Canopy Panoply

We have gone ziplining a handful of times in the past: twice in Costa Rica where the sport began (originally as a means for biologists to research the rainforest canopy), and once here on the Big Island. That was 8 years near Akaka Falls on the other side of the island; I wrote about it here. But we only recently learned of another outfit that does it a little closer to Kona, in Kohala at the northern end of the island. That would be Kohala Zipline, who offer a couple of different excursions. We opted for the aptly-named “Zip & Dip”, a several-hour outing that included an impressive zipline excursion through Kohala’s ironwood forests, followed by lunch at a striking overlook and a brief hike to a couple of idyllic waterfalls where we could splash around in the 80°F water.

Our guide for the day was Dane, a beefy, fit, pony-tailed, and exceedingly cheerful local boy, born and raised on the Big Island. He actually speaks some Hawaiian and is married to a New Zealander, a beautiful Maori woman with whom he shares a cute little 7 month old daughter with a 27-syllable Hawaiian name that I cannot even begin to reproduce here. Dane was accompanied for the ziplining part of the day by Jake, an equally cheerful and enthusiastic mainlander with a triangular face, short scruffy red hair and beard, and a nose ring. Before coming here he was a restaurant cook in Canton, Ohio, of all places. (Janet, are you reading this?) He was in charge of maintenance of the ziplines, so you know that if he is with you it is definitely safe.

In fact, it is definitely safe, despite the intimidating 100′ height in some places. The lines are very cleverly engineered, relying on two parallel independently-anchored cables, one about 6″ above the other, supporting a triply-redundant system of harness and straps. The only way you’re falling is if a tree somehow falls while you’re up there. You wear a helmet, of course, and heavy work gloves that you use to brake your speed by pressing on the cable just prior to “landing” on the next platform, when the guide at the far end signals you to do so.

We got to the starting point by crawling steeply uphill in our 4WD van for about 20 minutes over the world’s most rutted road. It had rained earlier and even the 4WD struggled to get past one or two of the muddier sections, necessitating backing up about 50 yards at one point and making a run at it, building up a bone-rattling head of steam to have enough speed to make it across the patch. Once we arrived at our destination we took a moment to re-insert some of our teeth.

There were eight ziplines lines in total, the first few connected by a series of six precarious-looking Indiana-Jones-style suspension bridges zigzagging among the treetops. The call it the “Ewok Village”, for good reason.

You will notice on this particular bridge that there is a board running down the center. They do not all have that, and on those you have to step verrrrry carefully from one crosstie to the next to avoid testing the carabiners that you can see connecting us to the cable above. You might also infer from the photo that (a) you are very high up, and (b) this bridge would twist and sway very substantially as your weight shifts from one step to the next. You would be right on both counts; acrophobes need not apply. There were only two other people in our group, a young Korean couple who spoke little English. But you didn’t need to be a linguist to see that she was terrified; she was visibly trembling much of the time. But she went through it, to the applause of all.

The bridges and ziplines traverse what is called the Hawi Gulch, a valley where the original Hawaiians terraced the land with low stone walls and farmed taro and sweet potatoes. A couple of the walls are still visible. It is quite close to Kamehameha I’s birthplace, he being the imposing warrior king who united the islands under a single monarchy (his, of course) in 1810. He was under a sort of a fatwa when he was born, the king at the time having received a prophecy that a newborn male child would replace him, thus quite reasonably concluding that all such children should be killed. (If this sounds an awful lot like both Moses’ and Jesus Christ’s origin stories, go complain to Carl Jung.) Anyway, Hawi Gulch was where Kamehameha hid out in his teens before eventually fulfilling the prophecy and having seemingly every road, school, hotel, and shopping mall in the state named after him.

The eight ziplines started with a short initial 300′ bunny slope that they called “flight school”, teaching us how to distribute our weight, how to brake, what hand signals to look for, and how to hand-over-hand along the cable if you get stuck short of the landing platform. (They made each of us demonstrate our ability to do this, demanding also that we make the appropriate screeching monkey noises while doing so.) The skills were easy enough, and off we went on a series of progressively longer and faster lines, each time coming to rest on a platform on the next tree, where we would be unclipped from the line and immediately clipped to a safety cable girdling the tree. (We were always attached to something by two clips; when transferring us from a zipline to a safety cable the guides would always transfer one clip before undoing the second; consequently there was never a single moment when there was not at least one clip anchoring us. You could not, for example, mistakenly walk off the edge of the platform and fall fifty feet.) Here’s Alice on one of the middle segments.

I should mention that the weather had started out somewhat ominously, with high winds and heavy clouds down near the coast on the 1 1/4 hour drive up from Kona. But the gulch is at higher elevations and the weather was much sunnier there, though still pretty breezy. The guides stayed in touch with the office to monitor the winds: they cancel the outing if sustained winds exceed a little over 20 mph or frequent gusts above 25 mph because you do not want any wind-driven branches thwacking you in the face as you are zooming through the treetops.

The grand finale was the longest traverse, a 1200′ segment where you reach a speed of over 50 mph. This segment was also unique in our experience because there were two parallel sets of lines. So here are Alice and I underway, briefly holding hands before the small difference in our respective speed non-metaphorically separated us.

The end of the line of this final segment was a tree platform about 40′ up. The guides gave us a quick rappelling lesson, and down we went to terra firma.

Once safely down with our adrenaline levels returning to normal, we piled back into the van and lumbered back down the rut collection for a box lunch at a picnic area overlooking the stunning cliffs of Pololu Valley. But at this lower elevation the weather was back at the ragged edge of nasty, and while we were eating a rain squall moved through, casting an ominous ambience over our view of the cliffs. So I took these photos:

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(Three years ago I captured some dramatic drone photos of sunrise on these same cliffs on a clear morning. They look a lot different from this!)

The squall passed, and we headed back uphill for the final part of our outing, a series of secluded waterfalls that we reached by walking a steep but thankfully short trail down the wall of the valley. There were a number of interesting and occasionally edible native plants along the way — guava, lilikoi (passionfruit), some mushrooms and berries — that Dane enthusiastically pointed out. And finally, at the falls at the bottom, the water was warm, and in we waded.

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We had left the house at about 6:30 AM and got home around 3:30 PM, so it was a pretty long and full day. And a pricey one: this particular outing cot about US $300 per person. Still, it was a great adventure and we’d certainly recommend it to our future visitors.

Dive! Dive!

Every year we see the Atlantis “tourist submarine” floating near the dock in downtown Kona, and every year we view it with entirely unearned disdain for reasons that we have never really tried to articulate: too touristy, not all that different from snorkeling, probably too expensive, etc., etc. Turns out it’s actually pretty cool. Our visiting dear friends Jim and Elaine generously declared that they would treat us to it and so for about $160 (US) per person the four of us took the literal plunge.

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Our sub was the Atlantis X, 65 feet long and accommodating 48 passengers. (They have a bigger one on Oahu as well as others in the Caribbean.) On this particular day we were about half full; we were directed to occupy every other seat so there was plenty of elbow room. (And, it being rather close quarters, we wore COVID masks though this was not required or even requested. We were the only ones doing so.)

The trip lasted about an hour and we tootled around about a half mile offshore, exploring a vast coral reef at depths ranging from about 85′ to 104′, the maximum depth occurring when we set down for a few minutes on a sort of a landing pad that had been placed on the bottom.

The aquatic life was not much different than we normally see when we snorkel (or when I scuba dive), but the sensation was more panoramic both because of the extent of the reef and because some of the fish showed up in large schools, right outside the windows. We also passed by a couple of shipwrecks (photos below).

The only real downside was that at those significant depths — my scuba dives usually max out at about 75′, though I have gone deeper — colors are very substantially washed out. Everything looks blue with (sometimes) a little yellow; the reds and oranges are pretty much gone. Snorkeling is actually a significantly more colorful experience. Even so, it was a wonderful and thrilling sight, especially watching the fish school around the shipwrecks. So we hereby jettison our early disdain in favor of recommending the trip should you find yourself in Kona. (The link to the Atlantis website is in the first sentence of this post.)

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I’ll be going scuba diving at the end of the week, which will be an interesting comparison. But next up on our agenda is zip-lining tomorrow, so I expect you’ll be reading about that in a day or two….

Pulling Some Strings

Our current visitor in Hawaii is a tad more exotic than our usual guests, having made her way here from Japan. (At a gut level it feels very far away, which I suppose objectively it is, but Japan is in fact a great deal closer to Hawaii than the east coast of the mainland, from where the majority of our visitors arrive.) Anyway, we have been in touch with our friend Mariko for several years now, ever since she was our tour guide on our trip to Japan in 2016. She was supposed to come last year but Japanese COVID restrictions at the time sunk that plan, so we are happy that she made it now. She is 10-on-a-scale-of-10 cheerful and enthusiastic, as befits a professional tour guide, and is an interesting mix of Japanese and Western mindsets: plainspoken and cosmopolitan on the one hand (she spent a year in England), but interested in traditional Japanese arts and culture on the other, e.g., she knows the for-real tea ceremony. (No, she does not do it every time she makes a cup of tea: she puts a kettle on the stove like the rest of us who aren’t too lazy to use the microwave.) Anyway, among her interests is the sanshin, for which she has been taking lessons for a year.

No, I hadn’t heard of it either. A sanshin is a very old, traditional Japanese stringed instrument, the precursor of the better-known shamisen. It has three strings and has been likened to a Japanese banjo, which it does indeed sound rather like. Here’s Mariko’s in its case:

If the body looks like snakeskin, there’s a good reason for that: traditionally the instrument is made from Burmese python skin. Because of various pesky international regulations though, that is rarely the case any more: they use the more common reticulated python instead. (Irony alert: the Burmese python is now an invasive species in Florida. Brought into the country as pets, some inevitably escaped into the wild and have now overrun the Everglades. Growing up to 16′ long, they are decimating local species, unfortunately not including any members of the state government. There is a bounty on them, and you can make a solid $1000 for catching and killing one.)

Anyway, you can’t bring pythons into the US, not even python skins, and so Mariko’s sanshin is made out of some pythonesque synthetic. (I feel like I should be making some Monty Python joke here about dead snakes instead of dead parrots — “He’s pining for the swamps!” — but you can make up your own.) So here she is practicing on our lanai; click the image to see a one-minute video of her in action in a new browser tab.

Mariko explains that the high-pitched singing — she describes it herself as sounding like a meowing cat — is the traditional Okinawan style, which is where the instrument originated. There was a lot of work-related emigration from Okinawa to Osaka, where she is from.

Interestingly, the musical notation that one uses for this instrument is also from Okinawa, and does not much resemble Western notes. It’s called kunkunshi, and here is what Markio’s music looks like:

One of the interesting things about it — which is radically different from Western notation — is that it does not show the notes but rather the fingering. So the key in which one is playing is determined entirely by the tuning of the strings; you place your fingers and pluck the strings according to the notation, and the notes that come out are whatever the tension on the strings causes them to be.

That’s today’s music lesson from Hawaii. Meanwhile, after about a month of cloudy days and frequent drizzle, we finally seem back to the paradisiacal weather with which this place usually spoils us. We went snorkeling today, which was Mariko’s first time doing so. She reacted with predictable and deserved enthusiasm, which is part of the pleasure of having guests here. The singing still sounds like a cat, though.

Up, Up, and Away

If you’re looking for an outdoor sport that makes no physical demands on you whatsoever, then parasailing is certainly your way to go. The only requirement is a pulse, and now that I think about it you could probably get away without even that: since the only actual activity is sitting in a sling under a towed parachute, one could in principle send up a corpse or any person-sized inert object. But no matter; it’s still a lot of fun, especially so in the photogenic environs of Hawaii, so off we went.

Parasailing was invented in the 1960’s although the winching device that made it easy to launch from a moving boat wasn’t patented until 1976, after which the sport, um, took off. Now it seems there is hardly a resort area with a body of water where you can’t find it. We’ve done it any number of times on the east coast but this was our first time doing it in Hawaii, occasioned by a visit from my mother, who especially loves it. So we booked a 3-person tandem ascent with a local outfit, UFO Parasail. I was secretly hoping to get some kind of freebie or super-senior discount by exploiting my mother’s longevity: at a feisty 90 years old, I figured she was in the running for the oldest passenger they had ever lofted. Ha! Not even close, as it turns out: the crewman told me that their oldest passenger to date was 97. Mom consequently declared that she will return in 8 years to break the record, and honestly, I wouldn’t put it past her.

In any case we had a great time, floating about 500 feet above the Pacific at the end of a 1200-foot cable. The view was wonderful of course, though much of the time I was keeping my eyes peeled for whales in case we got lucky (we didn’t). Here are some pictures of the outing. (You can click on each image to see it at full resolution.)

The mountain in the background of the first picture is Hualalai, one of the five volcanoes that collectively form the Big Island. It last erupted in 1801 and was witnessed by Capt Cook’s crew. Because it erupted in historical times it is classified as “active” though you will also sometimes see it characterized as “dormant”. Let’s hope it stays that way: another big eruption like the ones that created the lava fields on the Kona Coast would probably play havoc with the real estate prices and bring new meaning to the phrase “overheated market.”

Puako Petroglyphs

The Hawaiian Islands were first settled roughly 1000 years ago by some very brave canoeists from elsewhere in Polynesia, probably the Marquesas or Tahiti. The islands they settled looked rather different from what we see today since a large fraction of what we think of as native flora were actually brought here by them. So their legacy is a substantial one — as in, everything and everyone here that did not arrive later from North America and Europe. But one of the most enigmatic reminders of their existence are the petroglyphs: carvings into the lava rock that dot the islands. Some have obvious meanings: men, women, fish, canoes, spears, i.e., the usual iconography of an agrarian hunting and fishing society. Others are some kind of geometric symbolism about which essentially nothing is known.

Hawaii’s two richest collection of petroglyphs are right here on the Big Island, one near Kilauea Volcano and the other here on the Kona Coast near a beach called Puako, about an hour north of our house. I’ve written about it in some detail before, so just click here if you’re interested. (It’ll open in a new browser tab.) But for the past few years I’ve been yearning to photograph it from the air, failing every year because the winds in that area are usually quite strong, making drone flight impractical. But yesterday we got lucky, with winds of only a few knots, so I was able to realize that particular small ambition.

There’s a parking lot near the beach, and from the trailhead you make an ankle-twisting one-mile walk across broken lava to the petroglyph site, through an ominous assemblage of burnt, twisted trees that look like the Hawaiian version of the haunted forest that Dorothy et al navigated in The Wizard of Oz.

The petroglyph field is about the size of a couple of tennis courts and is covered with hundreds of the carvings. So here at last is my long-sought aerial tour of it: just click the image to open a YouTube video in a new tab.

When we returned from the site we hung out on the beach for a bit, failing to spot the hoped-for sea turtles or whales but enjoying watching the surfers. I took some drone video of them, which turned out to be a lot harder than I thought. If I succeed in assembling some clips of them, I’ll put them up in another post.

Kona, One Year Later

When we arrived on the Big Island for our annual stay, more or less exactly a year ago today, we were 10 months into the COVID pandemic and in a perpetual state of borderline terror, the vaccine rollout still being a month or so in the future. The state of Hawaii made it very difficult to come visit: tourism was down 80-90% but as a consequence the state enjoyed the lowest COVID case rate in the US. At the time the national average was about 35 new cases per 100,000 people per day; the rate on the Big Island was TWO new cases per 100,000. So though we were scared to fly to get here, we felt quite safe once we were here. Normally thronged downtown Kailua-Kona was a ghost town, and I posted this picture at the time:

Now, one year later, some things are very different and some are the same, not altogether in a good way. Thanks to the vaccine, tourism has started to recover but still has a ways to go. Here’s the same scene, taken this afternoon, exactly one year to the day after the previous shot:

As you can see, there are at least a sprinkling of cars and a handful of people but tourists are still rather thin on the ground. This at least largely eliminates the normally frequent traffic jams but robs the place of a lot of energy and (of course) economic health.

The vaccines and the ubiquitous COVID omicron variant have made the illness simultaneously far more pervasive and far less terrifying. As of today the omicron surge is starting to wane, but the national case rate is still a factor of five higher than a year ago and the falloff from the peak is propagating westward from the mid-Atlantic states. As of this moment that national average of new cases (per 100,000 people per day) is about 162; our home state of Maryland is a relatively happy 48, the lowest in the US; and Hawaii is 158, in the middle of the pack. Put in perspective, that means that there are more than fifty times more cases per day in Hawaii than there were a year ago. So despite the fact that we are both vaccinated and boosted, we continue to wear masks here and generally exercise caution. (That said, the local movie theater never seems to have more than about five people in the theater at any given screening — God knows how they stay in business — so we’ll probably risk a matinee showing of Spider-Man: No Way Home.)

Our trip out here was uneventful if a bit of a nail-biter at the departing end, since the DC area was forecast to be hit with a piece of the very substantial storm that walloped New England. It proved to be not especially dramatic this far south, and our flight departed on time. The only oddity was an incident that enraged me as we boarded our connecting flight in Phoenix, as the gate agent colected our boarding passes and looked at our driver’s licenses. (Generally speaking you do not have to show ID on a domestic connecting flight, since you already showed it when you boarded your originating flight. But Hawaii is an exception and requires ID for all incoming flights.) The agent was a tall gray-haired bespectacled guy whom I speculate was a baggage handler or something who was dragooned into gate duty because they were short-staffed, like everywhere these days. He looked at my Maryland license and remarked, “Good thing it’s not from Delaware.” Utterly baffled by this, I asked why. “Because that guy in the White House is from there. Go Brandon!”

WHAAAAAAAAAAAT? REALLY?? Honest-to-God white supremacist MAGAt rage from an American Airlines gate agent during boarding? Didn’t seem like a good time or place to cause an incident so we boarded, I sat down, and promptly detailed the incident in an email to American Airlines’ customer relations department. I expect I will hear back from them after the weekend. At least, I’d better.

But the important thing is, we made it and we are settled into our beloved tropical pied-a-terre. I got very excited when I looked at today’s weather forecast on my phone this morning:

The exciting part is not the balmy temperature, which I shamelessly invite you to feel envious of, but rather the “Orange Volcano Watch” notification, which immediately filled my head with visions of jaw-dropping photos of glowing lava rivers. But alas, it turns out that an “orange” watch means, “Yeah, there’s still a little lava sitting inertly at the bottom of the summit crater where you can’t see it, and nothing much is happening.” Oh well. This brief bout of hopefulness did however inspire me to subscribe to the US Geological Survey’s “Volcano Notification System“, whose existence I did not heretofore suspect. Turns out the US operates five volcano observatories, here and in places like Alaska and California. They even monitor the “supervolcano” under Yellowstone National Park, the one that is going to blow half of North America sky high some time in the next 300,000 years or so. Anyway, you can subscribe to the observatories of your choice, and the service will send you emails when something exciting is happening (e.g., “Run!”). We’re here till mid-March, so maybe we’ll get lucky.

Ghost Town, Hawaii Edition

This was our typical first day back on the Big Island, spent running errands, most of which involved buying stuff. Our first stop was one of our favorite venues in Kona, the Farmer’s Market where we pick up an eyes-bigger-then-our-stomachs assortment of tropical fruits. Our favorites are lilikoi (passionfruit to you), rambutan, longan, mango, papaya, and of course, the legally-required pineapple. (I have provided Wikipedia links for the two that are likely to be unfamiliar to you. Rambutan is sort of a hairy lychee.)

Our first hint that things were…different… this year was the sparse traffic into town. The oceanfront road into downtown Kailua-Kona is usually packed, and at 11 AM today it most decidedly wasn’t. And indeed, when we arrived in town, an easy 10-15 minute drive from our house, we encountered a disorienting post-neutron-bomb scene: the buildings were there, but the people weren’t. The Farmer’s Market itself usually has about 75 stalls and is thronged with people; parking is always a challenge. Here is what it looked like today:

Barely a dozen stalls, a half-empty parking lot, and a lonely smattering of people. Happily the stalls included a couple of fruit stands so we were able to get what we wanted, but it was clear that we were in a new world.

Our next stop was the rental car office in the King Kamehameha Hotel, to register Alice as a driver of our rental car. The King Kam is one of the older and best known hotels in town; “venerable” is the word, though it’s only about 60 years old. For a long time it was the place to stay, and it is still very highly rated. It was bought by Marriott about two years ago. But in any case, here’s what the lobby and adjacent hallway with the travel and car rental offices looked like today:

There are a grand total of two people in these images: the desk clerk in the lobby and Alice (masked and in her characteristic floppy garden hat) emerging from the car rental office.  In short, not exactly a beehive of activity. The effect was even more striking as we strolled along the main drag, which is normally clogged with traffic and abuzz with crowds on the sidewalk, going in and out of the many shops and eateries, and jaywalking. Here was the scene this afternoon:

Cue the tumbleweeds

In happier times the only way to get a picture like this would be to make a time exposure at 2 AM and brighten the exposure in Photoshop to make it look like daylight. But alas, no trickery required: this is downtown at mid-day, punctuated by a car and a tourist every few seconds. (You can see one person near the middle of the frame.) Restaurants closed, monthly street fair canceled, the numbers tell the story: the number of visitors in the past couple of months is down 80% from a year prior. That is actually better than I would have guessed from today’s scenes; I hazarded an estimate of 90%, and Alice thought it was even worse. The downturn will be most acutely felt in a few days: the cruise ships normally dock on Wednesdays and disgorge thousands upon thousands of tourists at once, who swarm the town like locusts leaving nothing behind except piles of money. But not now.

The situation is not completely bleak. Many restaurants are still open, including most of our favorites. Some of those have outdoor or open-air seating so we are comfortable eating there. These include Kenichi, our favorite local Japanese fusion place, where we have developed the tradition of dining on our first evening here every year. We satisfied that ritual last night, the first time we have actually eaten in situ at a restaurant (as opposed to getting take-out) in ten months. And lunch today was at Da Poke Shack, possibly the most accurately named restaurant in the world, a hole in the wall whose marinated ahi is a religious experience, and which we will probably visit at least weekly. Life is a little more convenient with diminished crowds, with no lines anywhere and no traffic jams, but as easy as it is to complain about them in normal times, they do inject a very noticeable energy and enthusiasm into the air, and we do notice its absence.  But the surpassing overall natural beauty and cultural and ecological richness of the island is undiminished even by COVID-19, and there are still few places that we would rather be.

Hawaii-COVID-19

While our fellow Americans celebrate their maskless personal freedom by dying like flies, Alice and I have been weathering the pandemic in the manner of many of our fellow affluent retirees: Zooming with our grandchildren instead of hugging them, and bemoaning having had our travel wings clipped. By late summer when things were really getting out of hand, and everyone’s quarantine fatigue was multiplied by anxiety about the impending election, our big indecision was about whether to return to Hawaii for our annual winter sojourn. We’ve come to love this six week interlude, but was it worth risking our lives?

“We’ll decide in the fall,” we said, assuring each other with shaky confidence that the situation would be clearer by then.

“Things will probably be looking better by Thanksgiving,” we convinced each other in October.

“We can wait until Christmas to decide,” we averred to family and friends in mid-November.

“We’ve gotta do some research,” we said nervously as we stumbled into the new year. “But at least the election came out right. Barely.”

Our “research” consisted of maybe a half hour of Googling to determine which airline seemed COVID-safest and had the most liberal cancelation policy (answer: Delta). So in early January we simultaneously rolled the dice and hedged our bets, buying refundable tickets for a January 28 departure. (Our annual rental house had already been paid for a year ago, so that was a sunk cost no matter what.)

Buying the tickets and making the decision to go, however, turned out to be two unrelated processes since we knew that we could bail at the last minute if one of us got cold feet. And that is when the head games began. Although Hawaii itself is comparatively COVID-safe compared to the rest of the US — the statewide incidence is one-sixth the national average, the lowest in the country — the trip itself seemed rather nervous-making, widespread assurances about filtered airplane air notwithstanding. Neither of us was altogether sanguine about that, but Alice was more anxious than I was, to a greater extent than she was willing to let on. She underestimated my own reservations, mistakenly believing that I was determined to go and that I would be angry at her if she vetoed it. (Helpful advice column hint: hilarity does not ensue when you attempt to read your spouse’s mind.) And so she engaged in a poorly-disguised propaganda campaign, regularly bringing to my attention one or another horror story on the web about a massive increase in infections in [insert random location here], or about a new mutation of the virus that affects mostly retired Jewish men by liquifying their spleens.

The breaking point came a couple of weeks ago when she brought me an article about a 900% increase in infections in Ireland, which pierced my normally placid, Zen-like demeanor (note to readers who have never met me: that is a horribly ironic joke). I snapped, “WE ARE NOT GOING TO IRELAND,” which outburst had the surprisingly felicitous effect of sparking an actual conversation, in addition to momentarily silencing our next door neighbors’ habitually yapping dogs.

We received a helpful nudge a day or two later when Zooming with our dear friends Jim and Elaine, who, exasperated at all of our sturm und drang, admonished us with a single wake-up sentence: “Alice is a mathematician, so surely you guys can figure this out.” Huh. Maybe it was time to lead with our heads instead of our guts, so we did: some actual risk calculations involving an online aerosol dispersion model from MIT — we are Alpha Nerds, fear us — led to the conclusion that the probability of arriving in Hawaii without being infected along the way was in the range of 99.8%, which after all that angsting seemed like a pretty good bet. So we decided to go.

But not without one additional sop to our anxiety. We are indebted to our friends and occasional travel companions Laura and David for alerting us to this rather timely device: www.easyflowusa.com. Here is Alice wearing hers in the departure area (at right) and on the plane:

My mother’s reaction to this photo was, “You’re on an airplane flight, not a space mission.” But these days the difference between those two things is somewhat less than it used to be. Though it is true that when we sat down in the waiting area, a little girl in a nearby seat took one look at me, whimpered, and buried her face in her daddy’s lap. He reassured her, then asked me where we got them.

(Class discussion question: what do you do if the “loss of cabin pressure” overhead masks deploy?)

Anyway, in case you’re wondering what this thing actually is, it’s a portable air filtration unit. The little blue and white box contains a PM2.5 HEPA filter — basically the same as airplanes and hospitals use — and a built-in fan that pumps the filtered air into the KN95 mask. It probably provides some extra protection, and definitely increases the comfort level: you can feel the fresh air coming into the mask so you don’t have that warm, humid, claustrophobic breathing-through-cloth feeling, and your glasses don’t fog up. The battery lasts for about 9 hours at the lowest setting, not quite enough to get us all the way to Hawaii, but we brought along portable chargers to bridge the gap. It’s not perfect — the hose is very soft rubber and kinks too easily — but it definitely facilitated the long trip and very possibly even made us a little safer.

But should you nonetheless think that this solution is a little cumbersome or extreme, consider this Asian couple next to us in the departure lounge in Atlanta. They’ve gone full Andromeda Strain, and it is a sign of the times that no one batted an eyelash.

Traveling safely or auditioning for Daft Punk?

The upshot is that we survived the trip and are now ensconced in our happy tropical home away from home. This stay will have a rather different feeling than in all of our past years, those having been marked by a more or less continuous stream of visitors. This time we have only one pair coming, my mother and sister, and we will be eating at a lot fewer restaurants than usual. But hey, we’ve got perfectly good wifi, Zoom works everywhere, and if we have to be isolated somewhere in the middle of winter, this is where we’d choose (and have chosen!) to be.

We like it here. A lot.

Weasel Poop Central

Dalat is a college town of about 400,000 people with a large (13,000 students) regionally well-known university. It’s only about 30 miles from Nha Trang as the crow flies, but it’s a 3-4 hour bus ride; Dalat is up in the mountains at about 5000′ (1500 m) elevation, and the road to it is steep, winding, and very slow. It does take you through some scenic valleys with narrow waterfalls threading down the cliffsides.

There used to be a rail line connecting Dalat with Saigon but the Viet Cong blew it up during the war and it has never been replaced. It does have an airport with twice-daily flights to Saigon, though. (People seem to randomly call it either Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City as the mood strikes them, though the latter has been the official name since 1975.)

There is a certain amount of nostalgia for the railroad, though, at least among the very small community consisting of a burnt-out expat American who opened a restaurant called the Train Villa Cafe, which sports a railroad car behind the building. He used to be the general manager of Tower Records in Singapore, but he moved here in 1991, married a local woman, and (according to Phil) has been running this restaurant and drinking himself to death since then. We ate lunch there, and he did arrange for some of the local hill tribespeople to come and perform some traditional music for us.

They are called the Kho, part of a larger set of hill tribes that are collectively known in the West as Montagnards. The Kho themselves are subdivided into a number of groups, including the Khmer in Cambodia. They have a very characteristic style of dress — dark blue cotton with vertical colored stripes as you see in the photo — and speak their own language. This particular family of musicians had been educated in the cities and spoke Vietnamese as well. The Kho language is significantly different from Vietnamese; Phil does not speak it.

We continued on to our hotel, a large ornate place with the inexplicable name of the Sammy Hotel. No one seems to know who “Sammy” was, but the architecture is pretty purely French Colonial and — because of our frequent travel with OAT — we have been upgraded to a very large and pretty snazzy suite, with a full living room and two baths. Yay!

The weather was deteriorating by mid-afternoon but we headed out anyway — eventually getting poured upon — to visit the Linh Phuoc Buddhist temple, a large and impossibly ornate complex in which every exterior square foot — and quite a bit of interior space as well — is covered by elaborate dragon-themed ceramic mosaic tile and statuary. It is an utter riot of color and detail, something that Antoni Gaudi would have happily designed if he had been into Buddhism.

The interior is no less elaborate, and includes some creepily realistic statuary along with all the ceramic frou-frou.

By the time we left we were in a full-on downpour, which continued for the next four hours; it is the monsoon season.

It was still pouring at 6:30 PM when we were picked up at our hotel by a cheerful young woman in a rain poncho, riding a motorbike. (Vietnamese use their scooters to go anywhere at any time; monsoon rains are of no consequence.) Her name was Nhii, and she is the 26 year old daughter of the host family with whom we had dinner at home last night. As I have mentioned before, every OAT trip has a generous dollop of interaction with the locals, and each trip usually includes dinner at home with a local family.  Nhii put us into a taxi, and then led the way home through the driving rain on her motorbike.

Those are Nhii’s parents at left, and our travel mates Hazel and Bruce on the right. Nhii’s father is a retired archivist with the government; her mother is retired from a bank. Nhii herself is a receptionist at a hotel and the only one of them that spoke any English. (Hers was pretty rocky but serviceable enough for the occasion.) The language barrier put things off to a slow start, but as we started showing each photos of our various grandchildren, things picked up. Nhii’s mom is an excellent cook and served us a nice meal that included pho, spring rolls, sticky rice, and a salad that had a large number of hard-boiled quail eggs in it. The evening was enjoyable enough, but we would have liked to see more of the house (we never got out of the living room and dining room) and learn more about their lives. (We learned a lot more about Nhii since she could converse.)

The rain had stopped by the time we headed back to the hotel, and we slept well enough in our Colonial Overlord room to take on more ambitious sightseeing today.

Dalat is a major center for wholesale flower cultivation and sales; it is sort of the Holland of this part of Asia. Flowers are big, big business here, and the best way to illustrate that is to show you this panorama looking into the valley adjacent to the downtown part of the city:

With the exception of the tile roofs in the foreground, every single building in that image is a greenhouse, hundreds and hundreds of them filling the valley. Here’s the interior of one of them, and happy Alice — who is an avid gardener, unlike myself, and much in her element here — with a sample bloom.

I am informed that that is a gerbera daisy.

The greenhouses are not made of glass, but rather nylon, which we were told is a technique invented by the Israelis. Water condenses on the interior and drips into the gutters that you can see running the length of the structure, thus minimizing the need for an external water supply.

Besides flowers, the other cash crop in these parts is coffee, and so of course we were morally obliged to visit a coffee plantation. Since we live in Kona (Hawaii) for about five weeks a year that was not exactly new and exciting for us — and I don’t even drink the stuff — but here you go anyway:

We got The Coffee Spiel. There are three types of coffee here, being Arabica, Mocha, and Something Elsa-a (Robusta, I think), and the differences are [at this point my brain turns off due to total indifference]. So of course they sat us down and served us a sample, which everyone duly admired, except for Alice, who literally shuddered and sotto voce averred it much inferior to Kona coffee.

Those are our travel mates Yvonne, Karen, and Joan. Yvonne looks a little dubious.

But this was not the main event. Oh no, far from it. This particular coffee was conventionally grown and processed. At no point did it emerge from a weasel’s digestive tract.

You may perhaps have heard of kopi luwak, the fabulously expensive Indonesian coffee that is processed from beans that have been eaten and excreted by a civet cat. Well, guess what? They do it here too. They call the creature a weasel here, but it is the same animal, Paradoxurus hermaphroditus if you’re taxonomically inclined. It is not related to the ferret-like thing that we in the West call a weasel, but looks rather like a raccoon. Here’s one in its cage at the plantation.

So the deal is, they feed the coffee “cherry” — the red fruit with the bean at its core — to the animal, which dutifully poops it out the other end, its digestive enzymes having dissolved the fruit and worked some chemical miracle upon the bean. The poop is dried in the sun and the beans then extracted by machine (thank God). You then process the beans and charge a zillion dollars a pound for them because people are insane. I mean seriously, this is certainly the only consumable substance in the world where declaring, “This tastes like shit,” is considered a compliment.

Note the sign above. For the record, I was not tempted to take any away. I am however going to start an emo band named “Weasel Feces”.

Alice, who is a coffee snob, was very disdainful of the whole thing but upon actually tasting it — they gave everyone about a half a shot glass to try — declared it quite excellent after all.  And as I looked on in head-scratching wonder she actually plunked down money to buy a few ounces, at a price that scaled to US $90 a pound.  That’s about three times the price of good Kona coffee. She is unable to testify that it is three times as good.

That adventure under our belt, we climbed onto a flatbed hitched to a tractor — this has been an especially interesting trip, transportation-wise — and literally headed for the hills, traveling a short distance up into the hills to visit a Montagnard/Kho village. Our first encounter was with some fierce children (one was wearing a Batman teeshirt so you know this is serious) who took a break from chasing each other around to threaten to eat us.

We navigated this existential threat — I taught two of them to play Thumb War in case my grandsons ever visit here — and spent some time talking to the village headman and his wife, who was patiently weaving through part of the conversation.

It’s an interesting society, matriarchal for starters; property is handed down through the women in the family, and arranged marriages have been abolished.

That’s as much of Dalat as we have time for. Tomorrow morning we fly to Saigon for the last leg of the trip. We’ll be there for three nights, then leave for home on Saturday.

 

Hip, Hip, Hula

On the third Sunday of every month — which was yesterday — part of the waterfront main drag of downtown Kailua-Kona is closed off to auto traffic in favor of the “Kona Sunday Street Stroll”, which is pretty much exactly what you are picturing. About 100 local vendors set up tents, and it’s worth an easy hour or so to stroll among them. Some of these are for food, including that Hawaiian perennial, shave ice, and — our personal favorite — a local lady who makes popsicles out of fresh-pressed local fruits. Trust me, you want a lilikoi (passion fruit)-banana popsicle. I also tried a rather bizarre mixture: a pineapple-papaya-chili pepper popsicle. The chili peppers were in little chunks, scattered dangerously throughout. I came to think of it as a Menopause Popsicle: you’re happily working your way through the sweet refreshing fruity ice, when POW! Hot flash!

The non-food vendors: jewelry, tee shirts, photographers (you have no idea how many metal-printed photos of lava and sea turtles are out there), and herbal panaceas. The latter are usually advertised as having been extracted from some species of flora that no one has ever heard of, but which can nonetheless provide relief from pretty much everything.

Certainly the highlight of our walk — besides the popsicles and shave ice — was the hula demo on the grounds of the Hulihe’e Palace, the former Kona waterfront vacation home of Hawaiian royalty, built in the early 1800’s. Here was the scene yesterday at about 4:30 PM:

Hula — especially Hawaiian hula – is a complicated and subtle art form. Many mainland hula demonstrations include an admixture of Tahitian hula, which is the one with the very rapid tempo drumming. the tall headdresses, and the women with the inhumanly fast hips. Traditional Hawaiian hula is different: the pre-Western kind, called hula kahiko, is a story-telling medium centered on the arms, hands, and face. It’s performed to a song and accompanied only by a percussive double gourd. Here’s what I mean by it being gestural:

I like to think that the pose on the left means, “Please silence your cell phones.” Other examples from yesterday:

At this point, someone out there who is reading this post is thinking, “Wait a minute. What’s with the 19th century prom dresses? Where are the grass skirts?” Here’s where it gets complicated.

First of all, the original Hawaiian female hula dancers never wore grass skirts. They wore very elaborate, multi-square-yard skirts made of kapa cloth, which is a fiber made from a certain pressed tree bark. And they did not wear coconut-shell bras. (No sane woman anywhere ever has; they’re some late 19th century guy’s fantasy, which I’ll get to in a moment.) They did not wear any tops at all.

The whole topless women thing did not sit well with late 18th century missionaries, or at least with their wives. It became necessary to cover the immodest heathen, and so they did. To keep the missionaries placated the hula halaus (schools) adopted the grandmotherly garb that you see above, and much of both modern day (‘auana) and traditional (kahiko) hula are performed that way. Men’s hula, on the other hand — much more stylistically aggressive and less subtle than the women’s dance — was and still is performed in loincloths and maile leaf adornments.

So where did the whole grass-skirt-and-coconut-bra shtick come from? The answer, believe it or not, is vaudeville. Vaudeville got its start in the 1880’s about a century after Cook’s arrival and eventual death in the islands. Knowledge of Hawaii’s existence had seeped into popular knowledge by then, and theater producers were always on the lookout for exotic material for their productions. “Girls from a tropical island” was bound to occur to somebody sooner or later. But the topless thing clearly wasn’t gonna fly, and the authentic kapa skirts weren’t going to work either: they were expensive, labor-intensive to maintain, and, well, insufficiently sexy for their intended purpose. Enter the grass skirt: cheap, easy to fix or replace, and just a bit suggestive. Ditto the coconut bras. The skirts also had a certain historical precedent in that they did somewhat resemble Tahitian hula skirts, which are indeed made from grasses and leaves but are ankle-length and thick.

This dress scheme was wildly successful, and soon every vaudeville act with a Hawaiian number was dressing their dancers in grass skirts, to the point that it eventually became everyone’s default mental image for Hawaiian hula. It was, in its way, one of the first viral memes. And of course, it filtered all the way back to its point of origin: if you plunk for the $49.95 Colorful Hawaiian Luau at whatever hotel you’re staying at, odds are good that you’ll see a hula dancer in a not-particularly-Hawaiian grass skirt.