Day 1830: Wrapping it all up

Besides aloha, the most commonly used Hawaiian word we heard was “mahalo”.  

Alex pointed out that we only ever saw it in vaguely passive-aggressive contexts, and thus it made sense to think of it as meaning “fuck you”:

Please do not smoke in the rental car.  Mahalo.

This area of the parking lot is reserved for valet parking. Mahalo.

Please remain seated until the captain has turned off the fasten seatbelts sign.  Mahalo.

As busy managerial types whose entire lives consist of prioritizing things, Alex and I figured it would make sense to rank The Top 10 14 Things you should do on the Big Island of Hawaii.

1. Snorkeling with the Manta Rays - this is legitimately super cool and requires basically no skill whatsoever other than putting on a wet suit. (Yes, you can fail to put on a wet suit properly. For example, if you put your foot through the arm sleeves. It’s really hard to get out of when you do that, too. Don’t ask. Alex still has scabs from it.)  We went with Jack’s Diving Locker, and they were great.
2. Sitting on the beach in a cabana drinking fruity tropical beverages - it turns out there’s a great reason why people do this, and the addition of 4G dramatically enhances the experience
3. Visiting the summit of Mauna Kea - we did the tour with Arnott’s Lodge & Hiking Adventures, and if you are lucky enough to get our guide, Dave, you will be in for a treat; can’t say what happens if you’re on the tour with the grumpy Australians who hate children. Plus, sky show!
4. The Kona Octopus Farm - seriously, who would miss this actually, unlike almost every use of the word, unique experience
5. Hiking Kilauea Iki - totally worth the suffering.
6. Staying at Volcano Rainforest Retreat - such wonderfully well made housing.
7. Seeing the volcano in Volcano National Park - lava! Real lava! OMG.
8. Snorkeling near the hotel.  Or snorkeling somewhere else, if you are staying in a different hotel.
9. Ocean Rider Seahorse Farm - they are adorable. Plus you can learn about seahorse tea.
10. The Hawaiian Vanilla Company — Alex whined so much about going here (“you want us to pull over and turn around to do what?”), but it was great.  Try to show up in time for lunch.
11. Eating shave ice - no, it’s not as good as you expect it to be. Also, getting 3 flavors results in a weird brown flavor after 10 minutes. Still, it’s cheap so you should do it.
12. Hilo Tropical Botanical Garden - because who doesn’t love orchids?
13. Mackenzie State Park - so much erosion!
14. Kehena Black Sand beach - mostly because of the lady who sold us cobbler.  If you see her, tell her hi!

Things that weren’t really worth it:

• Going on a lava boat tour when there isn't very much lava flowing into the ocean - unless you enjoy being seasick
• Place of Refuge - So boring that we forgot to include it in the original list of things that aren't worth doing. I hear it's better if you go when the rangers are actually there and giving talks.
• Snorkeling in Kealakekua Bay - unless you enjoy sunburn and seeing the same fish you saw at the resort, made better by a 30 minute boat trip
• Chain of Craters road - yes, it’s cool to see the old road that got covered in lava, but most of the craters are honestly kinda boring
• Coffee Farm - snooze.  Possibly less snoozeworthy if you enjoy coffee.
• Most of the food. Geez.  (Especially from a vegetarian perspective.)
• Akaka State Park - it has a waterfall. Who doesn’t, these days?  Literally the only thing you can do at this park is walk 5 minutes to the waterfall, photograph it, and then walk back to your car.
• Going to Hapuna State Park.  Comparing it to the beach near our hotel:

                                 Beach at our hotel                    Hapuna State Park
Swimmable?                    No                                                         No
Cabanas?                       Yes                                                         No
Fruity drinks?                  Yes                                                         No
Unexploded ordnance?    No                                                         Yes 

The winner is pretty clear.

Anyway, that's the last post about our trip Hawaii (or I guess the first one, if you just came to our blog).  Look forward to more updates to the blog in another 3 years or so!  Mahalo!

Day 1829: Chocolate and a beach

For our last full day in Hawaii, we decided that we wouldn’t have a complete trip without a visit to an actual beach with honest-to-God sand where we could get in the water and swim.  So we headed out to nearby Hapuna State Park, a lovely white sand beach 

with just one teeny tiny problem:

At the beach, it turned out that the water wasn’t actually very swimmable, because of enormous waves.  We understand now why so many people are into surfing in Hawaii — it’s a pretty obvious thing to do at many of the beaches!  There were plenty of folks in the water with boogie boards, but since we didn’t know how to use them, we contented ourselves with other activities, and Alex found a way to amuse himself:

(Fortunately, despite his digging, he did not turn up any unexploded ordnance.)  Afterwards, we went back to the hotel to continue lazing about on the beach with fruity beverages, but once more the weather wasn’t playing along.  A flash flood warning was in effect and high winds were whipping in from the shore, kicking sand in our faces, threatening the palm trees in the open air lobby, and, worst of all, causing the outdoor bar to close early. 

In the face of adversity, however, we had a brilliant idea.  Earlier in the trip we had heard radio advertisements for the Big Island Chocolate Festival.* As it turned out, the festival was tonight, only a few short miles from our hotel!  We purchased tickets, and after a brief shopping trip at the resort mall to buy a few more aloha shirts, we were on our way.

* One of the best parts of the trip has been listening to quaint radio commercials for small local events and businesses. Another excellent commercial is for a small bar that uses their hatred of Donald Trump as a strong selling point.

The Chocolate Festival, had, as promised, many many different chocolate dishes to try.  My favorites were the Valrhona sea salt caramel chocolate and a dish by a local restaurant that was a sort of a chocolate tapioca pudding.  The most interesting station was one where a cocoa pod was opened up and on display.  It turns out that cocoa is really just a fruit with seeds, kind of like a melon, even though the seeds take up a very large percentage of the interior.  The inner flesh that isn’t seeds, called mucilage, is - despite its namesake - quite fruity and tasty, a bit similar to passion fruit.  In modern chocolate production, the mucilage is used as a sugar source for the fermentation of the beans that is a critical step in the process of chocolate production:

Anyway, the event was a bit heavy on the deserts as opposed to the savory dishes, especially for a vegetarian.  Fortunately there was a salad bar:

But despite the world’s saddest salad bar, we were able to both get quite full and enjoy the greatest performing arts talents that the Kona public school system had to offer:

We also greatly enjoyed the silent auction, which was a who's-who of local businesses:

Alex insisted on going through the entire display, but we chose not to make any bids.

On the way back from the Chocolate Festival, we had a minor adventure finding a gas station as the range calculator on the car indicated we had only 20 miles to go before running on empty. Given that everything on the Big Island is miles apart, one wrong move could spell doom - especially given that we’d twice put tried to go to phantom gas stations on Google Maps.

Fortunately, this minor potential emergency was staved off when we … found a gas station.

Day 1828: An octopus farm!

We started out today with a visit to an octopus farm.  It was located very close to the seahorse farm, and in fact the guy who runs it used to work at Ocean Rider.  Then, one day, inspired by the success of the seahorse farm, he was inspired to work on the same vision, but with octopuses.  The Kona Octopus Farm is definitely a lower-rent operation — 400 square feet leased, according to Jake, the founder and maybe-it-was-kinda-unclear only employee of the farm, at $1/square foot. 

The Kona Octopus Farm -- occupying .009 acres of prime octopus farmland (farmwater?)

Jake explained to us that a power plant had previously been built on this site, pumping both cold and warmer ocean water on land and somehow using the temperature differential to produce electricity, which is why the site is covered in signs that say “Natural Energy Lab”.  (There’s a Wikipedia article on the concept if you’d like to understand it.)  However, in the 1970s, using diesel fuel to produce electricity became prohibitively expensive, and the plant was scrapped.  Instead, the government leases the land at cheap rates to local businesses that have a need of ocean water inputs, like the Seahorse and Octopus farms, functioning as a sort of startup incubator.  (There’s also an abalone farm, but we missed their tour, and abalone aren’t cute anyway.)  According to Jake, another business that exists here takes the water, desalinates it, and sells it as exotic Hawaiian natural water.

Anyway, like at the seahorse farm, Jake’s goal is to create a viable domestic octopus farm, although unlike at the seahorse farm, he has not yet succeeded — he hasn’t figured out what to feed the octopuses when they’re near the end of their larval stage.  He has, however, figured out how to breed octopus safely, which is important because if a female rejects a male in the wild, she will sometimes eat him.  Instead, the octopuses at the farm mate through tanks that are separated by netting, a practice Jake invented totally by accident when moving the animals into different tanks. Octopus pregnancy is more depressing than seahorse pregnancy though, because the same hormones that cause the female to hatch her eggs also kill her.  (A similar thing happens to the male octopus, whose hormones result in promiscuity followed shortly after by death.)  It’s quite a contrast from the constantly-pregnant and monogamous seahorses.

On a more cheerful note, at the octopus farm, you can see octopus in their tanks and stick your hand in and have them climb over you.  The octopuses all had rubber duckies and other toys but the part of their tank they seemed to enjoy the most was the drainage pipe at the bottom, which they would hide in.

The octopus farm was definitely a sleeper hit and we would give it an A+.  Jake is a very entrepreneurial sort and refuses to take any grants, because he thinks they make you lazy and complacent.  Instead, he runs the tours to finance the lab, and plans to soon start selling naming rights to the octopuses.  The lab definitely felt like Real Science — it isn’t doing p-value hacking to get a paper published or a degree, it’s a marine biologist on his own, in the middle on nowhere, trying to do something that’s never been done before, and if it works, he ends up with the only octopus farm in the world, and if it fails, he has nothing. (Actually, even if the breeding doesn’t work out, he probably has a pretty promising future running tours of the failed-octopus-farm since they’re adorable, the story’s good, and the Trip Advisor ratings are solid.)

Good luck, Jake!

After the octopus farm, we headed out to the harbor to get on a boat to Kealakekua Bay, which is supposed to have some of the best snorkeling on the island, and is not overcrowded because it can only be reached via boat or a lengthy hike.  While the snorkeling was good — notably we saw schools of needle-like fish that hovered only an inch or two below the surface — it made me appreciate the hotel snorkeling a lot more.  We both agreed that while Kealakekua Bay was nice, it was not worth the hassle of getting there.

Our next stop was Place of Refuge, a historical park that was a holy Hawaiian site where people who had broken a taboo, like eating the wrong kind of banana or walking on ground that a chief had walked on, could go to to be absolved by the high priest and thus avoid a death penalty. 

Honestly the park kind of sucked.  It is a boring and underexplained stroll through some artifacts that does not explain a whole lot and raises more questions than it answers, like, “how did people know that the priest had absolved you, and how did they know you had broken a kapu anyway?  Did people really care that much about kapus?”  The exhibit makes it sound as if Kamehameha II publicly broke kapu, and that ended the kapu system, in the same way that a person might say that Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of a church and that ended the hegemony of the Catholic Church.  In reality, I suspect the situation was much more complex.  I remember a former co-worker who had spent time with some tribes in New Guinea, and told us about their taboo and magic beliefs -- from his description, it seemed largely like an excuse to legally kill people who nobody liked.  I found myself wondering if kapu in Hawaii worked the same way -- especially since you're on a smallish island where you can't just kick people out and make them go somewhere else.

By far the most fun we had at the park was playing a traditional Hawaiian game called Konane - it’s a bit like checkers (in that pieces jump over and capture other pieces), and the objective is to be the last player to make a jump. Alex lost.

Also pictured: The aloha shirt from the seahorse farm

Day 1827: In which we have an actual vacation like normal people

Having decided that there had been an excessive number of 7:00 AM wakeups and an entirely insufficient number of frozen tropical drinks consumed on the beach, we decided to remedy the situation by sleeping in until the scandalous hour of 9:30 AM, then ordering fruity drinks and enjoying them in our cabana, and live-blogging it from the beach (courtesy of Verizon tethering and the fact that 4G is everywhere these days).  The cabanas have cupholders, which is really brilliant.  The original plan was actually to drink mai tai’s on the beach — Hawaii seems to have taken on the mai tai as its signature drink, even though we all know that the mai tai was invented at Trader Vic’s in Emeryville.  However, it turns out that mai tais contain almonds, so our plan evolved to drinking “frozen fruity drinks” on the beach instead.

Speaking of Emeryville, we have encountered an awful lot of Bay Area folks on this trip, including a charming British couple where the husband works at Pixar.  They chose Hawaii for their vacation because the wife was turning 50 and Hawaii was the timezone on earth where she could remain 49 for as long as possible.  I did mention that I had read Creativity Inc., which the Pixar developer described as idealized.  I also learned that the Cars series is the 2nd most profitable film franchise ever (after Star Wars, I guess?) and has sold more merchandise than any other film series, even though nobody really likes the movies.  

Even among our tour guides, it seems like everyone has a brother or sister in someplace like Walnut Creek.  I guess that if you are from Hawaii and want a job working in an industry other than tourism or the military, you have to move to the mainland, and the Bay Area is the closest place.  

Anyway, back to the main plot. Having spent the entire day sitting in our cabana, periodically applying sunscreen and reordering drinks from the nice lady who came around asking if we needed anything, we decided that - contrary to popular opinion - we too can enjoy a beach vacation. Alex even took a long nap and concluded that the conditions were “perfect” for sleeping.

We capped off the day with a trip to Merriman’s, which was by far the best food we’ve had while on the island. This is probably because - unlike most places - local food doesn’t mean “good” in Hawaii. It just means, “what we have available to serve you”.  When you’re on a small island 2,000 miles from the mainland, eating local is a matter of necessity, not a fad.  We figure this might also explain the otherwise bizarre presence of cattle ranches — if you want to eat fresh beef, especially if you’re living in the 19th century, you need to raise it here. 

Overall, our experience has been that Hawai’i is not-great for vegetarians. This should, I guess, come as no surprise - it’s an island with limited room for growing crops or importing food. Plus it’s a cuisine built around seafood, which, according to a recent survey, 50% of Alexes can’t eat. Nonetheless, multiple vegetarian options have consisted of “pasta plus some other random stuff we threw into the sauce, sometimes cooked - but rarely well” or dishes that include “cheese we didn’t bother to melt all the way through for you”. Also, you can’t really trust the Yelp reviews as they’re typically not written by vegetarians, and many are from locals whose palates are adapted to the available cuisine.  You're also limited in terms of restaurant choices by the small population -- the Big Island really is quite rural and sparsely populated, with fewer than 200,000 inhabitants.  To use a reference point I'm familiar with, the Big Island has about 70% of the area of Connecticut, but only about 5% of the population.  A town like Hamden is a thriving and sophisticated metropolis compared to Hilo [pop. 43,000] or Kona [pop. 12,000].

However, there have been a few highlights from the trip - such as the shave ice mentioned earlier, which also came with a fairly decent black bean burger. We also managed the rare-in-Hawaii trick of finding a place where Alex’s vegetarian food was better than the non-vegetarian food - largely on the strength of a pretty tasty pasta sauce compared to fried (yes, fried and breaded) lobster curry. 

Merriman’s definitely beat out all of them - the food was competitive with anything you’d eat on the mainland, they have a very tasty taro enchilada and an excellent dessert that was basically a deconstructed ice cream sundae (though not described as such on the menu, when you look at the ingredients - chocolate fudge, ice cream, caramel sauce and a light filo dough containing the chocolate sauce - that’s what it was). They also had a cocktail -the Mobeeto - that tasted an awful lot like a garden (mostly in a good way).

Day 1826: Mantas, coffee and (seahorse) tea

As on most mornings, we started the day out right with a sensible, papaya-based breakfast. Afterwards, we took a quick trip to the dive shop to rent snorkel gear, including the all-important prescription masks.  As a PSA — if you are ever going on a snorkeling trip and don’t wear contacts, rent the prescription mask.  If you’re getting your snorkel gear from a tour company they might not have prescription masks, but the dive shops (at least in Hawaii) do, and it is so worth it.  Using an old pair of glasses with the arms removed also works, but this way is a lot more convenient and surprisingly cheap.

We decided to try out our new gear at the hotel beach, and were rewarded with views of many fish.  My favorite was an enormous parrot fish so large that every bite he took out of the reef was accompanied by an audible “chomp”.  It’s a good thing that the reef fish don’t mind humans because I would hate to get on the bad side of something with that kind of jaw!

After our morning snorkel, we went to the next official stop of the day, the Ocean Rider Seahorse Farm.  If you are like me, you might be wondering, “why would anybody farm seahorses?”  The answer is that these seahorses are farmed for the pet trade.  In the past, many wild seahorses were caught for home aquariums, contributing to their status as a threatened species, but wild seahorses don’t even survive in captivity — they refuse to eat anything other than live mysis shrimp, and are monogamous fish that will pine away when separated from their partners.  

Ocean Rider specializes in breeding seahorses that are habituated to domestic life.  First, they found a seahorse willing to eat dead shrimp and had the seahorse, Mikey, move tank to tank, demonstrating this to other seahorses (seahorses will apparently learn eating habits from observing their friends) and breeding the seahorses that would eat the dead shrimp.  They also created the world’s first polyamorous seahorses, by reducing the social necessity of seahorse marriage and creating OK Cupid accounts for all the seahorses.  (Actually they just put the seahorses in densely populated mixed-sex groups, so that they would learn that if things weren’t going well with their partner, that there are “other fish in the sea”.)  Seahorses are still highly social, so Ocean Rider will only sell them in pairs, but they don’t have to be pairs of One True Seahorse Love.  Having conquered the seahorse frontier, Ocean Rider is now trying to accomplish the same thing for sea dragons.

We (where “we” = the two of us, a couple of random tourists, and what appeared to be the entire Duke University undergraduate aquaculture program) got to see a number of seahorses, including tiny day-old fry.  In the wild, about .1% of fry survive to adulthood.  At Ocean Rider, about 50% do.  We also learned that seahorses are very efficient at reproduction — male seahorses are pregnant about 100% of the time.  Finally, we even got to hold a seahorse!  They are not really shy around people at all.

 

 

 

 

At the end of the tour, we learned that while the wild seahorse population was previously decimated as a result of the pet trade (at a clip of over 1 million seahorses a year taken from the ocean, which is now down to just 30,000), the new threat is people drinking seahorse tea for medicinal purposes. I didn’t ask if they were planning on turning their farmed seahorses into tea - they seemed too attached to them to even ask.

The Ocean Rider gift shop is also the single most concentrated collection of seahorse branded paraphernalia in the known world.  We picked up a seahorse aloha shirt for the collection.

Our next stop was the Greenwell Farms coffee plant to take the tour.  Maybe it was that our tour guide had a very weird presentation style, or maybe it was that neither of us like coffee, but the tour was sub-amazing.  However, we did learn a few fascinating facts: the first is that at one point Hawaii was the home of the second largest cattle ranch in the US.  The second fascinating fact is that Greenwell hires randos as day labor to pick coffee beans and will pay you by the pound, just like the hops pickers Orwell described in A Clergyman’s Daughter.  I really had no idea this kind of super casual agricultural labor still existed in the developed world.  (The Hawaii Vanilla Company described doing something similar, as well as also using volunteer labor and student labor from orchid farmers and agriculture students.)  I guess the labor market in Hawaii is not big enough for the harvesting to be done by a full-time seasonal workforce you see in California’s fruit picking industry. It also seems like many people on the Big Island have the kind of irregularly-scheduled tourism industry job that allows time for farm labor between tours.  

 

Anyway, the guide told us that by hand-picking only the ripe fruit, the farm can increase its quality over farms that machine pick the entire tree.  I have got to imagine that it is possible to machine-sort coffee berries by color (and thus by ripeness), but maybe if you are picking the entire tree it’s not cost effective to throw out the unripe berries.  I was also surprised to see that even though the coffee trees we were viewing were over 100 years old, they were tiny — apparently, coffee trees are aggressively pruned and sheared to stay under 8 feet high for easier picking.

We also saw this neat chameleon in the trees nearby the farm:

 

 

The tour concluded with our guide explaining that Greenwell Farms coffee should not be drunk with sugar and cream because it is so good that it doesn’t need it.  (There is even a honey tasting set up near the coffee tasting, but with strict instructions that under absolutely no circumstances should you put the honey in the coffee.)  We tried a number of flavors of the coffee black, as instructed, and our conclusion was: coffee tastes really gross without sugar or cream. Also, to an untrained palate, it’s like red wine: it all tastes the same.

Our last trip of the day was to Kona harbor, to do a night dive with the manta rays.  Manta rays are filter feeders with enormous mouths and teeny throats.  They feed by opening their mouths and swimming in a loop, flipping upside-down at the top of it and swimming right-side up at the bottom.  The mantas feed on plankton in the evening — the dive companies put bright lights shining up at the bottom of the ocean.  These lights attract plankton, which attract mantas, which attract snorkelers, in a great symbiotic relationship.  The mantas are super cool and swam right under us, close enough to touch (although touching of mantas is VERBOTEN).  Our guides were also pretty great, and big sci-fi fans who played the Star Wars theme from the boat speakers.