After a quick cereal breakfast and a short, lazy lay-around we headed to Starbucks to write our blog post (because the condo doesn't have internet). I felt very modern bohemian sitting at a Starbucks, blogging my island vacation and sipping an iced latte.
Blog posted, we headed to Snorkel Bob's for snorkel gear. While we were there, we also booked a parasailing expedition for Thursday. Fun! A quick stop at the local Foodland (that's like Foodworld, only for the Gameboy, heheh) for sandwiches, and we were off to the beach!
The guidebook promised that Malu'aka Beach in a stretch of Maui called Turtle Town had the best snorkeling on the island. So off to Turtle Town! At the far end of the beach was a shoulder-height, naturally occurring lava rock wall which segmented off a narrow stretch of the beach from the rest. This would be Conley Cove, our "secret" snorkeling hideout. We applied sunscreen then sat on the beach and ate our sandwiches.
Fed and ready to swim, we headed out into the ocean. The reef was a lot further out here than it was on The Big Island. That meant more swimming to get to the action, but it also meant that we never felt like we were in any danger of accidentally kicking the reef. We snorkeled for probably an hour and a half, covering most of the reef up-and-down the beach. We even swam all the way out until the reef ended (at least the portion of reef in the swimming section of the beach). We saw many fish, even a couple of large schools, but the snorkeling here wasn't even half as good as it was on the Big Island. Another point against Maui.
We weren't seeing much, and Elly's gear was misbehaving, so we decided to ditch the equipment and just play around for awhile. We swam, and made a sand castle (more like sand egg lol -E), and splashed around. All told we spent about 3 hours on the beach. The sun was hanging low in the sky and we were both pretty tired, so we decided to call it a day.
We went back home for a quick shower, then back out to Foodland for dinner supplies. Tonight we had lilikoi-ginger sweet-and-sour red snapper with ginger-spiced starfruit honey wine and the last of the pineapple mac-nut pilaf. It was quite good.
A brief aside about lilikoi. Lilikoi (a.k.a. passion fruit) is a small, hard fruit about half-again as big as a golf ball. When you crack them open they are filled with pips similar to a pomegranate, except yellow, soft, and a bit slimy. It doesn't have the pithy fascia separating it into sections. If you're eating a lilikoi straight you use a spoon (or your tongue) to scoop the pips out of the 1/2 inch thick shell and eat them, seeds and all. Our recipe called for lilikoi juice, so following a guide on the internet we made homemade lilikoi juice by blendering the pips of 5 fruits slightly to break up all the pips. We then strained out the seeds and mixed it with some water (straight lilikoi is pretty strong).
This homemade lilikoi juice was then the base for the sauce, which also included ginger, garlic, onion, and bell pepper. The fish was then breaded, deep fried, and served covered in the sauce. Delicious!
I had black sesame ice cream and Elly had lychee sorbet. The sesame ice cream took a bit of getting used to, but it was quite good. We had a hike planned for the next day, so we went to bed early.
Photos:
https://plus.google.com/photos/105719328153023565846/albums/5943253149307995569
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