Hawaii - October 08, 2003

With another day wasted to my cold my chance of taking a tour up to Mauna Kea was gone. We had only two full days remaining on Hawaii. Unfortunately, I was still feeling under the weather

One of the things you must do when visiting Hawaii is experience a lu'au. There's little to no chance that you'll actually get to attend a real lu'au, but there's always the tourist lu'aus. We decided that today would be the day, which would give me more chance to rest during the day, as the lu'aus are held in the evening.

Chu-Wan and I needed to go to run some errands so we headed into town for a short trip.

Our first stop was the post office in Kailua-Kona. The DVDs I had picked up previously at Costco were too big to carry around when we moved on to Kauai. We didn't have a box, but the post office sells boxes, and this isn't the first time I've mailed things this way. I know for a fact that each mail window has a roll of packing tape and you can complete the taping of your box at the window while they prepare the postage.

The line was fairly long. I grabbed a box and put the DVDs in it, addressed it and, feeling somewhat guilty, I used a handful of Selective Service Draft Registration forms to pad out the contents. Ready to go, with the exception of needing two strips of tape, I waiting in line.

The line was slow, and when I finally got up the the window, I asked the man if I could use the tape (which was sitting right in front of me, apparently ready to be used.) He looked at me somewhat dismissively and closed his window and walked away, saying, "you'll have wait for the next window."

I have seen postal employees ask you to step to the side while they wait on the next person to keep the flow going, but never have I seen anything that arrogantly rude. Total time for me to tape up the package was about 20 seconds. Of course, then I had to back up and get back in front of the person who now thought they were the front of the line.

When I got called up to the next window, I told the clerk, "I need to send this first class and this is one of your boxes." The postal clerk replied, "You know you have to pay for that box, don't you?" Considering what I said to the postal employee next, I'm somewhat surprised the box ever made to its destination, but it did.

Next we tried, once again, to find Kaloko Drive, a windy road that leads up 5,000 into the "cloud forest" above Kailua-Kona. I was hoping, somewhat over-optimistically, that I might finally at least see Mauna Kea, or Mauna Loa... or any mountain, as they had, so far, remained totally obscured by clouds the entire time. The slope of the mountains is ever so gentle and you can see what appears to be a long way up, but eventually your view is stopped by a perpetual cloud bank hugging the side of mountain.

I couldn't tell if the clouds were really a ring around the mountain that might clear up at a higher altitude, or a solid wall stretching up and over the top. I suspected that, since Mauna Kea has some of the world's best telescopes on top of it, it must be clear. I also guessed that Hawaii was like Taiwan in that people flock to tall mountains at sunrise because they sit above the clouds and can see the sun rising above them.

We found Kaloko Drive, and I really wouldn't mind owning a house up there, but we reached the end of the road and we were stuck squarely in the cloud bank. We could see nothing, but the wetter climate and higher altitude allowed the growth of some enormous and beautiful flowers along the sides of the road.

We needed to stock up some additional supplies for the rest of our time on Hawaii and then for when we moved on to Kauai, as there was no Costco on Kauai. As we parked in the Costco parking lot, I looked up the side of the hill behind the Costco, my eye followed the mountain's slope until it hit the bank of clouds we'd just been in. I decided I needed a picture and I thought about all the places in the world where I'd run into Costco. It was at that moment that I hatched the idea of photographing every Costco in the world, and posting its picture on my web site. A man's gotta have a goal in life, or so I'm told. I checked later and discovered I'd missed three others on Oahu. It seemed impossible for me to get pictures of them on this trip.

While we were in Costco, I bought the flashlights I'd wished I purchased before.

Michelle had finally stopped having fits when she was alone with grandma and grandpa. I'm quite certain that much of my mother-in-laws "attitude" was an offshoot of her disappointment that Michelle was scared of her. This morning, Michelle had been asleep when we headed out for our errands, so we'd left her sleeping.

When we returned, she was up and doing OK, so we decided that when she took her afternoon nap, Chu-Wan and I would go to a beach for a while. We'd seen one on the way into Kailua-Kona that looked "safe" enough, and at the same time the waves came in like a wave pool at the water park. So far, neither of us had been into the ocean more than up to our ankles on the whole trip.

That afternoon, we put Michelle to sleep in our bedroom (the bedrooms were on the ground floor) made sure all the doors and windows to the outside were secured and left for the beach.

We had a lot of fun at the beach. It was a little crowded, and the waves were actually quite strong, but not rough. I stepped on a fish, which caused me to fall under the water when I wasn't expecting it, but no harm done except some water in the ear and waves crashing into the back of my head rather hard as I got up.

When we returned, grandma and grandpa were still upstairs in the living room. Nothing sounded wrong, so we went into the bedroom to get changed. Michelle was no longer in bed, but we didn't expect her to be. It was well past time for her to wake up, and we knew she'd go upstairs.

The problem was, she wasn't upstairs. She wasn't anywhere that we could find. Her grandparents hadn't seen or heard anything from her and assumed she was still sleeping. We couldn't find anyway she couldn't have gotten out of the bedroom, let alone the building. After a few frantic moments, we found that she'd crawled under the bed and gone back to sleep, totally oblivious to our calls to find her.

Later that evening, we went to the lu'au. It turns out that a tourist lu'au is mostly a dinner show. Before dinner they demonstrate a number of "cultural" activities: splitting coconuts, the hula dance and making grass fish. Michelle was fascinated by watching the hula (and trying to dance along.)

Dinner consisted of lu'au pig (pork roasted in a pit) and a variety of other food items, including, of course, poi. Dinner was good, but I gave the poi a miss. I don't like its constituent ingredients and I couldn't imagine how grinding them into an unappetizing looking paste was going to improve them. There was plenty of food, though, and a big, never ending punch bowl full of (weak) Mai Tais, which were pretty good. If you wanted to wait in line, you could also ask the bartender for full-strength Mai Tais, which were better.

During and after dinner was a dance show, showcasing Polynesian islanders from Hawaii, Tahiti, the Solomon Islands and elsewhere. It's not really my cup of tea, but the dancers were really good, and a couple of them were really pretty.

Even my mother-in-law enjoyed the show, although she did think the music was too loud.

After the lu'au, we put Michelle to bed, and Chu-Wan and I went out for a walk with our new flashlights. I convinced her to go for walk down the dead-end road we'd explored shortly after our arrival. She'd forgotten that it ended at a battlefield and graveyard. My goal was to use the night mode on the camera to take some pictures of the battlefield and hope enough detail would come out that some aberration in the picture could be misinterpreted as a ghost photo. I took several photos and we continued down towards the shore.

There's a small dirt road running past the battlefield and down towards the shore. The road is chained off to prevent cars going through, but this night, at nearly 11PM, there was a small mini-pickup parked in front of the road. I thought it was odd, but wasn't too concerned. As we reached a fork in the road, I realized that there were two people purposefully positioned so they were behind a wall and could not be seen from the road. We were only a few feet away from them, so I guided Chu-Wan down the other fork in the road and quickened the pace.

I got a good look back at them as we moved away from them and realized they were both buck naked. Oops, I guess we found a local make-out spot.

We stayed on the shore, looking out at the crashing ocean for some time - at least long enough for the other couple to pack up their blanket, get back in their truck and leave before us.

The pictures came out completely black, but when I got them home I was able to process them and bring out some actual details in the pictures. Included in the photo gallery is one picture as it looked originally and the same picture processed to enhance detail.

On to Day 11 ==>

Hawaii - On the slopes of Hualalai mountain above Kailua-Kona	Hawaii - On the slopes of Hualalai mountain above Kailua-Kona	Hawaii - On the slopes of Hualalai mountain above Kailua-Kona	Hawaii - Big Flowers	Hawaii - Big Flowers
Hawaii - Costco, Kailua-Kona	Hawaii - Michelle hides under the bed	Hawaii - At The Lu'au	Hawaii - At The Lu'au	Hawaii - At The Lu'au
Hawaii - At The Lu'au	Hawaii - At The Lu'au	Hawaii - At The Lu'au	Hawaii - At The Lu'au	Hawaii - At The Lu'au
Hawaii - At The Lu'au	Hawaii - At The Lu'au	Hawaii - Ghosts?	Hawaii - Ghosts? (Enhanced)