36.1 mi / 9.8 mph / 3061 ft. climbing
Home: Hippocampus HipCamp

We cleared out of our AirBNB room by 9:20am, and got immediately smacked with an 11% hill over the first half-mile (including sections of 15%!!) just to return to the main highway. We actually crossed the new highway and turned onto a paralleling section of the old highway, and the transition to a “mere” 5% grade at that point felt nearly like riding downhill. Still, we climbed at an average of 320 feet-per-mile over the first two miles, and the road pushed continuously upward for another three miles, bringing us 1400 feet above our start point before the first moment of actual flattening. A couple years ago in the US Midwest, we rode for three days and 150 miles, and didn’t even total 1100 feet of climbing, and here we did 1400 feet in 5 miles well before 2nd-breakfast. Thank you New Zealand for making hills “normal” for us!

At that first flattening, the house-dotted forest we had been riding through suddenly opened into blue-sky pastureland. It was a whole new world that had been hiding high on the volcano’s slope, and felt more like the Shire-lands of New Zealand than anything we expected to see in Hawaii. Far higher than us, we could catch glimpses behind of the 13,000-foot top of Mauna Kea occasionally poking through the clouds.

But despite the distance of the volcanic summit, the mountain found a way to remind us of its eruptive origin. Rett noticed a hole in the rock on the left side of the road, and it led into a large cave, presumably a lava tube. No markings, no sign, no parking lot, just something we could stop and explore on the nearly-empty old highway. We didn’t need to get very deep inside before I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. While we thought this was a unique thing to “discover” on this route, a little further on the road traveled through a cut in the surrounding rock, and there was a whole sequence of caves/tubes on both sides (though they looked smaller than the first one we stopped to explore, at least from their entrances).

The 10 miles of old highway were lightly traveled, and the handful of drivers we did encounter continued to demonstrate Hawaii’s excellent driving culture. Even when coming downhill towards us, they didn’t exceed the 25mph speed limit. Those passing us from behind moved completely to the other side of the road. And we even had an instance of something I never recall seeing: an oncoming driver came to a complete stop some distance from us, in order to let an overtaking driver pass us without any stress!

We joined the main highway just a couple miles outside of Waimea (the island’s 3rd-largest town), and the rain rejoined us soon after. We decided to just push hard to shelter at a grocery store, and lunch at the McDonald’s in the parking lot.

Continuing on from Waimea, we branched northward onto the Kohala Peninsula, and began the day’s second major climb, 1100 feet up the shoulder of Kohala, the oldest of the island’s volcanoes. I’d read some pretty terrifying accounts of this climb, mostly due to stiff crosswinds, but luckily we had light winds and New Zealand muscle-memory to make our ascent relatively easy.

In fact, both the American road design and our strength made the small sign marking the 3564 ft. crest almost a surprise: have we bested something worthy of a marker? Well yes, we had! The Crown Range Road in New Zealand has an impressive stone monument and parking area marking the pass as the highest paved road in the country. But here on a much smaller island, we had brought ourselves up with minimal fuss (and almost without realizing it) to an elevation 34 feet higher than New Zealand’s highest!

For our 10-mile descent down the other side, the crosswinds got worse (and are always more of a danger at downhill speeds than uphill), but we never got blasted with anything too terrifying. It helped that most of the descent was more wooded than the ascent.

Heading to our HipCamp, we took the route that the host very strongly recommends against, with the theory that we’d be able to ride/walk our bikes through rough roads more-easily than even 4WD vehicles. At first it seemed like totally fine gravel, but then we hit a quarter-mile section where we definitely had to get off and walk, and there was zero chance of a vehicle making it through. It was still way better than taking the recommended route and having to re-ascend an additional 200 feet though!

The HipCamp site is on a sort of hippie farm/commune, deep in a steep jungle gulch on the property. To make a flat spot in the ravine, there was one wooden tent platform available (a few other platforms had tiny wooden shelters with mattresses inside), though we were the only ones spending the night. There were steep rough stairs down into the gulch, but I still dragged our bikes down (after unloading the bags and carrying them separately), mostly just to have places to hold our gear, since the platform was barely large enough to fit our tent and it required careful rigging.

We took “cold” showers in the outdoor unit, and then cooked up our Caprese Mac & Cheese using the small outdoor kitchen, while constantly dodging rain that threatened a million times but didn’t fall in earnest until just after we had finished eating. Despite the amenities (sink, propane stove), camping in deep jungle was one of the more-challenging environments we’ve set up in.