Shortly after March 11th, we received photos of the Kona Village Resort which was hit by the tsunami generated by the earthquake in Japan. The tsunami hit the Village around 3:00 am. All guests had been evacuated to nearby hotels, and no one was injured. But the Village got slammed. It is now closed indefinitely, and the photos we received which document the damage are heartbreaking.
We first traveled to the Village in 1986, searching for a place in Hawaii which wasn't Waikiki, which Billy hated, nor Maui, which just didn't seem Hawaiian enough. We decided to give the Big Island a try, and made plans to go to the Mauna Kea. A woman (whose name I have since forgotten, but it may have been Jeanne), who worked out next to me in Kim Blank's class at Jane Fonda's Workout in Encino, had touted the Big Island. When I told her of our plans to go there, she got excited.
"Where are you going to stay?" she asked.
"Mauna Kea," I told her, expecting her enthusiastic affirmation.
She vehemently shook her head (long red curls rippling for effect). "NO," she exclaimed, still shaking head and curls. "NO," repeated again, emphatically (I'm assuming you got that with the italics and bolding. Like, I'm trying to convey that there was no way she was going to let us go to the Mauna Kea).
"Does your husband want to wear a jacket and tie to dinner every night?"
"Uh. No. Probably not," I responded, not a little overwhelmed by her response.
"You're going to the Kona Village," she stated.
And . . . we did.
On that very first flight to the Big Island, when our plane was on approach to Kona airport, I looked out the window and saw what I believe was the ugliest landscape I have ever laid eyes on. Lava. Weird beige-colored yucca-ish plants. White stones arranged in graffiti-like patterns on top of the lava. Moonscape. Are you getting this picture? I PANICKED. We gave up Maui for THIS?!
We gathered our luggage, and piled into some form of transportation and headed up the highway. About twenty minutes later we were on the roughest road I have ever traversed -- seriously. Mexico? Greece? Nope. Rougher. The driver pointed out that, if we were lucky, we might see donkeys. Donkeys!?! Donkeys in Hawaii.
Finally we arrived at a guard gate and were allowed to enter. Vegetation appeared, and we came to a stop at a circle, in front of a thatched-roofed building. Someone, who we now know was Auntie Eleanor, met us and placed welcome leis around our necks. It would be the only time that this happened, that we wouldn't feel like we had come home.
Within a day or two, I sent a postcard to my parents. It said only this: This is IT. It was the place I had dreamed of, in the Hawaii I had dreamed of. It was . . . magic.
I went to Hawaii for the first time before I started school. We sailed from San Francisco on the Matson liner, The Lurline. My dad had spent the duration of WW II stationed at Pearl Harbor. His aunt and uncle also lived on Oahu during the war, as his uncle was a Royal Navy advisor to the US Navy. Having spent three years in Hawaii, my dad had developed an intense affinity for the islands. By the time Billy and I spent our honeymoon there, it was my lucky seventh visit to the islands, including two full summers spent there.
We were to travel to the Village, with our friends, Todd and Christopher, in May. It would have been their first time there, after hearing about it from us for many years in copious amounts of too much information, on and on, ad nauseam (I've misspelled this word all my life and only now learn that it ends in am, thank you Google Dictionary!), more or less (we can't help ourselves). Our canceled reservation for this trip would have been our eighteenth stay at the Kona Village. And the twenty-seventh time I would have traveled to the Islands. But, those lofty numbers aside, I have to write that Billy and I, and all of the Village returnees, who are part of the Kona Village ohana, are mourning the loss of this special and magical place. Unless you have been there, and stayed there, you have no idea.
I have celebrated every birthday, with Sandra and John, at the Kona Village since 1998. I cannot imagine spending a birthday and a Halloween somewhere else. But, we will. Hopefully the Village will return to us, and will somehow have retained the magic that we knew there. But, we have to be realistic. The Kona Village staff has been let go. The grounds, and even our special hale, Lava Samoan Eight, has been devastated. How it will come back to us is, at this point, unknown.
Here is our hale, knocked off of its foundation, without steps, and without the railing (where I found a Happy Birthday balloon tied on the morning of my birthday each year, courtesy of a special someone, with a big heart, in management of the resort). The second picture is of the hale's lanai where we often spent time watching the approaching sunset, before hurrying off to the Bora Bora Bar to meet Sandra and John.
Like many others, we have come back again and again to Kona Village, and felt a special joy when we arrived at the circle outside reception. And, each year, we eagerly looked forward to seeing the faces of all of the staff there who have felt like our special Hawaiian family (ohana). What we know is simply this: We have loved being at the Village. We have truly loved this place. And we will miss it more than any of us can imagine at this time.
*Pau means the end, or over. We fervently hope that the Village is only pau, for now. Mahalo for reading my blog. Aloha nui loa.
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