This is probably (in my opinion) the prettiest beach we visited on the Big Island. It's just North of the airport. The problem is accessing it. There's a very rough, rocky road from the highway leading down to a parking area and the beach. This road is about 3 kilometers across a bare, black lava field. You often hear warnings about a road being rough and that you need a big truck to drive down it, but in reality it's fine in a car if you take it slow. This road is actually very rough. We had some kind of modern rental car and we bottomed out several times. You have to crawl along, analyzing the road ahead trying to decide which deep hole or pile of rocks would be less damaging to drive over. I kept picturing our rental car having its transmission or engine oil pans punched through or torn off. The trails of oil down the road showed that this actually happened to other drivers recently. There were some very short paved sections along the road. Just to make sure drivers wouldn't see this as a break, they installed very high speed bumps along it. Our car bottomed out on these too. We eventually reached the parking area and the beach. This is a drive I wasn't going to do again without a high ground-clearance vehicle. We snorkeled out around a lava area on our right. The beach we ended up at was the pretty one I mentioned earlier. The snorkeling itself wasn't very good. There was almost no coral. It was mostly just bare lava rock. I assume all the sand in the area gets shifted around during storms and smothers the coral. There were a few fish, but the visibility was pretty stirred-up (again, all that sand). We didn't see any turtles while snorkeling, but we saw one in a tide pool while walking around the lava point. Later, while sitting on the beach, we saw a monk seal swim along the beach and charge towards the shore. I assume it was going to crawl up to bask, but it then changed it's mind at the last minute and swam away.
