The Beginning of the End
Perhaps it was fitting that Hawaii, the 50th state to join the Union, was also the 50th of the 50 states that Tim and I would visit together. We like to do things in sets, so we have visited all the counties of Georgia, all the states of the United States, as well as all the continents. We just now need to rope in American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands to have a truly complete set of US shores. Visiting Hawaii also meant that we had now visited all three points on the Polynesian triangle formed by New Zealand in the southeast, Easter Island in the southwest, and Hawaii in the north.
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In Honolulu
We started our Hawaii journey in the capital city of Honolulu. Now, if you have never been there, it might be tempting to think of Honolulu as a tropical paradise far from the cares and worries of the mainland. Temptation is so frequently wrong. Honolulu is a major metropolitan center, with a population pushing 1 million people, making it the 57th largest metropolitan area in the United States and easily the largest metropolitan area in all of Polynesia aside from Auckland, New Zealand. And as with any large city, no matter how many palm trees may sway in the wind, you will find traffic, crime, violence, homelessness, drug abuse, and did I mention traffic? Honolulu may be a necessary starting point simply due to the prevalence of flight options, but by no means make Honolulu the extent of your stay, for to do that would be to make a tragic mistake, likely leaving a visitor with a very slanted impression of the islands.
Most visitors to Honolulu find themselves in Waikiki, which was in the days of the monarchy (more on them in a bit) a worthless swamp land. It is safe to say that today it holds some of the priciest real estate on the planet as well as some of the tackiest of all the tacky visions of Hawaiiana to be found. This is a place of mega hotels and resorts packing in the folks from only a few steps above the trailer park with so-called luaus and hulu dancers. Whatever was traditional about such meals and dances has long been concreted over to meet tourist expectations. The hulu, for example, was never meant to be a salacious hip slinging dance, but rather a means of maintaining the historical story of a people without writing. The hulu was a sacred art and a dancer who made a mistake in the telling of the history of the Hawaiian people through dance could face execution! It is safe to say that the dances you see today hold little to no resemblance to those of historical times. Waikiki is tourist malls and kitsch brought in by container cargo carriers, one after another, from the source of all that is Hawaii today, otherwise known as China for the knickknacks and Vietnam or the Philippines for the pineapple, a crop no longer commercially grown in the state of Hawaii because labor prices are too high to be competitive. Waikiki, in my highly inflated opinion, is tourist trap hell, so after one night spent there to recover our senses after a journey of 10 hours from Atlanta covering 6 time zones, (other flights of similar duration would have us arriving in Europe, the Middle East, or southern South America!) we were ready to flee Waikiki!
Pearl Harbor
We had booked an inter-island flight for the late afternoon of our second day in the islands so that we could take in what is probably the most requisite sight in the environs of Honolulu which is of course Pearl Harbor. We had been warned that to obtain tickets we should arrive hours in advance but in reality our boat was leaving in 5 minutes from when we picked up our tickets and it wasn’t full anyhow. I am going to go out on a limb and assume that the basic story of Pearl Harbor is well known to all and I would further guess that most, if not all, of you are familiar with the memorial built over the sunken remains of the USS Arizona. What I am not clear about is why the Arizona was chosen for memorial status given that many other manned vessels were sunk that day, but so it is. I realize that this memorial is of paramount importance to many visitors and perhaps it allows us as citizens of the United States to feel deeply wronged by the Japanese, or maybe it engenders a completely different set of emotions depending on who you are. The emotions it stirred for Tim and I were, frankly, nothing. World War II is simply not our war. Our parents were children when the events took place and if I had to guess I would say that we just don’t have a connection to the war beyond movies and mini-series on television and that just isn’t enough to create a sense of emotionality. Thousands of people died that day at that site, and we understand that, but we also understand that the vast majority of the dead were soldiers and sadly, soldiers often die. And of course with me being me, I am made nervous by too much public breast beating at sites like these because I fear that it allows us to forget, or worse yet, to justify our own actions in the world that have been less than stellar.
Putting It In Perspective
We remain to date the ONLY nation in the world to utilize nuclear weapons against another nation, and while I have heard and read countless justifications for this action, what remains true to me is that we vaporized some 80,000 men, women and children instantly in Hiroshima, and those were the lucky ones, for tens of thousands of others would linger and die of burns and radiation sickness in the days, weeks, and years to come, to say nothing of those who would later be born with severe birth defects because of parental exposure. We would later repeat the action with the deaths of hundreds of thousands more in Nagasaki three days later. And let us not forget that we rounded up and forcibly interred tens of thousands of US citizens without trial or cause beyond being of Japanese origin, depriving without due process as guaranteed by the Constitution itself, citizens of liberty and property and it would take until President Clinton before official apology would be made to the mere handful still living who had experienced the internment.
The point for me is not to say that the Arizona memorial is wrong or inappropriate, but I think it must be visited with consideration given to our actions on the world stage as well. It is easy, and dangerous as well, to play the victim without acknowledging our own aggressive and destructive actions in the world. And in the end, I suppose I have a hard time balancing the murder and mutilation of hundreds of thousands of non-combatants against the deaths of a few thousand sailors and other servicemen.
That said, if World War II is of particular interest, Honolulu and Pearl Harbor are certainly places you will want to see for your own reasons and interests. You may also find the enormous military cemeteries of Punch Bowl of interest as well, although personally I don’t find much point in visiting cemeteries other than to excite the same jingoistic and aggressive tendencies that it seems to me that we excel at as it is without further provocation.
Iolani Palace
But prior to Pearl Harbor we visited the only royal palace to be found on United States soil, the Iolani Palace in downtown Honolulu, directly adjacent to the modern State capital building. Prior to 1893, Hawaii was a sovereign nation, recognized as such with exchanges of ambassadors and royal visits with the courts of Europe as well as the United States. Iolani Palace, while small, is elegant and featured electricity before even the White House. The problem the Hawaiian people and government found themselves with was American greed and rapacity, coupled no doubt with healthy doses of racism, in the form of ambitious businessmen who were heavily invested in Hawaiian agricultural products such as sugar, pineapple, coffee, and cattle. By manipulating a succession crisis, as well as fanning religious flames with stories of incest amongst the royal family (there is historical truth to these claims), a group of American businessmen managed to have the newly assended Queen Liliʻuokalani overthrown, charged with treason, and imprisoned in her own palace. The goal was annexation by the United States, an act that then President Grover Cleveland refused to take since he considered the action of overthrowing the Queen to have been illegal. In response, the new leaders of Hawaii declared the Hawaiian Republic, “to last until annexation by the United States,” and finally in 1898 President William McKinley agreed to the annexation of Hawaii and the installation of Sanford B. Dole as the first governor of the newly created Territory of Hawaii.
Of all the places one might visit in Honolulu, I think Iolani Palace is by FAR the most important. I think it is critical that as Americans we are aware of our own imperialist actions since we are so incredibly fond of criticizing others for the same sorts of actions. As a nation we must resolve to remember that we are not blameless and to perhaps temper our reactions and actions in the world with an awareness of our own past actions. I cannot consider the overthrow of the legitimate government of Hawaii and its annexation as other than a huge black mark against our own stated principles but I also cannot quite find it within myself to imagine that Hawaii today would be any more economically, socially, or politically viable than other nations within Polynesia, aside from New Zealand. I can sympathize with and understand calls for Hawaiian sovereignty but I am not sure that I can envision how it would realistically come to fruition or how it could be maintained within the standards that the population of today has come to expect.
On Board for Hilo
You start to realize that you are off the tourist path once you board the flight for Hilo in Honolulu and realize that practically, if not everyone, else on the plane is a local who has commuted over to Oahu for one reason or another for a day or two. We found that being the odd men out was a great thing since it augured well that we would soon be leaving tourist trap hell behind!
We were also provided a point of intense humor during boarding when one passenger who was seated in the back made a point of complaining to the flight attendant that “there wouldn’t be sufficient oxygen way back there since I have chronic bronchitis and asthma.” Her assurances that oxygen diffused evenly throughout the plane proved insufficient until the pilot finally informed the guy that there really was not more oxygen in First Class than in the butt of Coach. I give the guy credit for inventiveness in complaining and maneuvering for a first class seat!
One of the nice things about inter-island flights like these is that they are invariably short with the longest, our run to Hilo in fact, being no more than 45 minutes. Tickets prices are only in the double digits, there is pretty healthy competition to keep it that way, and flights almost invariably operate on time. I think of these flights as being the equivalent of inter-island bus service, which is important since the only regular ferry service is between Maui and Lanai, not exactly a route requiring lots of service, and an on again, off again service between Oahu and Maui (don’t count on it being operational). Frankly, I have had longer rides on BART between the San Francisco Airport and downtown San Francisco, or on Santa Clara County Transit between the Fremont BART station and San Jose State University than the longest inter-island flight one can book!
An Overview, Literally, of Hawaii
Our evening flight to Hilo, on the northern and wet side of the Big Island of Hawaii, was quick, easy, and the skies were clear which gave me a nice bird’s eye view of most of the other major islands in the Hawaiian island chain. We didn’t fly over Kauai since that lies in the westerly direction, but just for the sake of completeness, I will include it. Kauai is often referred to as the Garden Isle because of its thick vegetation and abundant rainfall, in fact, the wettest place in the United States is located on Kauai. On its southern edges are some mega-resort developments, but much of the island remains fairly laid-back, very native, and undeveloped. There is no ring road on the island because the Na Pali Coast to the north is too rugged and too naturally beautiful to build a road through, nor would there really be much demand for it anyhow. A subsidiary component of Kauai is the privately owned island Niihau, which cannot be visited without an unlikely invitation from the family which owns it. Niihau was purchased for approximately £10,000 in the late 19th century by a Scotswoman who had previously turned down that worthless swampland in Waikiki. The island supports a native population of approximately 100 people, Hawaiian remains the predominant language and the language of school instruction until English is introduced as a second language in 4th grade. Residents are all employees of the ranch on the island which raises mostly cattle, and while they are free to visit Kauai for social and recreational reasons, they cannot bring friends back to the island nor can they drink alcohol on the island.
Hawaii really extends well beyond Kauai in a chain of islets and atolls stretching all the way to Kure atoll, but these are uninhabited except for sea birds and fall under the jurisdiction of the US wildlife officials. The only exception to this general rule is the island of Midway which is famous for the World War II battle fought there. It remained a Navy base until the final personnel were removed in 1997. It has since reverted to the control of the Department of the Interior along with the other outlying islands and is used strictly by seabirds. If you find yourself landing on Midway, be very afraid because the only civilian use for the island is as an emergency landing point for trans-Pacific aircraft, a use which is subsidized by Boeing.
Moving east from Oahu, which has much more to recommend it than Honolulu, especially the rugged and wild north shore so imminently popular with world class surfers, one arrives at Molokai, a flat top rectangular island that is blessedly free of commercial tourism operations aside from one resort. The island is mostly a large cattle ranch but is also the site of the historically significant colony for those suffering from Hanson’s Disease, otherwise known as leprosy, a relative of tuberculosis. The colony was founded by the Hawaiian royal family and its most famous leader was the Belgian priest Father Damien, who moved to the colony from the Big Island to minister to the lepers. Over the long course of time and exposure he was eventually infected himself and died from the disease. Contrary to popular belief, the disease is not easy to catch and isn’t contagious through limited casual contact. Prolonged close contact is necessary and even then many family members of sufferers were not infected. Isolation and stigmatization were the norm for those with the disease until the development of treatments such as Dapsone. The enforced segregation policy was lifted in 1969 but many patients stayed on, as do a small number to this day, since they no longer had any other home to return to.
Just south of Molokai is Lanai, an island entirely owned and operated by the Dole Company. The small island used to be one huge pineapple plantation but labor costs eventually shut down the island and production was moved to Southeast Asia. Today the island is home to only about 3,000 people and the mainstay of the economy are the two resorts owned and operated by the Four Seasons. Technically, the island today belongs to David Murdock following his purchase of Castle and Cooke, the parent company of Dole.
Offshore of Maui is perhaps the saddest of all the Hawaiian islands, Kahoʻolawe. This island was never heavily populated because it lacks fresh water, but it proved very useful to the United States Navy as a bombing target from 1941 to 1990. Bombing ended in part due to protests by native people and in 1994 the island was returned to the State of Hawaii. Because of the dangers of unexploded ordinance, only limited visitation is allowed by native peoples for cultural and religious purposes.
Maui is next and it is second only to Oahu in terms of development and tourist infrastructure. The island is heavily visited and easily reached from the mainland, but the island does retain some of its natural beauty and allure, especially in Haleakalā National Park.
The Big Island
Finally we reach the western and southernmost of the islands, Hawaii itself. Make no mistake about it; this island is comparatively huge, with a total landmass almost double that of all the other islands combined. To drive around the island completely, assuming no stops, requires at least 6 hours! The island is effectively divided into two zones or areas. To the south and west is Kona, a dry, desert-like area that is filled to the gills with commercial and tourist developments because the sun always shines due to the rain shadow cast by the 14,000+ feet high peaks of the island interior. To the north and east is Hilo, a city which logs rain daily somewhere in its environs. Hilo once was the center of commerce and power on the island when the economy was based on agriculture and cattle ranching, but Kona has overtaken it with the predominance of tourism as the moneymaker, and the only tourists one is likely to see in Hilo are those who come over from Kona by bus, or those hardy few like Tim and I who were looking for a different vision and version of Hawaii away from tour buses and plastic hula dancers.
Slumming in Pahoa
But we were headed even farther afield than even Hilo. We were headed to the outskirts of Pahoa, a tiny burb to the southwest of Hilo proper. Pahoa is the place one reportedly goes to avoid the FBI, the IRS, and a wealth of other acronymic government agencies. This is the place to hide if you never really recovered from the 1960s and all you need is a basic shelter that you build yourself on your squatter land on which you grow yourself some vegetables and raise some chickens perhaps. It is said that of all the deeded lots in the area, only half report having any structures at all, but it is likely that many more lots are built upon than are reported to avoid the paying of property taxes. Pahoa likes to think of itself as a rebel, a holdout, and for some it certainly is that, but we found it to be mostly a place with a high percentage of folks living off the government they claim to despise in the form of Social Security Disability or Aid to Families with Dependent Children (welfare) checks. The town is certainly not without atmosphere, which may well be emanating from the unwashed body of the shirtless person in front of you at the Pahoa Cash and Carry Store. But the town also hosts some amazing Thai restaurants and its northern edge is being recreated, for better or for worse, with an infusion of new lava faced buildings and services. Even the Pahoa Post Office has lava rock facing!
Kalapana
Even Pahoa represented a level of sophistication compared to our ultimate destination which could best be called Kalapana, otherwise known as some developments along the coast road, some of which have been swallowed at various times by the lava flowing from the very active Kilauea volcano. In fact, the property on which we stayed was built on top of the 1955 flow. Lava flows are hard to comprehend if you have not seen one up close. Lava is very hard and very sharp, unforgiving in a word, and yet it is also incredibly fertile once it starts to break down. Growing all across the lava flows from 1955 are ferns, shrubs, and even full on trees, contributing to the process of breaking rock back down into soil. However, our host, Didier, assured us that his garden was growing in soil that he imported for the purpose.
Didier is a rather enigmatic French Canadian who worked in several major US cities in a profession he did not choose to disclose before he and his partner at the time, some twelve years in the past, purchased the house that Didier still lives in and which he operates as a bed and breakfast. I use the term “breakfast” lightly since unlike other such establishments that I have stayed in, breakfast is very much catch as catch can from the freezer or a cereal box. Didier sets up the coffee maker to start at 7am, but that is the extent of his cooking effort for breakfast. Since I don’t eat breakfast as a rule, I couldn’t care less.
The house seems purpose built with a separate building housing one of the rooms for rent, with the other three being in the main house, lower level, while Didier occupies the upper level complete with his own panoramic deck with views of the wild Pacific, rolling uninterrupted for 3,500 miles from Kodiak, Alaska. Didier is, as he calls it, a “naturist,” in other words what most of us would call a nudist. I never saw him with a shirt on and at most he wore a thin pair of Adidas running shorts. After the initial surprise perhaps, even though of course one realizes when booking to stay here than the property is clothing optional, it all starts to seem very natural and par for the course for this part of the world. The only beach in the area is small and entirely clothing optional for all visitors, male, female, young and old, families, friends, and strangers. This aspect of the lodging wasn’t what attracted Tim and I who consider it best that our bodies remain covered to protect the eyesight of the free world, rather, we were interested in the location and remoteness of the place. What perhaps came as a surprise to us both was the ease with which clothing becomes so unnecessary in the right environment. Even Tim, who is inherently allergic to the sun, could be found on several occasions reclined on a lounge chair, albeit in the shade of an awning, with no more on him than that with which he entered the world. When he got overheated, a jump into seven feet of unheated pool cooled him off. And I grew seriously addicted to hours long soaks in the still, no jets, hot tub every evening drinking seemingly endless cocktails, viewing stars one would never see at home because of a total lack of light pollution in this, the Puna District of the Big Island of Hawaii, thinking big and noble thoughts, planning brave deeds, with nothing in the background but the sound of the coqui frogs, no bigger than a quarter and inadvertently imported from Puerto Rico, which are oddly capable of calls registering upwards of 90 decibels (equivalent to a heavy truck driving past you in the street…loud in other words), all the while being strangely unconcerned with my lack of shorts, or shirt for that matter, especially since I am so incredibly conscious of the devastation wrecked upon my body by disease and the drugs that control it. Oh yeah, for those that don’t know, I look the way I do not because I eat uncontrollably and am lazy, but rather as a nasty side effect of the one and only drug that keeps me going. The choice between beauty and death is really pretty easy I think.
The point here really is that the environment was one that I have never really experienced I don’t think. There are NO hotels or resorts on this side of the island aside from one yoga ashram retreat and the occasional informal bed and breakfast. Approximately 40% of the immediate neighborhood is gay men and the remainder are laid back and relaxed to almost comatose levels. Most anything goes as long as you aren’t raining on someone else’s parade as far as I could see, and I had to ask myself, “could I live like this?” The only answer I could find was that I wasn’t sure but I also wasn’t opposed to trying for a few days!
I wasn’t sure if I could “rough” it as much as Didier does in some respects though. While the house is completely furnished with all the modern amenities, there is no water supply aside from that which is captured from the rain and stored in cisterns. In truly dry and desperate times, Didier can buy water, up to a 4,000 gallon truck at a time, to have pumped into the cistern. Knowing this certainly did wonders for my water conservation consciousness.
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park
We did rouse ourselves enough to make the trek up to Volcanoes National Park, about 30 miles from where we were staying. The highlight of the park is the Chain of Craters road, which as the name implies wound its way around several volcanic craters. Sadly, the original entrance, in Kalapana, is closed since it is now covered in lava. That sort of thing happens in a volcanic park! The Crater Rim Road is closed past the Volcanic Observatory because of high concentrations of sulfur dioxide gas, which is poisonous. All hiking trails are closed as well. Because of the limited physical availability of the Park, the visit was brief although not entirely without interest since it isn’t every day that you get to look down into the crater of an active volcano.
A Koa Diversion
For me, a more interesting diversion happened on the way back from the park. I had read an article in the Hawaiian Airlines in-flight magazine about a koa lumber mill. Koa is a species of Acacia that is native to only Hawaii and it is a wood prized by craftspeople for making bowls, pens, and musical instruments as well as truly traditional outrigger canoes and surfboards. I recalled that the mill was somewhere near Hilo, as were we at the moment, but I didn’t have the actual magazine with me. Now was the time to pull out our latest technological acquisition, one I SWORE I would have none of, the iPhone. This handy little piece of Steve Jobs’s wonderment allowed me to search Google from the car for the terms “koa bowl blanks” which yielded as its number one result the place I thought I had read about. We eventually conned the GPS system into locating it and almost as an afterthought we called ahead to make sure someone would be there on a Saturday. We were assured that someone would be waiting for us and after a much longer than anticipated trek through what passes for subdivision developments on the outskirts of Hilo (like nothing you can imagine from living mainland, I assure you), we found this tiny house complete with huge truck and snarling dog chained up outside. This was Chris’s house and he welcomed us into his shop to see the stock of koa and other woods he kept at home with an assurance that much more was available at the mill. This was decidedly NOT the place I had read about but it was also a case of finding something by accident that was much more interesting than what you were seeking.
Chris has never been off the islands although he admitted that he was curious about visiting the mainland to see the changing of the seasons someday. That was something I had never considered, being so used to at least two seasons in Georgia, hot or cold, whereas for a lifelong islander like Chris, the weather was never really much to comment on or wonder about. Every day would be lightly cloudy with chance of showers, highs in the 80s, lows in the 70s, never mind if it was January or June. Turns out that Chris is a wood turner and this becomes very evident in his completely outdoor shop, covered only by lean to sheet metal. Again, in that climate, who needs an indoor shop. He has literally hundreds of green turned bowls, especially from Norfolk pine, drying under the house and around the shop. We were lucky enough to visit just after he finished the exterior of a koa bowl which was stunningly beautiful. Chris has five lathes, ranging from a very small pen making model to a monster he constructed himself using a Jeep transmission, complete with gear shift lever that could turn bowls in excess of 4 feet in diameter. He showed us a green turned mango wood bowl of at least that size! I purchased several pieces of koa from Chris along with some koa pen blanks. He gave me some other pen blanks cut from other Hawaiian woods for free. He runs a successful business completely on-line, except for the occasional random visitor like myself, selling koa and other woods as well as taking on commissioned projects and crafts. Give Chris a visit at: http://www.koawoodhawaii.com/
Surface Lava Viewing
On the way back from Chris’s house, we decided to take a chance on turning down the old state highway that has since been closed by the lava flows starting in 1990 and continuing to this day. Sometimes, one can see active lava from the old road, which ends in a parking lot from which one walks approximately one mile to the viewing area. The road is open to residents and guests of property owners in the former subdivision of Kalapana Gardens. Amazingly, some houses were left untouched by the lava, although most burst into flame on contact with the 2000+ degree lava and were destroyed. A handful of hardy souls continue to live in the area without any services such as water or electricity. While it was tragic for those that lost their homes, more tragic are those whose houses were NOT destroyed. Why? Simply because home owners insurance insurers against loss of the STRUCTURE, not loss of ACCESS. So, if your home burned to the ground, you were cashed out, but if your home still stands, albeit in the midst of an active lava field, you have no claim. Residents have busted rough roads to their still standing structures, which remain at risk and at least three more would burn to the ground during our visit, and they zealously guard their property with very clear and blunt signage. By quirk of Hawaiian state rules, you still own the land the lava flows over, but you do not own the new shoreline that the lava creates, meaning that if you formerly had ocean frontage, you might not any longer since your property line remains static even as new land is created adjacent to your former ocean front property. All such newly created shoreline and ocean front land is the property of the State.
It was a surreal walk and it gave us the opportunity to see up close the lava as it flowed through. If you have never seen rock that looks liquid but which is literally frozen solid, it is quite a sight. The presence of standing houses, some quite elaborate, amidst the ruin of the lava flow is easily the spookiest sight I have yet seen. We were lucky in our viewing attempt in that there was an active break-out close enough to the road to be seen. The lava doesn’t move quickly over flat ground, instead it oozes and slides slowly, quickly crusting over to black, which could cause an unsuspecting walker to easily break through to the molten rock below. This risk is why the roads are closed and why non-residents are forbidden to trespass over the danger area. However, that doesn’t prevent some foolhardy souls from walking out across the rough, sharp, and uneven lava flows to view the active vents up close. Thus far no one has been injured or killed in this endeavor, but it is critical to remember that what appears solid to the eye may not in fact be able to support your weight, and it also pays to remember that occasionally shelves of lava up to acres in size will fall off into the ocean, taking anything, or anyone, on the surface with it. Clearly, we chose to not risk the hike, but we really did want to see that active lava flowing into the ocean.
Ocean Lava Viewing
We had seen the ever-present steam plume from the lava entering the ocean through the active vent to the south of where we were staying, and more encouraging yet, our fellow guests, Mike and Ross from Colorado, had actually completed the hike out to the surface viewing. Tim and I, for multiple reasons, were not signing up for a 4 mile hike across broken lava fields and illegal crossings of private property, but we didn’t feel like our visit would be complete if we didn’t see that damned lava! Fortunately for us, lots of folks feel that way and there are boat companies that will take you out on the water to see the entry point. We signed up and are we ever glad that we did.
We had the advantage of a steel hulled boat that was large enough to keep us dry (a special concern of cat-like Tim who resents even the wetness required for showering on most days) and didn’t require us to wear life-jackets. We would see other operators out in the water in what amounted to little more than rubber Zodiacs and we were quite pleased that we were not amongst them. We got close enough to the entry point to actually feel the heat! Yeah, we were THAT close and the pictures really prove it I think. The hissing, popping and miniature explosions are impossible to describe, but hopefully some of Tim’s video will capture it. The gases escaping from the underwater vents hitting the hull sounded like machine gun fire and the crew dipped up ocean water that was very hot to the touch all due to the heating from the lava entry. The ocean actually changes color due to the chemical changes that occur when super-hot lava hits ocean water, reflecting for example, the creation of, among other chemicals, hydrochloric acid. It was a truly unique experience and between the two of us we couldn’t think of another place in the world where one could witness this type of event. Words fail me, so please look at the photos and see for yourself how incredible it really was.
Perhaps appropriately we were leaving Hawaii the next day and I was full to the brim with contentment on the boat ride back to the landing site. The stars were out in full force again and it was just us, the skies, and the ocean, just as it had been every night since we arrived. Once back at the house, we shed our clothes and gratefully sank into the hot tub with rum drinks in hand for one more soak and midnight dream under the stars, in the warmth and wonder that we found in Hawaii.
Final Reflections and Thoughts
The question for me always is, would I go again? And the answer is absolutely. I have been to Kauai, Oahu, and now Hawaii, but I would also very much like to explore Molokai, perhaps a day trip to Lanai, as well as more of the islands to which I have been. For one of the smallest states in the Union, even if it is there by force and not entirely with its will, Hawaii offers much to explore for travelers of all types from the most well-heeled with the most exquisite and demanding tastes to those who really want to shed it all and just enjoy the stars, the sea, the frogs, and the lava as well. Go to Hawaii, get beyond Waikiki, and discover which of the island experiences suits you best.