Miscellaneous family visit photos (part 1)

While my family was visiting in November we checked out a number of places on the island, from which I have a bunch of photos. I'd just gotten a new phone (the Pixel 7 Pro, for the curious) and was learning the camera, and partly because of that I often only ended up with one or two good shots from a location. Instead of writing a lot of little posts about each individual spot, I thought I'd bundle up photos from multiple places into a few larger posts. (They also won't necessarily be in chronological order.)

For this post, I think I'll focus more on the biological splendors (or things of interest) that we saw. Two interesting places we toured were a coffee farm on the Kona sida and a chocolate farm just north of Hilo (just a few miles from my house). I'd never seen either fruit on the tree before, so it was interesting to see how they grow and hear about the process by which they become the end products we're familiar with.

Coffee berries at Greenwell Farms.

Chocolate pods at the Lavaloha chocolate farm.

The chocolate pods in particular were rather interesting with the way they just grew seemingly at random upon the tree, including up and down the trunk. I'm holding a mature one in that photo, to give you a sense of scale (the coffee berries were more like olive-size). Within the pods are a bunch of seeds surrounded by a fleshy layer, which has an odd but not unpleasant taste. (We got to eat some straight from the tree on the guided tour!)

We also visited Richardson beach and walked along the coast to Leleiwi beach were we came across a pair of sea turtles sunning themselves on the rocks. I think that's only like the third time I've seen turtles in my time here (not spending a great deal of my time at the beach), so it was pretty neat. Especially since the zoom on the Pixel 7 Pro is a lot better than on my old phone, allowing me to get shots like these while staying safely distant from the nonchalant chelonians:

Two tired turtles at Leleiwi beach.

Close-up of one of them checking us out. (We we safely beyond the legal distance, don't worry.)

Anyway, that's all for this (fairly short) post. I'll try to get another up fairly soon summarizing some of the cool geological sights at the places we visited. A hui hou!