Flashback to April and Hawaii. On the day we drove to Kilauea we stopped at various places along the way. And since it’s a nearly-100-mile drive from Kailua, there was a lot to see.
We never made it down to South Point (the southernmost tip of the island), partly because of time and partly because—believe it or not—our car rental contract forbid us to drive on the 12-mile road out to the point! Supposedly it’s poorly maintained—or it used to be, and the policy hasn’t kept up—and they don’t want the wear and tear on cars that aren’t designed for it. As I recall, rental trucks and SUVs don’t have the restriction. This was the closest we ever came to it, and you can only barely see it way off in the distance.
If you look at the end of the spray near the visible point, then go straight up toward the horizon, you’ll notice that the sky-sea line dips downward slightly and there’s a faint darker patch of sky. As far as we could tell, that’s the promontory heading out toward South Point. Even then, we weren’t quite sure. Update: It’s not. I checked the map when I finally uploaded these images to Flickr, and the highway doesn’t get close to the ocean on the west side. It’s a viewpoint near Haleokane, east of Naalehu and east of the turnoff to South Point Road. We’d already passed it!
