Tuesday 2nd February

Another lazy start - we could get used to living like this...

Spoke with Patrick and Divina in England via Skype. Gave them the grand tour of where we are staying.

Lunch on our deck and then off to the seahorse farm just outside Kailua-Kona which is the main town on this side of the island.   They have over 20,000 of them and breed them to sell to people who have an aquarium to stop people taking them from the wild. Apparently people used to take 1+million of them each year and this has been reduced to 25,000. The farm used deep water from the ocean nearby to raise them. They are tiny to start with - less than an inch long and some get quite large. They ask you to wash in iodine to help preserve their biosecurity and also treat on mats covered with it.

I became a coral reef for a while.  One of the seahorses was put onto my fingers and stayed there for a couple of minutes. We also saw the weedy sea dragon (which we saw off Sydney on our last trip) and they had four leafy sea dragons which they are trying to breed as well. And an extremely ugly bright yellow frog fish.

We thought we'd do a bit more snorkelling today so found a beach which had a 4wd road going to it. The description of it was 'nasty' but we've done a bit of off roading in the UK and we have a jeep and how hard can it be?

Nasty was an understatement - think large rocks, potholes and lots of them. It took us over 30 minutes to inch our way down to the beach and then drive a bit further along it. The beach was worth it - Makalawena. Hardly anyone around. Beautiful sand, palm trees, lots of fish (some quite big) and a couple more turtles just hanging around.

We then had to lurch/climb/inch back up the road again. I will post a couple of photos so you can see what I mean. A beautiful sunset on the way. The coastline faces west here so is known for its sunsets.