule. She was there all night. Also in the daytime the vestibule seemed good place for her to hide. One reason was as a shade, but more important reason was to hide from children. Some kids chased the cat and she seemed to want to hide from them.

She even played with me using some plants. It was like a tamed cat.

Cats are not native in Hawai’i. They were introduced from Europeans. Cats were important to catch rats on ships.

Now feral cats are considered to impact Hawaiian native animals, such as birds. This problem has been controversial how to deal with that. Indeed it is a tough thing to deal with for cat + animal lovers.