The University of Hawai'i was playing the much-feared Stanford tennis team on Friday, over on the Big Island. That was all the excuse I needed to book a day flight over to Kailua and the Kona Coast.

I rented a car when I got to the airport and drove south for about 15 minutes until I reached the town of Kailua. After driving around for a few minutes I parked and went for a walk along the waterfront. The town was, I assumed, a typical Hawai'ian tourist destination. Shaved ice stands, ocean art galleries, t-shirts, macadamia nuts... the usual. A nice old church and an old summer home from a long-ago ruler offered a brief respite from the entrepreneurial monotony.

One of the parking lots off the main road was hosting a small farmer's market. Fresh fruit and tacky coconut bras competed with wood carvings and wild flowers. I saw some truly gruesome masks that would have made a great gift for a friend back home; I assumed, however, that they were standard Hawai'ian tourist trap issue and therefore would be plentiful throughout my visit -- I could always buy one later and save myself the trouble of carting the thing around. Alas, I never saw the masks again, despite some rather desperate searching towards the end of my holiday.

I gave up on Kailua and turned the car north, towards the resort where the tennis matches were being held. The landscape alongside the highway was of the "tortured volcanic" style -- twisted rust-black rubble interspersed with desperate brown grass. Along the sides of the road, people had taken graffiti to a uniquely Hawai'ian level: pieces of white coral from the beaches had been carried to the side of the road and arranged on the black rocks to convey various messages. There were thousands of names, words and pictures stretching for mile after mile along the highway.

I reached the resort, a massive monolithic entity sporting multiple golf courses, timeshares, hotels, and restaurants. I had time to kill so I went down to the beach, hoping to photograph some of those lush tropical scenes that I seemed to remember so vividly from my earlier trip to Hawai'i. Unfortunately I was on the western, dry side of the island and the only lush greens I saw were of the putting variety.

I didn't give up yet, though. A short, 20 minute hike promised to lead me to ancient Hawai'ian petroglyphs, so I followed a gravel path into a twisted forest of sparse, mangled trees.

A short way along the path there was a display about petroglyphs. There were some examples, made by contemporary Hawai'an artists, and some signs encouraging me to ask questions like: "why did most of the petroglyphs point towards the volcano?", and "why did they put all the petroglyphs here?"

I continued along the path. The air was hot and dry and the ground was dusty. The forest was just short of ugly, a pitchforked display of crooked limbs and meagre little leaves. When I finally reached the petroglyphs themselves, I was disappointed.

I was hoping to uncover a site of spirituality, a gathering place of old, a home for deep mysteries and even deeper answers. What I found instead was an old wooden fence and a slab of rock with a bunch of worn stick figures in it. The petroglyphs at the end of the trail looked exactly like the ones at the head of the trail -- the only difference being that these were about 10,000 years older and just slightly more remote. Other than that, I couldn't see or feel any difference between the two. I returned to the car.

By this time it was time to get some lunch and watch the tennis matches. I drove a few laps of the resort complex, getting thoroughly lost, before finally arriving at the right set of tennis courts.

Even though they were the visitors, The Stanford contingent had a much larger throng of supporters -- in fact, I think I was the only fan to come out and cheer on the Wahine. My new friends put up a valiant fight but with only my meagre vocal support to encourage them against the best team in the country, they eventually succumbed. The final score was 8 matches to 1. (To see more photos from the matches, click here.)

The afternoon was getting late and I had to catch an earlier flight than the tennis team so I hopped in the car and headed back to the airport. I had to fill up the car with gas before returning it, though, so I continued past the airport and back into Kailua. I did a few laps of the town before finding a gas station and stopped into Hilo Hattie's to pick up my free souvenir shell necklace. By the time I got back to the airport, there were only 15 minutes left before my flight departed.

I shouldered my way to the front of the checkin line and got my tickets properly assigned. There were only minutes to spare. "You're in gate 3a," the ticket lady said. "You'd better run."

I grabbed my tickets, hoisted my bag, and started running. Unfortunately, I had no idea where I was running to. I found a security checkpoint, went through it, then watched through a chainlink fence as my flight departed from the other end of the terminal. Damn.

With my legs now cramping from the short sprint around the terminal, and freshly covered in sweat, I returned to the ticket counter. I could fly standby on the next flight. It was booked solid but I got lucky and managed to get a seat. Also as luck would have it, the later flight didn't have a stopover in Maui and arrived at pretty much the same time as the previous flight. Again, being lucky, I bumped into the tennis team at the Honolulu airport. They crammed me into the back seat of their team minivan and we returned to the dorms for another night of videos.