I agree with the positive reviews already here. Hale Melemele is clean and modern, a very well kept house. We were 2 adults and 2 under-10s, and we had plenty of room. The two bathrooms were particularly welcome. Good size bedrooms with lots of closet space and good beds, large kitchen-dining-living room that opens via full-sized double French doors onto a generous lanai. The only issue we had were with the dining chairs, which probably need to be replaced. (I’ve mentioned this to Faith.)

The location is very quiet, with no traffic, no occupied houses nearby, and no roosters. Lovely to listen to all the insects, frogs and lizards at night. It is verdant and lush, surrounded by a dozen different varieties of trees and shrubs.

You're on a double lot with the owner’s other rental. Most of the time nobody stayed there, and so we had a very private experience. Even when people did stay there it wasn’t an issue. I would definitely take this place over the other one if you don’t need the added space (+1 bedroom), as all the living spaces on this one look out onto jungle.

Pahoa is ten minutes away, with several good restaurants (Pele’s for an excellent, inexpensive breakfast, Kaleo's for lunch or dinner), a decent but expensive Natural Food Store and a slightly less expensive regular food store, and a Longs Drugs, and some night life on the weekends. Hilo is a hike of 30 minutes if you need more standard shopping (Safeway, WalMart, etc.) It’s worth it, though, just for the ice cream at Hilo Homemade Ice Cream is the best I’ve ever had outside of our own.

Lava Tree park is right around the corner, Volcano is a half-hour, the coast is twenty minutes...it's a good location for exploring this part of the island. But you will ABSOLUTELY need a car. If you reserve Faith's van, I suggest you also reserve a backup; hers had the misfortune of getting totaled two days before we were due to arrive, and if we had had to book a new rental on the spot it would've been exorbitantly expensive. As it was, we had reserved a backup.

It is the rain forest, so be prepared for lots of rain. We stayed for over a month in Feb. and March, and averaged 1 day partially cloudy, 1 day cloudy, 1 day rain, and it rained most nights. For shorter stays, particularly if you're traveling around the island, this probably won't matter as much.

Faith was easy to reach, and readily answered all of our questions. She was accommodating to a couple of special requests, and generally lovely to deal with.