Wow, I Never Knew She Was a Lava Flow

Sorry about not writing yesterday; I went to the zoo instead.  I'm sorting through the pictures now - next week should be monkey-tastic!  In the meantime, please enjoy this glimpse at the lave formations from Volcano National Park on Hawai'i's Big Island.

(That last one's not actually a lava formation - it's just a sea arch.  But I thought it was cool, anyway.)

I Ate That

 Or rather, I ate there.  If you couldn't tell, that's fried shrimp served out of the back of a truck.  It's actually not totally uncommon in Hawai'i.  It's not that different from buying a hot dog out of a push cart, only this Plate Lunch comes with two scoops of rice.

The truck is parked next to a shrimp farm, though I don't know if they get their shrimp fresh from the man-made pond.  They have about five different shrimps on offer - lemon-garlic shrimp, spicy shrimp, and 'original', just to name a few.  One Japanese woman hangs out the back of the truck to take our order, while the second busies herself behind the deep fryer built in to the space behind the driver's seat.  I wonder if the truck still works, if they drive it home every night and back every morning.  Probably not.

Not pictured are the shanty-style awnings spread out over a handful of picnic tables, complete with a portable hand washing station and restaurant ketchup bottles full of soy sauce.  And the shrimp itself?  Delicious.  Best I've ever eaten out of the back of a truck. 

In The Shadows When I Come And Sing To You

You can pretend you've never done it, but we all know the truth.

It's a distinctly touristy thing to forget to turn off your camera.  And the best part is, you don't even realize it until way after, after you've come back home, and Aunt Susie drops by for a visit and you decide the thing she wants most in the world is to watch the video of your trip to St. Tropez.  And things are going great, until you're halfway through and suddenly there's fifteen minutes of your feet in the sand that you don't remember filming.

Sound familiar?  I thought so.  Don't feel too bad, though.  I mean, yes, I laughed when my folks came back from Hawai'i with footage of the floor of the Bishop Museum, but that doesn't mean I've never done it myself.  The only difference is, now I do it on purpose.

Not the first time.  The first time was definitely a proper accident. Knocked my finger against the record button while stomping through Rome and ended up with a short series of pictures of my shadow on the cobblestones.

Sure, I was embarrassed when I first discovered them, but I kind of like the effect.  Now I do it whenever I remember to.

Here I am with my sister at the top of the Punch Bowl in Oahu, Hawai'i.  

Here I am in Uganda, with my cousin Malia.  It's a bit of a cheat, since we're sort of in the picture, but try getting a toddler to stand still for anything.

Here I am with my sister again, in the courtyard of Salisbury Cathedral.  It was spring break, but FREEZING (C'mon England, be more temperate!), which is why we look that size.  But look!  You can see the outline of my shaved head!

And here I am at the Tower of London.  I've left it on its side so it doesn't look staged, but between you and me?  Totally staged.  And when I stand it upright, it looks a bit too much like the cover of a penny dreadful, what with all the trench coats and cobblestones.

Someday, this will make the best vacation slideshow ever.

It Gets So Cold When You Look At Me That Way

You can't drive up to the edge of the cliff.  Obviously.  So we park our car  in the makeshift lot, and direct our way through the many signs warning us to bring water, to watch our step, to mind the sulfur levels in the air, and to mind our bladders now, because there are no restrooms beyond this point.  As we get closer to the start of the trail, the signs start screaming at us that it's a mile and a half walk to the viewing area, and that we shouldn't attempt to get out there if we aren't of able body, and seriously, there are no bathrooms out there, so go now or don't go at all.

There's a congregation of tourists gathering around the security shanty, asking the same questions and adjusting their fanny packs.  I wonder what the neighbors must think.

Yes, though it looks like the wasteland from some forgotten 80's disaster flick, there are people living out here.  It's strange to see the houses out here, perched delicately on top of the hardened lava flow.  There's no ground for gardens here, just black rock as far as the eye can see in every direction.  Every now and then you'll see a spot of green where baby trees have heroically pushed their way through the cracks and crevasses, reaching for the light of the sun.  I wonder when they built here.  I wonder what they lost.

"It's better at night," one of the volunteer security guards says from her temporary lean-to.  "Then you can really see the glow." (We do come back that night, and she's right.  When the sun sets the angry red glow lights up the lip of the cliff, and we can easily see when the explosive meeting of lava and water rockets cooling fragments up into the air.  It's also raining furiously, almost hard enough to sting.  Our shoes squelch dangerously over the uneven trail, and even with umbrellas our pants are still soaked up to the knees.  And still there's a strong handful of watchers when we get to the viewing area, and more a pulling in to the parking lot when we're getting ready to leave.  We tourists are a hearty bunch.)

The hike feels a bit like a pilgrimage, all of us following the signs, knowing where we're going but not quite sure how to get there.  The hardened lava is not all-together tricky to navigate, but you do have to watch your step - the toe of my shoe clips the rock more than once.  It's a miracle I never landed on my face.  And at the end of it all is the tall, white, billowing pillar of smoke.

Technically, I don't think it's smoke.  It's steam from the lava hitting the cool waters, and there's a lot of it.  I've never seen a cloud that big in person.  Not even when that gas line exploded and a fireball ripped through my old neighborhood.  That was big.  This is bigger.

Looking up, I can see little black specks circling the plume.  Birds?  No.  Helicopters.  Full of tourists, probably.  Any opportunity to take your money, I suppose.  Back in town, we find that a boat will take you to see the lava spill from sea level for a cool thousand.  I can only imagine what one of those copter rides would cost us.  

We're only allowed to get so close.  It's for the best, I suppose.  Otherwise we'd all be falling to our deaths, trying to get the best picture of the lava flow.  If you stand at the very edge of the viewing area, and crane your neck like this, you can only just imagine you can see the rush of lava flowing out of the earth and into the water.  The island is growing with every passing minute.  Under the roar of the wind, we can nearly hear the hiss of molten rock in the air.  Every so often there's a brief flash of brown at the base of the cloud, when the cooling rocks explode up the side of the cliff.  It's all a bit hypnotic. 

"They say it's better at night," someone says, and we all agree that when the light goes away, it must be quite a sight.  So we'll go back to town for dinner, we decide, and drive up here again after the sun sets.  We drive back down the mountain, never noticing the storms clouds gathering above our heads.

Signs: Hawai'i (Oahu)

More signs and lables from Hawai'i, mostly from the surrounding Honolulu area, but occasionally not.

Are You a Fan of Delicious Flavor?

How many ways can you photograph a pineapple?  Let's find out.

The roots of Oahu's pineapple plantation grow deep into November, 1899, When James Drummond Dole moved to Hawai'i with his eye set on becoming the Pineapple King, and by the end of his life, his fruit and his company made him arguably the most powerful man on the islands.  The Dole Plantation stands to honor his legacy, though it wasn't always the sprawling tourist attraction it is now.  It started life in 1950 as a humble fruit stand smack dab in the middle of the original pineapple field.  In 1989, the stand was transformed to resemble a plantation style homestead, a fabricated relic of the once great Pineapple Empire.

How would you think a pineapple grows?  I, perhaps naively, thought that maybe they grew on a vine, or that you dug them up out of the ground like a carrot, or maybe I didn't think about how they grew at all (though I've heard enough stories about pineapple trees to know that they definitely do not grow on trees).

I don't know what I thought I was going to see when I stepped into the presentational garden at the plantation, but I certainly wasn't expecting what I saw.  Pineapples grow on stalks.  Big fat fruits growing close to the ground, peeking out from a nest of long leaves.  Little baby pineapples perched precariously on their stalks, bobbing softly in the breeze.  Bright pink buds kissing the sweetened air, saying "Someday I, too, will be delicious."  It's quite a site.

There's a walkable garden stretching along the length of the (in)famous Pineapple Maze, featuring nearly every type of pineapple grown in the world, if not grown on the plantation.  The working fields reach much, much further.  The tour train chugs its way through the grounds.  We've never ridden it.  Maybe next time.

When you go, you absolutely must have the Dole Whip.  I'll admit I was dubious about the prospect of pineapple ice cream, but as it happens, it's the tastiest pineapple thing I've ever eaten.  Icy and refreshing, it's just what you need to cool down after walking through the pineapple maze, and it's not so creamy as to make you feel tired and heavy.  

Pineapple.  Good stuff.

No One Can Blame You for Walking Away

The Dole Plantation on Oahu might be one of my favorite places in the world, and not just for all the pineapple.  It's been a lifelong dream of mine to walk through a giant maze made out of bushes, and I did it first at Dole.

You're issued a card when you buy your ticket.  To officially complete the pineapple maze (so-called because it's shaped like a pineapple, not because it's made of pineapples, although that would be delicious), you have to find the six stations hidden in the maze, stick your card into a stencil, and trace the little Hawai'iana figure onto the card, proving that you've been there.

Not pictured: Monkey

There's a board at the front of the maze listing the top ten best finishing times, and they're all under or around ten minutes.  I don't know how many times you have to walk this maze to be able to complete it in ten minutes, but that's a rabbit hole even I don't want to go down.  Sarah and I will be happy to beat my standing record time of an hour and a half.

The woman selling tickets hands us our cards and our little pencils, and asks us if we want a map of the maze.  Oh no, we assure her, we do not want a map.  We are going to do this the right way, the industrious way, with honor.

That lasts as long as it takes for us to find someone's discarded map at our third dead end.  "Okay, I'm pretty sure we're here," says Sarah, making a little mark on the map with her pencil.  "So I think we need to go that way."

We passed this cone fifteen times.

We do that for a long while, Sarah with her pencil on the map, telling me when to turn left, and when to go straight.  We walk and walk and walk and walk and still we haven't found the first checkpoint.  "I don't understand," she says as we circle the same bush for the seventh time.  "It should be right here."   I peek through the bushes, and I can see it.  It's right there.  Some other woman is tracing a monkey onto her card while we're futzing around on the other side.  "Whatever," says my sister, throwing her hands up in frustration, and pushes her way through the line of bushes.  I follow.  I tell you, it was worth it to get that monkey.  So much for honor. 

We do try to actually do the maze.  We reset ourselves on the map at the checkpoint, and follow the map diligently, but we just keep hitting those dead ends.  And, well, we're not going to beat my record going around in circles, so...yes.  We cheated.  We're big fat cheaters.  We felt really guilty about it, but sometimes sacrifices must be made.  Every time we hit a dead end, we pushed our way through the bushes to the other side quick like ninjas.  And we hit plenty of dead ends.

Which gives me ample time to do this:

I should say, Sarah is adorable in real life, but I could fill entire blogs with unflattering photos I've taken of my sister.  This is actually one of the better ones.  

In the end, I think we shaved about fifteen minutes off my previous time, so all that heartache was totally worth it. 

Sand it Black

Hawaiian Big Island.  Winter, 2008.

Punalu'u Black Sand Beach is an instant beach.  It's not really sand.  This beach, and many like it, were formed when hot lava from the volcanoes rapidly cooling and exploding when it hits the waters surrounding them.  The stones are smooth, polished by the years of being turned by the tides.  Maybe in a handful of centuries the grains will be worn down to a fine, proper sand.  For now you can feel them crunch and slide under your shoes as you walk along the shore.  The sand is fine enough to walk over with bare feet, but coarse enough to hurt when it gets stuck under your toenails.  I recommend you be properly shod.

And you wouldn't want to take to the tide pools without protecting your footsies, anyway.  This isn't really a beach you come to for swimming (and with sharp underwater rocks and little protection from the currents, you wouldn't really want to), so the big draw are the hidden pools tucked away in the larger lava formations.  The crabs may scurry away when your shadow falls over them, but the sea urchins aren't going anywhere.  The fish don't often make it up to the tide pools, but when they do, the sun glitters of their vibrantly colored backs.  Blues, reds, greens.  Little pools of rainbows. 

White pebbles pop against the black sand like stars against the night sky.   Visitors who've come before me have left behind simple messages - a stick figure, an initial, a cat.  I leave a little smiley face behind a rock. 

Local tradition says that those who take rocks or sand away from the beach (or the islands, depending on who's doing the telling) will be cursed by the fiery Pele until the stones are returned.  I've had a Pepsi bottle full of black sand for a year and a half without too much tragedy befalling me (yet) so I don't know how much stock I put in that legend.  Though a display case in the lobby of Kilauea Military Camp has a small collection of rocks mailed back to the island after their captors hit a wall of bad luck, so make of that what you will. 

(Interesting to note: while that's perpetrated as being an ancient belief, historians can only trace the myth to the 1920's.  They believe park rangers invented this little piece of fakelore to prevent visitors from packing their pockets with pebbles.  Maybe I should return that Pepsi bottle after all.)

Further up along the formations, too high for the waves to reach, the lava rock twists and turns, forming high peaks and shallow crevasses.  It's been raining since we've set foot on the Big Island, but we've been afforded this rare moment of sunshine, and the light casts long shadows across the lava-formed walls, making faces in the rocks.  Moss grows in the bumps and tubes - food for the tiny crabs that scuttle into their hidey-holes when we stand too close.

Standing at the lava's edge, we watch the waves crash into the rocks.  The water doesn't quite reach us, until suddenly it does, and we're too shocked to get out of the way in time.  Our toes squelch in our shoes, and it's starting to rain again.  It might be time to go.

Close Up

Because the best way to photograph a plant is from thiiiiiiis close.

From John Bryan State Park:

From Jinja:

From Hawai'i: