A Lodging Guide to the Big Island (3)

Hilo Seaside Hotel (Night 5)

After two nights near the fires of Kilauea, we left the seclusion of the Ohana 5th Street and pushed onward counterclockwise. It was Sunday, a day off, and feeling adventurous, we detoured for a couple hours through Hawai'i's Puna district on the southeast coast. It's of the most secluded and remote areas of the island.

Red informed me that Puna has a long-time favorite locale of both FBI protected witnesses, as well as fugitives from the same agency. It's easy to imagine folks hiding out for years in the rain forest there. We gave the rental car a workout on the potholed dirt road that skirts the coast through the mango groves that gave way from time to time to pristine volcano beaches pounded by the direct surf.

In the afternoon we made it into Hilo, the second largest community in the entire state of Hawaii, and obviously the largest one on the Big Island. After grabbing a burger at a dive-bar we checked into the Hilo Seaside Inn, a classic motel right along the waterfront of the protected harbor that once made Hilo a center of the sugar cane trade.

Hilo still feels like a working class town, with a micro view of the social problems of Honolulu. A few minutes spent in the Long's Drug in town was enough to see the "real Hawaii."

In a way that makes it more accessible and interesting to me. As I mention to folks, the more I travel, the more I am interested in seeing human communities rather than pristine natural beauty (as awesome as the latter can be). I'd come to the Big Island curious as much to see places like Hilo as the volcanoes and the beaches.

The Hilo Seaside Hotel was somewhat in the spirit of the town. At check in, the native woman at the front desk informed the hotel had been operated by the same Hawaiian family since the mid 1950s. But it was well kept-up, despite a distinct older period feel. Thus our room was small, and with a wall air conditioning unit, but it was clean and comfortable, with a splendid view out over the hotel's koi pond and across the harbor nearby.  We both felt quite relaxed lounging there with the door open.

Still it's  Hilo. It's a whole different world from the tourist-oriented Caribbean-like feeling of Kona. In back of the hotel was an old corrugated metal shed in full tropical decay with junked cars. The hotel had extra security gates in the parking lot. The Sunday afternoon silence was punctuated with bikers revving their motorcycles across the street. The proud hotel owners were keeping their socks pulled up amidst a changing community around them. Like I said, all of this somehow makes me like Hilo even more.