I almost feel like giving the Green Sea Turtles the “shaka” hand signal, when we meet in the ocean. They seem so tame and friendly. The Humuhumu and Parrot Fish, on the other hand, are scared of us, when we appear above them. Frequently, they “shit in their pants” and expel another load of fresh sand, before bolting. We are spending our week with snorkeling at different spots along the Kohala Coast.
On Thursday, we enter the ocean at Kikaua Beach, just south of the Four Seasons Hotel. This morning, we are number one to get a beach pass at the gate.
The access road is through a private community, with gates and security cameras. We walk past new big homes with pools, built on the barren lava rocks, next to the golf course. All the green landscape is artificial, and we know right away, that we would not want to live here!
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In between snorkeling and sleeping, we find some time for culture.
We visit the Ka’upuleho Cultural Center at the Four Seasons in
Hualalai. It has half a dozen big modern paintings, showing ancient Hawaiian customs, ranging from fishing, outrigger canoe building, taro planting, shark tooth war club to tapa making. I can relate to this, since I just finished reading James Michener’s “Hawaii”, where he describes the old Polynesian customs.
We take a trip through the farmland in North Kohala, and pay our respect to the King Kamehameha statue in Kapa’au. It was from here, that he conquered the Hawaiian Islands. We can see Maui to the west and dark clouds with rainbows over Mauna Kea in the east.
On Sunday afternoon, another exploration takes us to the Kalahuipua’a Historic Trail at the Mauna Lani Resort. There are some lava tubes along the shore, where Hawaiians used to live in cave shelters and tended their fish ponds. We see eels and fish in large coastal fish ponds, which are still used today. A sluice gate lets small fish enter the pond from the ocean. After being fed in the fish pond, the fish grow too large to escape back into the ocean and are available for harvesting.
Before sunset, we stumble over Kiawe tree roots, hiking along the Puako Petroglyph trail. We see drawings of little human stick people and various symbols or animal drawings scratches into rock surfaces.
It is amazing, that the Hawaiians did not know the wheel, had no metal tools, no navigational instruments, no written language and lived in rock caves or grass huts when Captain Cook arrived here in 1778.
Today, we see the sun rise over the lava fields along the Kohala Coast of Big Island. The alarm wakes us at 5:45 AM and we drive 25 minutes to the Pu’ukohola Heiau, overlooking the bay at Kawaihae. Hawaiians are celebrating the 200th Anniversary of the Unification of Hawai’i by King Kamehameha The Great in 1810.
The ceremony is not advertised in the tourist hotels, and we are among a few Caucasians, observing the opening festivities. Just as the sun is coming up over the hill, a procession of Hawaiian male and female kahunas (priests) comes down from the top of the heiau (temple) and are greeted by several groups of chanting men, women and children. It is all very colorful, with some groups dressed in red or yellow togas, some wearing Pandanus leaf skirts, while others just wear loin clothes, exposing large tattooed buttocks and thighs.
Pu'ukohola 200th Anniversary Celebration
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Hawai’i, the 50th US state since 1959, has 2 official languages, English and Hawaiian. Even as a linguist, I am finding it difficult to remember the Hawaiian words. It shouldn’t be so hard because the language only contains 7 consonants, 5 vowels, a glottal stop and a macron, which is actually a bar accent – above a vowel; the letters are quite similar to the German, hence English pronunciations. So why is it so challenging? Is it because one little letter or stop and you have a whole different meaning of a word, like ‘ai meaning food in contrast to ai meaning sex. Wow can that get you in trouble! Or is it because they string the words together, as in a fish name, humuhumunukunukuapua’a, which actually means trigger fish with snout of pig? The stringing together of words to create a picture is actually a prevalent aspect of the German language, lots of compound words to create a picture of something. Who knows why it is so difficult, all I know is that my short term memory is not letting those words go in!
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Our Marriott Hotel room is fronting Anaehoomalu Bay, or A’Bay for the Hawaiian language-challenged. After breakfast, we walk along the black lava and old fish ponds to the artificial white sand beach. We set up camp in the shade of palm trees and enter the clear water with our snorkel gear. Right off the beach, we encounter about half a dozen big turtles, munching on sea grass. We have never been swimming this close to turtles. These animals swim at arm’s length right next to me, and at times come swimming right at me. I feel that we almost could use an underwater traffic light, so we don’t bump into each other!
Further out, Gabi and I are happy to discover a healthy, colorful coral garden. We float right over the shallow reef and see plenty of reef fish, adult and juveniles. 2 more turtles are sleeping in the sand between the coral.
At night, we have dinner on the porch at the Harbor Grill in Kawaihae. We are in luck. Tuesday is Filet Mignon night and today is Tuesday. We both do not regret coming here tonight. The beef is from a local ranch and delicious! Another proof for us, that often it pays to get away from the touristy and overpriced resort restaurants. I give the Harbor Grill an A+.
We leave Hana today, and we have no traffic in our direction back to Kahului. Except for a FedEx truck, which I let pass at the first opportunity. If he has to drive all these curves every day, he deserves a medal.
Gabi finds a German restaurant and we have lunch outdoors at
“Brigit and Bernard’s Garden Cafe” near the airport in Kahului. We meet Bernard, who came from Switzerland, and we eat his Gulasch soup and “Buendner Fleisch”.
We fly on a Hawaiian Airlines B717, and the flight time is a short 20 minutes, from taking off at Kahului on Maui until touching down at Kona airport on the Big Island.
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This evening, we are sitting on our upper floor lanai at the Hana Kai resort and watch the surfers riding the waves at Hana Bay. It is a black lava pebble beach and the big Haleakala volcano, builder of this coastline, is looming behind us.
We bought our dinner at the Hasegawa General Store and explored the coastline at Koki and Hamoa Beach. This part of Maui still belongs to the local people. The narrow road and single story homes, hiding behind the lush vegetation, remind us of Samoa. We see private fish ponds and local Hawaiians enjoying a Sunday on the beach.
Now it is time for dinner on our lanai, with a great view of the Pacific crashing into Eastern Maui.
We are spending this week at Wailea Hotel and have a Japanese Onsen and pool all to ourselves. We swim and exercise daily in the outdoor pool, and have no idea where the other guests are. The spa has about 15 body scrub cubicles, Japanese style, all low to the ground. There are batteries of soap bars and little shampoo bottles. Towels with red Hibiscus flowers are placed everywhere. All this work, just for the two of us. Every day, Gabi and I have the whole place to ourselves. We rotate between the hot bubble bath, circular powerful body shower (you are standing in the middle of a spiral spraying you from all angles), waterfall shower and hot water chaises. The view from the open air hot bath encompasses the tropical gardens, the ocean and West Maui Mountains and Lanai in the distance. The spa roof has a dome with a big open eye, similar to the Pantheon in Rome, letting the sunshine hit the water. Very nice and relaxing!
We are on the Island of Maui and are chasing the sun.
Even though, we can not slow down the movement of the sun across the firmament, as the God Maui did with his lasso, we can follow the sun from sunset to sunrise. Last night, we saw a colorful sun, disappearing into the Pacific Ocean between the islands of Lanai and Molokai.
This morning at 3:10 AM, we pull ourselves out of our soft bed at the Hotel Wailea, and drive for 1 hour, forty minutes from sea level to an elevation of 10 000 feet. On our drive up the Haleakala volcano, we have clear skies with many stars and hope for continued good sunrise viewing conditions.
We arrive at “The House Of The Sun” at 5:15 AM and witness the eastern skies turning from pitch black to a light blue and pink, as dawn arrives. I am warm and toasty, wearing 5 layers of clothing, as the cold, strong wind tries to rip off the shorts and t-shirts of not so well prepared sunrise gazers. Gabi, in an effort to keep warm, is wrapping an extra blanket around herself.
Finally at 5:57 AM, the red, hot planet makes its appearance above the clouds to the east of Maui. We watch the sun rising and its rays are slowly filling the volcano’s huge bowl below us.
The size of the black bowl is impressive : a crater, 7.5 miles times 2.5 miles of volcanic ash. Strictly speaking not a crater, but valleys formed from erosion. We can even see Mauna Kea on the Big Island.
With little sleep since the sunset last night, we beat the sun, and this morning arrived first at Haleakala, “The House Of The Sun”.
Twice this week, we manage to leave our hotel and do some snorkeling. Ulua Beach in Wailea is crowded, with a lot of reef damage and very few fish. On the other hand, the drive to Kapalua Bay in West Maui is worth the trip. There are not many people in the water, the reef is colorful and we see plenty of fish. We observe Parrot fish, munching on the corals, and quite a few of the Hawaiian State fish:the “Humuhumunukunukuapua’a”
(one of the few Hawaiian names I actually can remember) and even a large wrasse. While we are snorkeling in the bay, we notice a couple of downpours with rainbows over the mountains. Later on the beach, we see 3 separate wedding parties, the wedding ceremony administered by local priests, who had arrived by motorbike!
