Kona Kudos
After spending half a week in Hilo, we made our way to Kona to finish the other half. When you think of Kona, you probably picture sunshine, beaches, blue water and miles of black lava stretching across the landscape. But hiking Makāula–ʻOʻoma, we left all of that behind and walked straight into another version of Hawaii.
This trail is GREEN. And I mean green, green.
Everything around you is lush, thick and alive. Trees tower over the trail, giant ferns surround you, and there are moments when it feels less like you’re hiking in Kona and more like you’ve wandered into the middle of a Hawaiian jungle. It’s also cooler and wetter than it is along the coast, which only adds to the feeling you’ve entered somewhere completely different. There were parts of the trail that felt prehistoric, like we should be keeping an eye out for a dinosaur to casually walk through the trees.
Unlike some of the other hikes we’ve done, Makāula–ʻOʻoma isn’t about reaching one big attraction at the end of the trail. There’s no massive waterfall you’re trying to get to or some dramatic viewpoint where everyone lines up to take the same picture. The forest IS the destination. Once I realized that, I stopped waiting for the trail to show us something and just started paying attention to where we already were. And that’s when this hike became an experience that stuck to me.
It was unbelievably peaceful being surrounded by that much green, hearing the sounds of the forest and just walking beneath the trees that made everything else seem very far away. At one point, Kev and I didn’t even talk to each other – which sounds concerning as I write it out, but I promise our Marriage was fine.
We we’rent mad at each other, irritated, exhausted or doing that married-couple silence where one person says, “I’m fine” and everyone knows damn well they aren’t. We genuinely just didn’t want to talk. Talking felt like it would interrupt the peace, and so we walked. Sometimes he was ahead of me, sometimes I was beside him, and sometimes we were just taking in our own little part of the forest. There wasn’t need to fill the silence with conversation because the silence didn’t feel empty. It felt the opposite.
Even though we weren’t talking, I felt completely connected to him. We were experiencing the same place, hearing the same sounds and breathing in the same cool forest air. There was a lot of Love in that silence.
That’s one of the things I learned from all the hiking, rucking and exploring we’ve done together. Being connected to someone doesn’t always mean having some deep conversation or constantly interacting with each other. It’s knowing He’s there. It’s walking beside the person I love through a Hawaiian forest without saying a word and still feelling like we’re sharing an entire converation. It’s looking over at each other every so often and knowing what the other person is thinking.
Maybe that’s why I remember the feeling of this trail more than anything else. I couldn’t tell you every turn we made or point out every tree we passed. I couldn’t even retrace our exact route without pulling up the GPS again, but I remember the green. I remember how quiet my mind felt. I remember walking next to Kev and feeling completely content without needing anything from him except his presence.
Travel can get so busy. You’re trying to see everything, photograph everything, get to the next stop and make sure you don’t miss something you’re “supposed” to see. Makāula–ʻOʻoma was opposite of that. There was nowhere we needed to rush to and nothing we needed to check off a list. We just walked through the forest.
We went there expecting a hike through a beautiful part of Kona. What we got was a few hours of slowing down, getting completely lost in the green and realizing that silence with the right person can feel just as full as a conversation.
