This is the view from Mauna Kea

Our home at the farm.

Hawaii

Aloha makamaka. This is going to be a long post, but it’s hard to describe a month in Hawaii in less than a page. I hope you’re comfortable because this one may take a while. Mahalo.

Hawaii is not as you would expect. I personally thought that it would look like it did in Hawaii Five-O, with roads lined with palm trees and glittering condos everywhere.  In truth the Big Island is not like that at all. The other islands such as Oahu are closer to that vision because they have finished forming. The Big Island on the other hand, can’t be developed as extensively due to the active volcanoes.

The Hawaiian Islands were formed over a period of more than 60 million years. There is a magma seep under the Pacific tectonic plate that is constantly pushing molten rock up and forming volcanoes. This seep is stationary, but the plate above it is progressively moving northwest at four inches per year. As the seep makes volcanoes across the plate, the islands will form around the volcanoes, and that is how the Hawaiian Islands were born. The cool thing is that the islands are still forming. The Big Island is getting bigger and bigger from the lava flows, and right next to the Big Island another island called Loihi is forming deep below the surface. Loihi probably won’t be visible for thousands of years.

Needless to say, when we arrived we did not stay in a glittering condo. We stayed in a tent on a farm with goats and sheep everywhere. After a while we got used to it, but at first it was hard.  We had a canopy tent about 15 feet tall at the peak, at the base it was about 10 feet by 20 feet. A canopy of tarps had been strapped to the front which expanded it a little bit and offered a place to eat.

See what I mean, it looks exactly like M and M

Before we even got to our home we had an adventure.  First we went to a black sand beach where we saw turtles crawling up the beach.  Then we went to the Mauna Loa macadamia nut factory. BTW, they totally copied M and M with their logo.

The first few days of living in the tent were challenging. First of all we didn’t know where anything was, as is normal with new places. Second of all, my mom was sick, but she pushed through it and didn’t complain for our sake because she is such a wonderful mother.

There had been a bug going around my family so it wasn’t all that surprising when she got it.  Originally my aunt had it, and when she came to visit us in Sedona my mom and grandpa must have caught it because about twelve days later they felt awful. It took about a week until she felt better. While we were on the farm we took weekend excursions to explore Hawaii.

On our first weekend excursion we went up to Hilo. Originally we had been in Pahala, and there was not much in the way of food stores there. The first thing we did in Hilo was go to the farmers market because we really needed food. Afterward we went to the Queen Lili’uokalani botanical garden and saw a lot of banyan trees.

For anyone who hasn’t seen a banyan tree I will put in a picture. Banyan trees are really cool trees that look like a million tiny little trees fused together. There are also little roots hanging down from the branches. These are an adventitious root system. We heard that these grow on the tree to collect extra water. After the garden we

went to Coconut Island and found a great jumping spot where we got an awesome picture of me jumping.

We spent another week on the farm then took another vacation for Christmas. We went to two parties with our host Malian, and her friends. We also drove up Mauna Kea to see the telescopes and the view. Mauna Kea was amazing. The peak is 13,000 feet above sea level, so it was above the clouds. At the base it was raining, but as we climbed we broke through the clouds and were above them. It looked amazing to be above the clouds. I have only seen something like that before when I hiked Katahdin in Maine. We also saw several of the telescopes, which are a very controversial topic we need not go into.

The next day we visited two beaches. The first we didn’t stay at very long.  My parents went to check it out while I climbed a tree. It was a very strange tree. Climbing it was closer to walking on a balance beam than climbing a tree. The branches splayed out until they went horizontal to the ground and made it the easiest tree ever to climb.  Next we visited the black sand beach again and saw more turtles.

We spent another day at the farm, then went to a place called the Green Sand Beach. The Green Sand Beach takes its name from the distinct greenish hue derived from the olivine in it. Olivine is a silicate mineral containing iron and magnesium. Interestingly this is just an unrefined version of my birthstone, period. 

It was a four mile hike to get to the beach, but when we got there it was really cool. I tried to go snorkeling but the waves and the lack of anything remotely interesting quickly deterred me. When we were done we made the four mile hike back.

After the Green Sand Beach we left the farm to go explore more of the island. It may not look it on a map, but Hawaii is big. The cities are spread out so it isn’t just a hop skip and a jump anywhere. In fact the Big Island has more land mass than all of the other Hawaiian Islands combined.  Over half of this is attributed to Mauna Loa, the largest mountain landmass in the world.

The first place we went was Hilo, the sixth rainiest city in the U.S. We stayed a few nights at a place called Arnotts, and that’s when my dad and I got sick. It may seem kind of random that we got sick about two weeks after my mom, but that seemed to be the pattern. My mom got sick about two weeks after seeing my aunt, and we got sick about two weeks after she got it. What supports this even more is that my grandpa got sick about two weeks after coming to Sedona with us and my aunt, then my grandma got sick about a day before I did, two weeks after my grandpa. Anyway, it sucked.

For the first few days it felt like I had a fever and chills with a hacking cough. Then the fever abated leaving me coughing my guts up. We stayed at Arnotts through New Year’s Eve. During the day we went to another black sand beach and saw more turtles. The up side about being on a five hour time difference is that when it was midnight in Times Square it was seven at night here, so I could finally see the ball drop. Usually at midnight I am out like a light. At midnight for us some people started setting off fireworks right next to our window, which as one could imagine, made it hard to sleep, and I need my sleep. On any given day I get tired if I get less than nine hours of sleep. While I was sick I would get about ten hours at night and take a two to three hour nap during the day. That night I cried myself to sleep from sheer exhaustion.

After a restless night (six hours of sleep) we went to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The first night we stayed at a place called the Volcano Inn. We got in at about noon, and at one I promptly took a nap. At eight that night I woke up from my seven hour “nap”, watched TV for an hour, and went back to sleep. After ten more hours of sleep I woke up and felt absolutely no better. We left to go our next room. We had rented a cabin in a different part of volcano for a night, and I had absolutely no idea what it looked like.

When I saw it the first thing I said was, “It’s a freaking birdhouse.” It honestly was the exact same shape as a bird house. Not that that changed the fact that I went in and took a nap.

The next day we left Volcano National Park and went north. My uncle’s brother owned several cabins that he rented in Honoka’a. The cabins are on cliffs overlooking the ocean with an orchard right next to them so we had amazing views and all the fresh fruit we wanted.

We stayed for four days and went to a few places. First we hiked down a mile long road to a beach. With my cough walking was bad enough, but what made it even worse was that the road was at a 25% grade.  At the bottom the beach wasn’t all that exciting, just a sandy strip with sticks everywhere. From the beach we could see up the cliffs that the houses are situated on top of. Since this part of the island had been getting an abnormal amount of rain there were waterfalls cascading down the cliffs that looked amazing. Then we walked back up. When we reached the top I was panting and coughing like crazy. We went into town because we needed food, and on the way there we passed a shave ice stand. I got a snow cone the size of a small baby’s head, which made things a little better. 

A few days later we did another hike to another beach.  It was a trail instead of a road this time, but that didn’t make it any easier.  At the bottom we sat on the beach and looked out at the horizon. All of a sudden we saw whales breaching miles out in the water. We saw about seven jumps before they settled down. We walked back with my mom buzzing because she had always wanted to see whales.

Next we went to Waimea and stayed in a bed and breakfast for four more nights. While we were there we visited several beaches on the Gold Coast. At three of them we snorkeled and saw some amazing things. Out of all the fish we saw I had a few favorites. There was a fish that was about two feet long but only as thick as my thumb. There was another that was covered in about five different colors, seemingly spaced at random, that looked like a little like a kindergarten art project (or mine).  There were also schools of about a hundred tiny yellow fish that would swarm around eating things off the coral.

Originally we were supposed to fly out on the 11^th but our flight was delayed until 10 at night and eventually canceled. We stayed in a hotel for the night and flew into San Diego the next day. Now we are staying on a forty foot yacht in a marina before we go to Whistler.