Honu

Honu is the Hawaiian word for turtle, and we were in for a sweet surprise when we visited the beautiful black sand beaches of Punalu'u. Months before our visit here, we saw Punalu'u on the Travel Channel ranked in the top ten beaches in the world, and it did not disappoint!



The turtle was just calmly hanging out, sunbathing on the beach as we walked up. Rebekah wanted to name it Lindsay. We had also seen sea turtles when we went to Georgia a few summers ago, but this one seemed much more comfortable around people.



At first the girls seemed hesitant to get too close, but they quickly got braver. Because there were signs asking visitors not to disturb the turtles, I wouldn't let them touch it, but they were definitely close enough to.



"Lindsay" had lots of little friends swimming just off shore who kept poking their faces out of the water. I think they were monitoring the gathering crowd that came to see them. They preferred to wait for some of the people to leave before coming in for a rest in the warm sand.



What a sweet turtle face ~ At least she wasn't at all camera shy :-)









It was a little funny how after a while of standing there, watching the turtle, Rebekah ran right past her up and down the beach as if she was just running past a dog, hardly taking notice of the spectacular site.



The texture of the black sand was very soft, making for such a nice beach! We packed some sand in a ziploc to bring home, and at the airport headed back to Oahu, the TSA people had to check it out. The lady first asked me if she could go through the bag. A minute or two later and almost like she was scared of me, she asked if she could run a chemical test on it...Dave speculated that maybe they thought it was gun powder or something else harmful. They laughed at us when the test showed it was sand. I completely understand (and I'm very thankful) that they check everything thoroughly, but we can't possibly be the first to try and bring some of the pretty sand home.

Little did we know as we headed to the Kona side of the Big Island that we would have the chance to see lots more sea turtles, but for today we were wowed by Honu Lindsay.