My trip to Hawaii

Posted by Sappho on October 24th, 2009 filed in Daily Life

Sometime later today, or maybe tomorrow, I plan to get my photos off my camera and onto Flickr, at which point I’ll post a link. Joel already has some videos from the trip up there. For now, though, here are the highlights.

Getting to Hilo: Due to a quirk of the fact that I’d paid my ticket to Honolulu with frequent flyer miles, and everything else by credit card, my luggage (but not Joel’s) had to be retrieved on the way in (but not on the way back) in Honolulu and then checked in again. This meant that we went through airport security a second time in Honolulu. They appear to be the most efficient airport security team I’ve encountered yet, as evidenced by the fact that they found the pen knife in the inner pocket of my purse, that I’d entirely forgotten about, and that several other airport security checkpoints had missed in the time I must have had it there.

Language: The most ubiquitous Hawaiian words were aloha (which you probably know even if you haven’t been there), mahalo (thank you), and keiki (children). Some others are in common use, like lanai for porch; street names are also practically all Hawaiian. Some parks also have older English names replaced with Hawaiian ones, so that, for instance, the real name of the City of Refuge park is Pu`uhonua o Honaunau.

Hilo atmosphere: Tropical climate, with the diversity of New York or LA, but the slow, easy pace of a town in Maine.

Accomodations, food: The hotel was a family owned seaside hotel, with your basic hotel amenities in each room, a pool (though there’s also water warm enough to swim in right across the street), and a safe where you can store things like laptops while you’re out. Oh, and a wireless network, which I used while there, but didn’t spend enough time on to do my usual blogging. We ate a lot of our meals at Ken’s House of Pancakes, which in Hawaii includes guava, passion fruit, and coconut sauces among its pancake toppings, and meals like Mahi Moco (a favorite of mine, rice, fish, and two eggs, which I choose to get sunny side up).

Farmer’s Market: Alternatively, there’s a farmer’s market, where you can buy some food every day, and more on Saturdays and Wednesdays. Joel got some Hawaiian shirts there (I have too many shirts already, so I just got the one obligatory one for Hawaiian shirt day at work), and we both got pastries, fruit, and a Korean rice dish that was sort of like a larger version of sushi. Incidentally, sushi in Hawaii, unlike sushi in California, includes hot dog sushi and spam sushi.

The Lava: You can take a boat out to see the lava flowing right into the ocean. Since Joel is sometimes prone to seasickness, we took the dawn boat, when the water is calmest, and fortified ourselves with Dramamine. The calm water didn’t quite spare Joel a few seasick moments when a strong whiff of sulphur came our way, but the rest of the time he was fine, and he counted the pictures worth it. The lava, bright red against the pre-dawn dark sky, comes out better in video than in stills. The water where the lava flows in, pulled up in a bucket for us to touch, was the temperature of a hot tub. Later that day, we went to view the lava flow from land. The land viewing spot is much less close, but you can still see the red of the lava flow after sunset. In the parking lot nearby, vendors sell pineapple and apple bananas.

The mountain: We took a tour bus up Mauna Kea, to an elevation of around 13,700 or 13,800 feet. The risk of going up to that height, from sea level, in a day is, of course, altitude sickness. The tour company takes several precautions against this. The first, of course, is that they have you sign forms saying you know about altitude sickness and won’t hold them liable. The second is that they warn you not to go up if you have any heart or breathing problems. The park service does the same; they have big signs at their visitor center (about 9000 feet up) saying that pregnant women, children under sixteen, and people with any heart or respiratory conditions, even colds, are not to go any higher. Since Joel has asthma and a congenital narrowing of the coronary artery, that actually means that he wasn’t supposed to go to the summit. If I were his mother, I’d probably have insisted he stay down. But I know how, at some points in your life, you want to take a bit of a risk for the right photograph, so instead, he took his inhaler before leaving, drank lots of water, and went ahead. So we come to the next set of precautions. The tour guide tells us to drink plenty of water, tells us the symptoms to watch for, and checks our eyes for signs of trouble about halfway from the visitor center to the summit. There’s oxygen on the bus, and the procedure is that if anyone really gets sick, you will get oxygen, and everyone else will be called back to the bus because we go down right away. In fact, it wasn’t Joel, but I, who showed signs of altitude sickness, not enough for the oxygen, but enough that we had to go down. Luckily, I was OK until we’d watched the sunset for half an hour, and feeling better by the time we got down to the star gazing point (still above the cloud line and the visitor center). The sunset and the star gazing are the high point of the trip. The air is very clear, and the whole surrounding community has done things like picking the traffic lights to minimize light pollution. There are a whole bunch of observatories there: Caltech, NASA, Japan (named Subaru, but, as it turns out, after a constellation, not after the car), etc., I think about ten or so of them. On the Mauna Kea summit, Joel took perhaps his favorite video of the trip.

Beaches: The shoreline across from our hotel was more rocky than full of sand beaches (which is perfectly fine by me, as the water was still warm), but we did get to a sand beach at a national park on the Kona side of the island. Actually, there are black sand beaches and green sand beaches, but this was a regular old white sand beach, with sea turtles. You have to stay twenty feet away from the sea turtles, so we found a sea turtle free section of the beach and I swam. I’d have swum longer, since the water was great, but I’d neglected to bring any sun screen, so needed to be careful of the sun. On the other hand, if I’d remembered the sunscreen, the place I’d have remembered to put it was my backpack, which I’d have taken up the mountain the previous day, at which point the sunscreen would have exploded all over my backpack, as my hand disinfectant did in my purse. So it’s probably just as well that I forgot it. After I’d had my fun in the water, Joel had his fun filming the sea turtles, particularly Honu Number 94, who kept trying to follow us. We wondered if someone had fed 94, obviously a no-no, but then, what could they have fed it?

Other parks: The City of Refuge park, otherwise known as Pu`uhonua o Honaunau, is a place where kapu breakers used to be able to flee to, in order to be freed of the penalty for breaking kapu. I was reminded of the cities that are set aside, in the Old Testament, for refuges for people who have killed someone by accident, so that the relative who’s supposed to avenge the death doesn’t kill them. Kamehameha’s favorite queen once fled to this particular City of Refuge, after a quarrel with her husband, and you can see the rock under which she hid, until the barking of her little dog gave her away. There was also a ranger making various implements that Hawaiians would have made in the old days, with the same tools as they would have used. The park with the beach had an old temple, but that was closed by the time we were done with the beach. Other parks we visited included one with a lovely waterfall, and the volcano park, which had lots of geological exhibits.

Other stuff: We also visited a macadamia nut factory (from which I got the obligatory food to bring back to coworkers), a thermal spring, a tsunami museum, a coral reef museum, and an old missionary house, along with a neighboring museum about the various peoples who had come to Hawaii.

The dog has already managed to get in trouble once since we got back, though the pet sitter had nothing but good things to say about him and the cats.