Weird things about Hawaii they don’t tell you
Everything is more expensive. Everything. This one I’d actually been warned about in advance, but it still shocked me how much it was true. And since it’s based off weight more than production costs, it’s the cheap stuff that kills you since it’s all bumped up by the same amount. I bought cereal and a 12-pack of coke at the grocery store, and my bill came to $17.
The roads are curiously good for two reasons: no winters, and very few trucks (with 0 semi-trailer trucks). The former means essentially 0 potholes or cracks in the road, and the latter means whatever wear happens to the roads happens much more slowly.
There are so many different environments on the big island. Since the Kona airport is on the opposite end of the island as the Volcanos National Park, we ended up circumnavigating it heading too and from there. In between was a staggering variety of climates, with as little as a few minutes separating literal rainforests and deserts. Why? Hawaii is really a series of tall mountains in the face of fairly invariant wind, which means that rain tends to fall on the same side, always. And since a half-dozen volcanoes make up the big island, this means there are all these little pockets of varying temperature, rainfall, and lava-freshness. Travel through the national park and around the island, and you’ll see it all.
