HAWAI'I TRIP PAU

("Pau" is a slang term from the Hawaiian language meaning "finished".)

I just flew the red-eye from Kona back to LA last Thursday night, then drove to my storage unit and picked up some file boxes so I can get back to business (and catch up on bills and correspondence - neglected far too long now).

Since my previous post, I had another week on the island (on my own), driving around it completely once again, filling in the gaps in my itinerary from the previous circuit.

July 1 (Friday)

After dropping Linda off at Kona airport June 30 (and giving her a farewell flower lei), I drove north to Waimea again - old cattle ranch country - to stay at a B&B just outside town (the only place with a vacancy for the weekend of the 4th). The Jacaranda B&B turned out to be one of the nicest places I've stayed in a long time: the former ranch house of the manager of the Parker Ranch (the largest in the US) with a huge 19-century kitchen and common rooms. The guest rooms are former ranch hand cabins - suites now with comfortable antique furniture, a walk-in shower room (not a stall), and jacuzzi. In the huge park-like area in back, it has a rushing brook, a waterfall and a gigantic volcanic "hill" looming above it. It was a bit price-y, but worth every penny - and half as much a night as the big, personality-less mega-resort hotels on the Kona coast.

I quickly dropped my bags off and, before the sun went down, I drove out to the coast (through one of the most complete and spectacular rainbows I've seen in my life) to see the Big Island's equivalent of the pyramids: the Pu'u-Kohola temple (heiau) (URL http://www.nps.gov/puhe/)



- the last pagan structure built in Hawaii before the old religion was demolished by King Kamehameha II in 1819. The site is a collection of three heiaus, the tall new one, built by King Kamehameha I to fulfill a prophecy that by building it he would finally gain the last island hold-out - Kaua'i (it appears to have worked!). Two older heiaus are located down the hill. It was dedicated to the king's war god Ku-Ka'ilimoku, and the first sacrifice at its dedication was his rival chief on the island: King Keoua. (Versions differ as to whether Kamehameha was in on the deception that lured Keoua there.) It's a mammoth structure built of huge lava stones, flat on top for other less durable structures (altar, priests' hut, etc.). At the bottom of the site is a quiet, palm-rimmed bay (a shark god heiu lies off in the water, so it's not exactly a *swimming* beach!). I walked down to the beach and across to the other side of the bay and, looking back, I was treated to the site of Mauna Kea (the tallest mountain on the island) completely clear with the Keck telescopes blindingly lit by the 6:30 sun! A shot to die for!

July 2 (Saturday)

I picked Waimea to stay in because it was central for my day plans for the next few days. I had missed North Kohala, the northernmost point on the island, on the first drive-round and wanted to pick up a couple of sites. The first was the Pololu Valley - at the opposite end of the coast from the Waipi'o valley Linda and I had visited earlier. The trail down was much less deadly to the knees and led to a lovely black sand beach with a river running into the sea.



The second stop was at Kapa'au ("wet tapa cloth") - where you can see a statue of King Kamehameha (I) carved in Italy in the 1880s and lost at sea near the Falklands Islands. It was later rescued and returned to its rightful place.

In between, I stopped in the regional "capital" of Hawi - a little hamlet populated by hippie and "Left Coast" refugees from the Bay Area with the expected coffee and gift shops featuring Eastern religious goods. I picked up a Chinese teapot at a tea store - a gift for Judy Bailey, our former hostess in Kurtistown (she collects Chinese teapots). The owner was a yuppie half Chinese-half Jewish expert in accupuncture and Chinese medicine from Nebraska!

My main "history" sites that day were King K's birthplace and the oldest existing heiau on the island: Mo'okini Heiau (also a place of human sacrifice dedicated to Ku-Ka'ilimoku). It dates to around 480 BC, when the Roman Empire was in its death throes. For such important sites, you would think the government would have built a 4-lane road out to them, but no. You turn off onto a tiny airport road (no sign except for the airport), then left on a red-dirt road (more often a red *mud* road) pocked with potholes the size of VW Beetles and dangerously large rocks. I had a standard transmission rental car, and dared the mud puddles and bad roads only a mile or so before giving up and parking it and walking the rest of the way!

The Mo'okini Heiau is a forbidding rock fortress of a place with the largest mass of lichen-covered stones I have ever seen - as if the entire place were molding with age as we speak. It was "kapu" (sacred and off limits to non-priests) until only a few decades ago when it was deconsecrated by traditional Hawaiian religious leaders.

July 3 (Sunday)

This day held one of the big events my visit just happened to coincide with: the Deep Impact comet mission was reaching its climax 7:52 pm Hawaii time. The Keck telescope center is located down the mountain from the telescopes in Waimea, where I was staying, and had an open house for interested civilians that evening to watch the (hoped for) collision between Temple II comet and NASA's space probe. I got there an hour early and still ended up having to stand for the presentation in their public lecture room where three screens followed the action: (1) at the Pasadena Jet Propulsion Lab - where live feed from the spacecraft itself originated, (2) the view from the Keck telescope just up Mauna Kea, and (3) the view of the scientists at the Waimea center viewing the data. The feed from Pasadena was the most dramatic: the tiny comet became bigger and bigger as it zoomed towards the space probe till all you could see finally were craters on its huge surface a few seconds before impact 80 million miles away. The excitement was palpable, especially among the Keck staff. The only time in history that every major earth telescope has been simultaneously focused on the same astronomical event.

July 4 (Monday)

Every year there is a rodeo at Parker Ranch in Waimea run primarily by and for local Big Island ranches. I got there before the 9:00 starting time and watched horse races, calf wrestling, and "team sorting" - an event in which 3 paniolos (Hawaiian cowboys) have to separate numbered calves and make them cross over a line in an order the announcer gives them. No team succeeded because a few calves had minds of their own: number 3 would automatically run across the line first no matter what the rest of the calves were doing, and 8 and 9 seemed inseparable and would always cross together no matter what order the paniolos were to make them cross in!

That afternoon, I finally left Waimea and drove to the island capital Hilo on the rainy east coast. It's a sleepy little city that looks like a 1940's wartime set. No buildings seem to have been built, at least in the downtown, since about 1939 and none top two stories.

I walked around the mainly closed-up downtown and found an open-air Mexican restaurant. While I was eating my camarones (shrimp), a couple at the next table approached me and asked, "Are you from Sweden?" Apparently, the husband was Swedish (who had had his adult career in Chicago), and the couple, both locals, played a guessing game about tourists' nationalities (the wife was island-born of a Portuguese family from Madeira). I laughed at the question, saying, "No, I'm not Swedish, but my dad's family were all Swedish-Americans" and told them about how my grandmother Selma had emigrated to the US via Ellis Island at 16 in 1907. They invited me to join them, and we had a wide-ranging conversation about Sweden, Chicago, the native Hawaiian independence movement, and changes on the island (a California-style land boom has just recently sent prices skyrocketing). That evening there was a fireworks display over Hilo Bay, and I sat in the beachfront park with 100s of other locals. A nearby bandstand had Hawaiian music groups entertaining the crowd.

July 5 (Tuesday)

One must-do I had planned since February was to drive up the Saddle Road between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa (both over 13,000 feet tall) for the nightly star gazing at the Onizuka Visitor Center halfway up the slopes of Mauna Kea. When I left Hilo, it was overcast and rainy. Finally, at about 6,000 feet, some sunlight pierced the mist, and then finally my car was above the clouds and it was totally clear. The drive up to 9,000 feet, where the Visitor Center is located, was challenging to my little rental car, but I made it! 6:00 is when the evening program starts, but it really doesn't get dark till after 8:00. Then they pull out some pretty heavy-duty telescopes to put out on the patio. Each one is pointed at a different target: Venus, Jupiter, and Mizar (in the Big Dipper) were the main attractions the night I was there. The guest astronomer for the evening also gave us a tour of the night sky, beginning with the North Star (Hoku Pa'a - "standing star" - in Hawaiian) through the (visible) Zodiac, and ending with the Milky Way, which, to the ancient Hawaiians, looked like the giant shark that had swallowed an ancient hero, been cut open to rescue him, then flung away (into the sky).

July 6 (Wednesday)

I had tried in vain to contact Bob and Judy Bailey, our local friends near Kurtistown, since Waimea on Monday. Finally, I heard from them my second-to-last day, and they invited me to stay the night. I drove the 12 miles out from Hilo to their 2-acre home and spent that afternoon being guided on a tour by Bob to some local attractions:

- Kaumana Cave - just up the Saddle Road from Hilo. It's the cracked-open opening to an 1881 lava tube (a hardened lava coat in which fresh lava continued to flow) and is covered with ferns, vines and other rain forest plants.

- Lava Tree State Park - a trail through some towering trees that features ancient lava "casts" of dead tree trunks that somehow avoided being burnt to a crisp by the 2000-degree lava flows centuries ago. The tree inside was destroyed, but it left an imprint and a column of lava surrounding it. A bit like Pompeii for trees.

- A quick climb down the cliffs to a nudist beach along the southern Puna coast (mainly wrinkly, middle-aged hippie types with little kids).

- Road's End, where a 1990s lava flow had submerged the entire town of Kalapana and severed the coastal highway. (At the opposite end of the same flow, also severed, was the road Linda and I had walked to see the live lava show where it entered the sea in Volcano National Park.) I took one picture, then ... nothing. After shooting more than 14 rolls of film since the trip began, my camera batteries finally gave out, and we had to stop at a local hardware store for me to buy new ones.

July 7 (Thursday)

My final day on the island. After Linda left (her hiking possibilities were limited by her pacemaker), I had planned to take a hike out on my own to the only active volcano on the island - Pu'u 'O'o in Volcano National Park. But it was an all-day hike 6-8 hours. Since time was limited the last day before I had to turn in the rental car (by 7:00 pm), I decided instead to walk a shorter trail - across the crater floor of the 1959 Kilauea Iki volcano - a two-hour trip. The lava plug that now composed the crater floor had cooled and hardened since the eruption 40 years earlier, but sulfur fumes and steam still escaped from various spots on the huge crater floor, making the trip a bit more exciting than most hikes (the possibility of a sudden, unforeseen eruption will do that!)

After that, I raced back to Kona to fill up my gas tank, wash the car (16 days of driving on the Big Island isn't too different than an African safari), and change out of my hiking clothes (in the restroom of a Starbucks) into something more fitting for a United flight!