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USa Page 1: HAWAII
[Yes, we know the US map/lights above don't show Hawaii, but that's all
we've got right now.]
We spent a few days on the Big Island of Hawaii around New Year's Day 2000
with some of George's family. This seemed to be a reasonable place to meet
since we were coming from Hong Kong and they were coming from California,
and we figured that in the event all the dire Y2K predictions came true, a
nice American tropical island was as good a place to be as any. Unfortunately,
Deb's devilspawn clients wouldn't lay off, and she spent a sizeable portion
of the vacation drafting weasel words for them instead of enjoying Hawaii.
But George gallantly left her in the hotel and went off to have fun so that
we'd have something to write about here. (Oh, don't cry, Deb's clients finally
went back to their pit and let her have some fun too.)
Getting there
Our theory that meeting in Hawaii would be "meeting halfway" turned out to be not quite right, and the reason is that there are no direct flights from Hong Kong to Hawaii. Instead, we had our choice of making a connection in either Tokyo, Taipei, or Seoul. We ended up going through Tokyo, which added about 3-4 hours of flight time and another 5 hours of sitting in the airport in Japan. In other words, getting there from here was no fun. But we made it without any real problem. And we were serenaded by a ukelele band upon arrival. We got hold of our rental car after a minor hassle, and drove up the coast to the hotel. The landscape in this part of the island is more barren than we expected, mostly remnants of old lava flows, and we were amused by the "Donkey Crossing" signs (Hawaii has wild donkeys?!).
Loungin' in the sun
When we settled in at the resort, we were a little tired and jetlagged, and hadn't made any plans yet. But that was no problem, because just lounging around the pool or beach is a mighty popular and relaxing pasttime around there. The hotel even has hammocks strung in strategic locations around the gardens near the pool. They're good enough therapy that we didn't make use of the "massage on the beach" people.
There is also a little park (with a small beach and tide pools) and a wooded nature area near the hotel where old petroglyphs (symbols carved into rock) can be seen. We took a walk on the trail that winds through the petroglyph area - which can get oddly spooky despite its location. The glyphs are interesting, some of them showing fishermen, hunters, etc that are vaguely reminiscent of the Olympic games symbols. And like everything else, they've gone commercial. At the local stores, you can get all sorts of clothing, coasters, keychains, and such with reproductions of various petroglyphs on them. (We took some photos, but they don't show the glyphs very well so we've left them out).
George goes diving
By day two, I was antsy to get some diving in, and I managed to fit in five dives by the end of our visit. No mean feat given all the other stuff we wanted to do. These were all shallow reef dives, with good corals and an assortment of critters, including pufferfish, smallish octopuses, and plenty of little reef fish. We played with the octopuses a little - some of them didn't seem to mind much - and the sensation of their suckers on my skin was a pretty strange feeling. Someone also stressed a pufferfish into inflating itself, which looks cool but isn't good for the fish.
I noticed what looks like a decent wall dive at the edge of the reef on some of our dives, but we stuck to the reef top, and in between the fingers of coral. There are some interesting little pass-throughs and tiny caverns, and we stopped for a few minutes at a crack at the bottom of a large rock formation. We held on to the rocks, resisting the surge, and looked through the crack to a larger sunlit area beyond. A giant trevally was patrolling on the other side, and he weighed at least a hundred pounds. I think about him at dinnertime occasionally.
The highlight of the dives were the juvenile green turtles that I spotted on almost every dive. I've seen a full-grown green turtle, and held baby ones in my hand (see our Malaysia page), but I hadn't seen any kind of turtle in the ocean before this. These turtles are about a third of the way to adult size, I'd guess, adult size being something like 400 pounds. They gave us a good show - snoozing under rocks, having parasites removed at a cleaning station, swimming along with that odd flying movement. They flapped by lazily, letting us get close enough to snap some photos. If we got too close, though, they'd put on a surprising burst of speed and leave us behind.
Seeing turtles on nearly every dive was enough to make me very happy with the diving, but on one dive we got an extra helping of coolness. Winter is humpback whale season in Hawaii, and though we were much too shallow to see a whale underwater, we did hear a mother humpback and her calf having quite a conversation nearby. Lots of clicking, groaning, and whistling, along with something that I swear sounded like a giant hungry baby. When we were back on the boat afterwards, we could see them at the surface a few hundred yards away. It was hard to make out exactly what they were doing, but we did notice the mother rolling on her side so the calf could feed.
Whale watching
We were planning on a little whale watching anyway, but now that we had evidence that the humpbacks were actually in town, we hurried to make plans to go out with a local whale watching operation. They have a big catamaran - room for a lot of people, and stable enough that we didn't notice much when everyone rushed to the railing on the whale's side of the boat. The guide tried to prepare us for the possiblity that we wouldn't see much of anything, and suggested that we settle in for a wait, but before we got out of the harbor we had spotted our first whale.
The whale was very cooperative, swimming along just offshore towards open water, taking her time and not diving very deep. That meant she surfaced every couple of minutes to renewed gasps, shouts, and shutter clicking. She was showing us just her dorsal fin, which the guide was trying to get a good look at (that's how biologists identify individual whales). And we could see her breathing through her blowhole. This went on for maybe half an hour as our boat kept pace a couple hundred yards away.
Now the guide was busy telling us how incredibly lucky we were, to see a whale and to see her for so long. But the whale upstaged him again, and launched herself completely out of the water, coming down in a massive splash and making the day of everyone on board. We don't quite understand how a 60-ton animal manages to get airborne, but it looks mighty damn impressive when it does. The guide didn't have to tell us how lucky we are to see that. The show lasted a few minutes longer, the whale breaching once or twice more, before she disappeared.
We did spot another couple of whales, but only briefly because they were diving deep (and therefore not surfacing often). And on the way back to the dock, we met up with a big pod of spinner dolphins that lived up to their name. Cool. Heck, we probably would've been satisfied if the dolphins were the only thing we'd seen.
Horseback in Hawaii
This isn't something that leaps to mind when you think of Hawaii, but apparently horseback riding is pretty popular there. The Big Island is home to the Parker Ranch, and other smaller ranches, and they've been riding horses around there for quite a while. And there's even a valley somewhere on the island inhabited by wild horses. Four of us went to a stable near the coast north of Kona to give it a try. Now, we're completely clueless when it comes to riding horses, so we took the guide's strong recommendation that we wear safety helmets in case we fell off. As it turns out, no one got thrown, so the helmets served no purpose except to make us look asinine in our photos.
We chose this particular stable because they advertised open range riding rather than trail riding where your view consists primarily of the butt of the horse in front of you. This is good in theory, but George's horse was adamant about following the trail precisely, and had no intention of veering off in some other direction just because the idiot on his back thinks that's the way to go. The guide said this horse was captured from the wild, so wasn't quite as pliant as the others. By the end of the ride, however, George and his horse had reached an understanding. The horse would basically follow directions as long as they generally went the right way, and George would no longer put heels to the horse while it was trying to stop to take a whiz. Deb had a different problem - her horse had a serious chip on its shoulder, and would aim a bite or kick at any other horse that even looked at it funny. But we enjoyed the ride.
Volcanic activities
As you probably know, the Hawaiian islands are volcanic in origin (here's a piece of useless info: in 10,000 years or so, there will be one more Hawaiian island - when a certain underwater volcano builds up enough to break the surface). On the Big Island, there are three big volcanic cones. Hawaiian volcanoes are the slowly oozing variety, not the Mt. Saint Helens type, so there's no real danger of sudden destruction. We decided to go check out the volcano park, where not only can you look down into the main crater, but you can get a look at the lava flowing into the sea - supposedly a very impressive sight at night.
This park is diametrically opposite from our resort, so it's a fairly long drive regardless of which way you drive around the island (it is a Big island, after all). We took one route going and the other coming back, so we ended up driving around the whole island. The north (windward) side of the island is noticeably different from the sunny leeward side that includes our resort. The north side had a lot more precipitation, fog, wind, etc. There are rugged coastal cliffs, and high waterfalls, rather than the rocks and beach of the south side.
After a quick stop at a waterfall, and a longer drive than we expected, we were behind schedule when we arrived at the park (so we didn't get a chance to stop by the black sand beach nearby). There was still enough light to stop and see some of the sights, like the massive main crater, but not enough light to get any decent photos. And it was dark by the time we got to the far end, where the lava is still flowing to the sea. We could see the lava flow during the last part of our drive from quite a distance, and it is pretty impressive. We were thwarted in our attempt to get a closer view though, because it was already dark, we didn't have a decent flashlight, and the hike (who knew there was a hike?) out to the lava is veerry dangerous without proper lighting. So we had to settle for the bits we could glimpse from the road, and a great view of the starry skies. Nice, but not really what we came for. We should also mention that the twisty coastal drive back to the hotel became fairly long and miserable.
New Year
For New Year's Eve, the resort put on an outdoor party. Nice to be able to eat late at night outdoors at that time of year. We never put much stock in the Y2K nonsense, but we have to admit to the slightest twinge of "hmm, what if they're right" as the clock wound down to midnight. The hotel had actually put a little Y2K kit in each room just in case - flashlight and that sort of thing. We'd like to think that all of the Chicken Littles who pushed the Y2K scare are suffering in software hell, but we doubt it.
Coming home
A less-than-wonderful flight back, but at least the Tokyo airport has good gyoza at their snack bar. We would definitely like to spend more time on the Big Island, but if we visit again, it's likely we won't travel there from Hong Kong.
P.S. - George in Waikiki
On the way back from New Zealand in 1994, I stopped over for a couple of days in Waikiki (I have a couple of amusing photos but they're somewhere in Chicago right now). My recommendation: unless you are overly fond of sailors, hookers, or Japanese tourists, Do Not Visit Waikiki. Especially if you're from Florida and not impressed just because they have an average beach lined with big hotels. Having said that, the cheesy tour bus luau is an experience to which it is hard to do justice. And where else could you see a big blonde prostitute accosting a Japanese businessman on the street in apparently fluent Japanese while the man's wife glowers at him from a few yards away?
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