regarding president-elect obama
a couple representative conversations i had while backpacking in europe last fall–
1.
“where are you from?”
“i’m american.”
“ohh, no one i’ve run into in all my very extensive travels has had anything good to say about america. no one thinks you are doing anything good.”
2.
“where are you from?”
“the states.”
“oh, ok, i thought so, but i didn’t want to assume in case you were canadian or something and got offended.”
how excited am i (as an america-loving socialist-anarchist pinko liberal american) to not have these conversations next time i travel abroad? SO EXCITED.
white sand beaches and gorgeous gorges and tasty food, oh my!
did you all have a superfantastic election day & night? i hope so. i spent the evening hiding from my fear that mccain would win. uh, i mean, walking on a freakin’ beach and eating s’mores and communing with sea turtles. finally i texted a friend in portland: “is it over yet? if no, no details please.” she wrote back, “it’s just about over! obama made his speech and everything” and we had to call and ask, “ack! acceptance speech or concession speech?” then we breathed a sigh of relief and went to sleep in our tent ten feet from the ocean.
anyway, i’ll get there. this is a long entry with a whole ton of photos. fair warning. so, i went on a little camping trip with lauren, my high school friend. we left on tuesday morning. first stop pahoa, so she could vote! that accomplished, we drove north, to hamakua and beyond!
found this rocky beach:
underneath this pretty bridge:
drove through this green green gorge:
before arriving at:
lauren’s grandfather’s goat farm!!! we were given a lovely tour, met baby goats and a very large pig named otis…
by far the best part, though, was this:
lots of delicious goat cheese. there is actually more in that little pile than you can really see in this picture. unfortunately, the mango is just for show and we didn’t get to take it with us–but is that not the largest mango you have ever seen??
onward to malasadas (!), then to waimea to buy s’more fixings at the grocery store, then to hawi. we got to town at about 2:30 to discover that bamboo, the restaurant i mentioned many entries ago at which i last ate five years ago, closed at 2:30 until dinner at six! we ate panini down the street instead and made plans to come back the next day.
we camped at spencer beach park. it was nice and uncrowded what with it being a weekday and election day to boot. this is pretty much the view from our tent:
that picture was taken at maybe 4:30, but it looks like sunset, doesn’t it? the air had a really, really strange hazy quality, which i think was vog (volcanic smog). when i got back to hedonisia last night someone explained that during the day the air blows in towards the island, and in the night it blows away towards the sea, which somehow explains why the air was clear and beautiful in the morning when we got up. the beach was nice regardless, almost dreamy in the strange light.
also, check out my sweet sandal tan:
the fact that the sand wasn’t black actually kind of threw me for a minute, hah. the beach ten minutes to the left (facing the ocean; i have no sense of cardinal direction around here) was even lighter, while the beach five minutes to the right was darker:
interesting! this beach (above) is actually a shark breeding ground. no swimming or wading, though the only sign mentioning that is a hike up a little hill–one of those informational signs, which also mentions that the remnants of a heiau (temple) devoted to shark gods is submerged in the area. i climbed up ’cause i was curious… i guess you’re just supposed to know about the sharks. lauren did anyway. we stood and watched for a while, and yes, we saw a bunch of fish flipping out and we saw fins. they’re reef sharks, i guess, and mostly not dangerous, but, uhhh, i still never got more than waist deep into the water at either of the other beaches. ’cause dude. sharks. pretty beach though…
lauren took this photo less than twenty feet from our tent, i swear:
i utterly failed to get any photos of the turtles ’cause i swear they know when you’ve got your camera out.
in the morning:
king kamehameha built this heiau, visible from our campsite:
we packed up our stuff and walked down the path to maumae beach, the whiter sand beach i mentioned above. a year or so ago, an arsonist apparently set fire to the trees around the beach, so what used to be a beautiful lush path is now a very different kind of striking.
starts out like this:
but then:
when i woke up i watched a bunch of people go by in outrigger canoes. kind of like the hawaiian version of a crew team, i think. we saw them coming back again on our way to the beach, and they actually landed at the beach for a bit as we arrived.
if you climb over some lava rock, you get to this little tiny beach right next to maumae beach:
anyway we had a great time being thoroughly lazy for most of the morning, sitting in the sand, wading in the water, lounging on an inflatable raft thingy, looking for sea turtles, et cetera. for a good chunk of it we had the whole beach totally to ourselves.
(picture by lauren)
we packed up around noon and headed back to hawi.
maui in the distance!
bamboo!
so, the best thing on the menu at bamboo is their chicken sate potstickers. i’ve become a vegetarian since the last time i ate there. hmm. i am a vegetarian for environmental rather than ethical or moral reasons, however, and so hey, i ate those potstickers… to celebrate obama’s victory. rigidity is for dogmatic republicans!! they were just as delicious as i remembered. i don’t think it was a hypocritical act at all. i still eat way less meat than most americans, and while i will explain my reasoning to anyone who asks, i’ve never been one to bully anyone else into giving up meat. so. yum. i also had a lilikoi margarita.
i’d never actually eaten a lilikoi (just lots of juice and lilikoi-flavored things and such) before this trip to hawaii. you cut them in half and slurp out the seeds (or, if you’re civilized, you use a spoon). sooo tasty, and tarter than i expected (most lilikoi-flavored things are somewhat sweetened).
in hawi we also bought a bag of rambutans, which i hadn’t tried yet, mostly ’cause i wasn’t sure how to eat them. basically you peel off the skin, pop out the fruit inside, and chew the meat off of the seed (you can just stick the whole thing in your mouth and then spit out the seed). they are freakin’ delicious and i pretty much devoured the whole bag between hawi and hilo.
i ♥ tropical fruit.
on the way to hilo we stopped at the waipio valley lookout. first, this:
then, the valley itself. breathtaking:
(i mean the valley, but check me out dudes i am tan!)
we also stopped at one of many bridges over gorgeous lush jungle valleys, and i took many many photos of this amazing jungle waterfall vista ahhhhh:
also, check this out:
i just like the way those photos look all in a row like that.
well, that’s all, folks. (i mean, except for all the other pictures i took, which you can look at here.) i hung out at uh hilo for an hour or so while lauren had class, and then we headed back to puna sweet puna. today i’ve mostly just been hanging out. and eating goat cheese. did some painting (the boring kind) for my work trade. next adventure up: mauna kea on saturday? if i can get the day off!
hedonisia!
it took me until sunday to notice the stars. we were standing on the lava looking at the glowing plume, and someone said “what a picture.” someone else said “yeah, the lava’s really something,” and the first person said, “no, i mean the whole thing, starting with the stars.” and we all looked up, and my god!
the view inside my tent this morning–with all my drying unmentionables draped over the top:
below: the view out the back of the barn (the common area where the kitchen and food storage and such is, plus books, dvds, couches and the like. also my bed/tent, for now) sometime last week, in the rain. on the left is the bathroom and shower area. the pink structure is the cat house. the structure behind that is bamboo hut, one of the sleeping areas. i’m hoping to move out of the barn and into one of the independent structures sometime next week…
this guy was hanging out behind the kitchen sink this morning:
the door to the shower (the other side of the sign says “occupied”):
and, um, here’s my feet this morning. just in case you thought i was exaggerating about the mosquito thing (agggh one of them just dove down my shirt as i typed that!). i don’t have chicken pox; i have tasty tasty flesh (apparently):
this afternoon we went to kapoho tide pools to bask on lava rock and wade and swim a bit.
see the rainbow??:
.
also, i voted today. my absentee ballot made it here all right, but the “secrecy envelope” i was supposed to put it into before putting it into the mailing envelope that was also included was, uh, sealed shut by the humidity here. i actually tried to steam it open, and then i tried to freeze it open (hey it was worth a shot), before somewhat-messily ripping it open and taping it back up again. i wrote a note and signed across the tape with sharpie, so hopefully it’ll be all right. i think it’s pretty funny, really.
and no, i’m not telling you for whom i decided to vote.