Thursday, June 27, 2024
One last adventure day before relaxing resort time takes over! On Thursday, we headed down towards Kona. We had a scheduled tour of the Kona Cloud Forest Sanctuary, but first we stopped by Mountain Thunder Coffee, which was just down the street. Unfortunately, we arrived slightly later than planned and missed the free guided tour. There was not much else to do there, so we drove back to the sanctuary to wait.
Soon it was time for our tour. We each chose a bamboo walking stick and then we were off through the cloud forest to learn about different plants on the island. This was a very chill, relaxing walk through the woods, with lots of great information.
After the tour, we headed down into Kona and ate lunch at Kona Brewing. The pizza here was very tasty! My mom also made a new friend, as a gecko crawled up her leg while seated at our table.
Before our trip, LS had become intrigued by how pearls were formed and really wanted one of her own. We made a stop at the Pearl Factory, and she got to pick out an oyster with a pearl, which we then set into a (very pricey) souvenir necklace.
We then headed back to the resort because Mr. Strange and I had a manta ray moonlight swim scheduled that evening. We had booked through Manta Ray Advocates, which operates from the Mauna Kea resort, the sister resort to ours. We took the complimentary shuttle over to the other hotel and headed out to the beach, where we checked into our tour.
There were five or six others in our group. We all got suited up with a mask, snorkel, and flippers, and listened to some safety information from our guide. Then it was time to head out to the water!
On our walk out to the ocean, the first group of the night was returning back to the beach shack. Our guide briefly stopped to talk to the guide from that group, then we continued down the beach. She stopped us then to tell us that the first group hadn’t seen any manta rays, and the boats that were out on the water had not either. The ocean was seemingly low on their food supply that evening. She said we could choose to continue with the swim or opt out and get a refund. We all kind of stared at each other, obviously disappointed. One couple bailed, and then slowly everyone else started to as well.
We headed back to the beach shack and turned in our equipment. I checked to see if there was any other availability during our remaining time, but there were unfortunately no additional openings. Very disappointing, but we decided it would just be a reason to come back in the future!