Ho'omaluhia Botanical Garden

We went to church on Friday because we were suppose to go rock climbing today. Unfortunately the guy with the experience/extra gear never got back to us. Instead we headed down to the Koa Pancake House and ate a delicious and unhealthy breakfast (me- banana pancake & homestyle pototatoes, Quinn- loco moco & corned beef and hash) then to our "back-up" trip of the day, the Ho'omaluhia Botanical Garden. I'm not really sure why but I had this mental image in my head of thousands of Hawaiian flowers... which is not what we saw...

The garden is actually 400 acres with multiple nature areas. There are native Hawaiian plants, Polynesian plants, African plain plants, and more. The lake features a catch and release rental pole program, when we walked down to the edge we saw the beautiful orange color (cichlid fish) but couldn't figure out why they were all bunched up until we saw a coot pecking at some bread crumbs on the shore. I had Quinn throw a piece of bread in for the top-right photo... check out the brain-bump on the lighter color fish!

We ran into a couple of mongoose, the one I have a photo of was sort of stalking us, maybe he thought we had food? There is a look-out you can walk up to that features a great view of Kane'ohe Bay, so we balanced the camera on the information stand and set the self-timer!

It wasn't quite as exhilarating as what we had originally planned for the day, but it was fun none-the-less!