Beyond the Horizon

As I sat at work today, not too happy about some things that are taking longer than I would like, this Bob Dylan song came on iTunes:

Beyond the horizon, behind the sun
At the end of the rainbow life has only begun
In the long hours of twilight 'neath the stardust above
Beyond the horizon it is easy to love

I'm touched with desire
What don't I do?
Through flame and through fire
I'll build my world around you

[...]

Beyond the horizon, the sky is so blue
I've got more than a lifetime to live lovin' you

The sliding steel guitar and dancing tempo of this song brought me back to Hawaii. Now there's a place I'd love to be right now, dancing to Bob Dylan on the beach.

From Reef Tank to Huey

In Hawai'i I became obsessed with coral reefs and saltwater tropical fish. Kevin and I went snorkeling every day, usually at excellent spots, and I just fell in love with the fish in the ocean. This led to a nightly routine, where Kevin would sleep and I'd sit on the computer in our condo researching reef tank set-ups. And I'm not just talking about a saltwater aquarium. I mean a live reef tank, where the decorations are live coral, urchins, anemones, and all that jazz. I also looked up minimum gallon requirements for the fish I desired to have, based on my snorkeling experiences.

Here are the fascinating species I saw out in the ocean:

This is a Hawai'ian trigger fish, also known as humuhumunukunukuapua'a. How could you ever forget a name like that? But apparently these fish are aggressive in live tanks, which makes sense because they were always pushing each other around in the ocean.

We saw two sea turtles while snorkeling this year, and they're always amazing. They're endangered, so even if we had a room-sized tank, it would do no good. They're not for sale.

This one is a puffer fish. We saw one of these, which was enough for me. They're pretty big (we saw probably a 14"-15" one).

These are convict tang fish. There are a variety of tangs. Dory, from Finding Nemo, is also a tang. These are hugely popular fish. These ones are smaller and live in schools, but I found out that Dory fish, which grow to 8"-12", aren't supposed to be in a smaller tank than 125 gallons (which is a big tank).

This is a butterfly fish, "because no one ever suspects... the butterfly[fish]" (OK, just a little call-out to Simpson's fans). There are lots of different types of these too, including one that looks strangely like the Moorish Idol.

These are flounders, who dig in the sand to disguise themselves and have their face on one side of their bodies, oddly enough. Kevin and I saw these off of the beach our condo was on.

And this is the beautiful Moorish Idol.

These are needle fish, who like to swim up at the surface, and often looked very perturbed when I swam by.

And these fish make me laugh. They look like they're wearing makeup. These are parrot fish, which are huge and beautiful. I, of course, liked to follow them around, which made them swim away, which made me follow, etc., etc.

Which leads to where I am today. Kevin would catch me in the bookstore reading "Saltwater Aquariums for Dummies" and doing even more research on tropical fish. I knew he was worried that I'd bite of more than I could chew. So last week I tricked him into going over to PETCO with me. We looked at all the fish, and I admit, only the saltwater ones were interesting. But, I finally settled for this one, which cost about $3.60,lives in fresh water, and I guess is pretty too for a very low-maintenance fish.

I think Kevin was relieved.

We've decided to name him Huey. Kevin suggested Bluey, which reminded me of "Kablooie" from "Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie" from Calvin and Hobbes, and that just naturally led to us calling him Huey. Even if he isn't a hamster. Welcome to the family, Huey.

Dolphins, Geckos, and Monastery Tag

We've captured some of the fun and funny Hawai'i moments on video, and after swallowing my pride about being seen in a bathing suit so up close and personal, I've decided to share. First, after breakfast one morning on our lana'i, we saw a whole huge pod of dolphins swimming right by our hotel. They're far out, but you can see them if you look for the sideways splashing, as they were all jumping out of the ocean on their morning romp.

And because I like animals so much, I can't let a gecko go scurrying by without chasing it all over. I finally caught this one.

This one is from Napili beach, a very sandy beach with steep shores and small waves. This makes it perfect for "Monastery Tag," a game we learned from our guidebook. In this game, you race your partner as high up on the shore as you can get without getting beached. It may look really stupid, but when you're that close to the sand, it looks like you're moving a lot faster. I still have the sand burns on my skin to prove my devotion to this pastime. This one you'll want to turn your earphones down on--I was obviously having a great time.

Beautiful Maui

Today we got back from our vacation this year to beautiful Maui. It was such a great time! Last year Kevin and I only got to spend two full days there, so we figured we'd go back and do all the things we were dying to do earlier. In addition to taking a surfing lesson (I stood up on my first wave!) and snorkeling, our activities pretty much consisted loafing on the beach or taking in the excellent ocean view from our condo's lana'i.

Here are the highlights:

Lava hike (calling the lava sharp is an understatement) and snorkeling at the Aquarium

Reading on the beach. Kevin read Bel Canto. I read Three Cups of Tea and then, when I'd start feeling guilty about being on a tropical island and reading about poor Pakistani children, I'd switch to Confessions of a Shopaholic (both excellent books in their own right).

Took in some fabulous sunsets (Maui is best for this)

Also took in some local culture. This guy (no, not Kevin--behind him) is walking up and down the beach, strumming his guitar and singing, wearing only a thong and a cowboy hat. Excellent stuff.

The Dragon's Teeth in West Maui

The Nakalele Blowhole

Maui's other West Coast sites

Iao Valley State Park. I'll have to tell you later what that mountain represented to the native islanders just 200 years ago, if you're dying to know!

Underwater Pictures

I think this is the last of the Hawaii posts. Kevin bought a disposable camera in a waterproof case for us to take to Hawaii so that we wouldn't ruin our other camera. Here are the highlights from the roll:

Our first snorkel spot by the Aquarium on Maui

Some fish

Angel fish and a rainbow fish

Sea turtles

A playful couple

And...

Some kind of Sea Monster.

Day 7:Pearl Harbor

We had to plan our last day in Hawaii more carefully, because our flight left at 10:00 at night, and we didn't want to be wearing wet swimming suits home on our red eye flight. Kevin read about a short drive up the mountain from Honolulu that was supposed to be sort of like the Road to Hana on Maui, so we decided to do that. First, though, we stopped by Leonard's bakery for the second morning in a row to get some malasadas diliciosas. Some of the best baked Hawaiian goods are from Portuguese sailors, including Hawaiian bread, but these malasadas were something else: sugar, cinnamon sugar, or banana, coconut, or chocolate filled. Here's a great shot of me and the Leonard's bakery dumpster.

And here we are driving up the road to Round Top, above Honolulu.

And this is what the road was like as we drove around. It sprinkled on us a bit, and the whole place smelled like flowers. I'd love to live up here!

In the afternoon we decided to go to Pearl Harbor. It's free to get in, but Kevin and I decided it was worth it to spring for the $5 audio tour as we went through the museum and waited our turn to see the film and ride the boat out to the Arizona memorial. I think the audio tour was totally worth it. I'm a bit of an NPR-junkie, so I've grown accustomed to learning through listening to compiled audio snippets and vignettes told by those who experienced these attacks over 65 years ago.

I'd been to Pearl Harbor once or twice before, but this time it had a lot more meaning to me. Before I was so young that I accepted history as fact and didn't question why things happened the way they did. But this time I was immensely curious to know why the Japanese thought it would be a good idea to bomb the U.S. (we had stopped selling them oil and had closed off the Panama Canal to them, so they thought they'd take out our Pacific fleet and then quickly take over all of the resource-rich French Asian territories before we had time to regroup), or why we hadn't detected the planes coming in (we thought they were our own planes coming from California), or why Japan joined with Germany and Italy (with the invasion of France, these French colonies were ripe for the picking by Japan).

Here's what remains of one of the gun towers of the sunken USS Arizona.

This was also a neat experience for me because my grandpa served as a colonel in WWII in Asia, and despite that I've always studied and learned more about the European side of the war, and here I got to immerse myself in a totally new perspective.

Days 5 and 6: North Shore

Going to the North Shore of Oahu was my favorite part of our vacation. My brother and sister-in-law had recommended spending a day on the North Shore, and I'm so glad we did. This place was so great for what Kevin and I love about Hawaii that we decided to come back the second day and basically do everything all over again! So that's why I'm combining these two posts together--the only difference is that the second day my sunburn was so bad (see pictures below) that I wore a shirt and shorts the whole day, and we did a lot less swimming.

This day couldn't have gone more perfectly. We started off by going to a bakery in Haleiwa and then snorkeling at Shark's Cove. I'll post underwater pictures from that later. We then drove past the Beach Boys-famed Waiamea Bay (where in the winter the waves measure 20 feet from the back--that's 40 feet from the front) and went to Sunset Beach, which is our favorite beach. We snorkeled and swam a bit there and then returned to Haleiwa for lunch and delicious shaved ice. One thing we noticed about the North Shore are these stickers, "Keep the country country," which essentially means that they don't want to ruin the lax feeling of the North Shore by building a bunch of uppity resorts. And I think this remote, relaxed feeling, this private beach feeling, is what made Kevin and I love this place so much.

After lunch, we headed to "turtle beach," where the water is a bit more shallow, the water a bit more algae-like, and where sea turtles love to congregate. We saw one on the shore and about seven in the water as we snorkeled around. They're a threatened species, so we couldn't touch them, but we could go right up to them and sit next to them and they didn't mind! The only concern of mine was that a big wave would push one into me.

After turtle beach we decided to grab some picnic dinner at the supermarket--a baguette, pre-sliced meat and cheese, Coke, and an Asian salad--and then head to Ted's Bakery for some famous coconut chocolate cream pie to eat on Sunset beach inbetween wave jumping and watching the sun go down.

Days 3 and 4: Maui to Oahu and PCC

The next two days of Hawaii were very busy days. Kevin and I woke up early at our Lahaina resort to take one last dip in the ocean that was right outside our door. As I've mentioned before, the water in Hawaii is oh so warm, even at 7:30 in the morning. We swam for about 45 minutes, and then headed in to shower, pack, and head off to the airport. We arrived around lunchtime in Honolulu and headed out to our Waikiki hotel. Here I am on the balcony.

We spent some time getting settled in, and then decided to walk around Waikiki. This location has a completely different feel than any place we'd been to on Maui. For one thing, it's crowded. There are tons of tourists here. Everything is in both English and Japanese, and it's very upscale. It would be a great place for high-end shopping, as we had Prada, Saks, and many other of the like right on our street. Our hotel was also right next to the International Market (a large flea market), which was a lot of fun (and a lot more affordable too!). We grabbed some lunch there and kept on with our walking tour.

We ate at a great restaurant right on the beach, and they even gave us free dessert because we told them we were celebrating Kevin's graduation from law school. That was one thing that we were constantly asked on this trip: Is it your honeymoon? Your anniversary? One guy who was selling surfing lessons on Waikiki asked us if we were celebrating, and I randomly replied, "Yes. We're celebrating our love," all seriously. Ah. Great times. After dinner we walked along Waikiki and watched all the surfers while the sun went down.

The next day we planned to go to the Polynesian Cultural Center all the way out in Laie. Our guidebook described Laie the farthest place from Waikiki in both geography and culture. The town is very predominantly LDS, complete with an LDS temple, BYU Hawaii, and the Polynesian Cultural Center, in which 70% of their employees are BYU Hawaii students. We stopped by BYU Hawaii first to see what the campus was like. It was humorously strange the way that the carpets, tables, chairs, and even building exteriors were so much like the BYU Provo campus. It really felt like I was back in Utah. We stopped by the bookstore where I picked up the Jack Johnson CD I love and Kevin got a shirt and hat. We were pretty disappointed they didn't have Hawaii-specific BYU pens, notepads, folders, etc., but it's all on a pretty small scale. After that, we hopped over to the temple to tour the grounds.

Straight down from the temple is the beach with a famous arch where a Tsunami blew a hole right through a fin. I was captivated by the way the water hit the rocks. That figure moving around way out there is Kevin.

After that we headed over to the Polynesian Cultural Center, where they are set up in eight or so little villages representing the various regions of Polynesia (Hawaii, Tahiti, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, etc.). They go to a lot of detail, and the buildings in those villages are even made of the same materials as their real-life counterparts. We watched cultural presentations of pit fires, stick-started fires, palm tree climbing, coconut husking and cracking, guitar and ukulele playing, and lots of dancing. Below is a shot from the afternoon canoe show, where each village presents a couple of traditional dances on canoes.

And here's Kevin outside a Fiji building holding a Noni Fruit. He has this thing with the Tahitian Noni building in Provo, with the very large picture of the guy blowing a conch shell.

When we were through touring the villages, we headed off to our traditional Hawaiian luau (rated the best by the guide books, despite the lack of alcohol) where we sat with some really nice people from Ohio and ate a pig that had been roasting underground. After that we went to the night show, where we saw more dancing from the different islands and men who danced with fire and weren't afraid to sit on it. Lots of fun laughs.

Day 2: Road to Hana Part 2

Back to the Road to Hana. This was honestly one of my favorite days in Hawaii, and even if we go back soon, I would do this drive all over again.

My favorite part of this drive was a tiny village called Nahiku. Kevin and I drove down the road there and parked across from the park and the little village church, which reminded me so much of little pioneer churches you see in the Midwest.

We walked further down the road and over a bridge to a beautiful view of the ocean. What was so great about this spot is that off to the left and down about 15 steps there was a little shady freshwater waterfall and pool separated by some boulders from the ocean. It was so awesome, and I think we could have spent all day there.

Back along the Hana Highway, we stopped in a the Black Sands beach at a state park and got out enough to get some very big grains of black lava sand in our sandals. Apparently these beaches are formed by harsh waves crashing against the lava, and they are formed in a matter of days. Most don't have a safe bay to maintain them, so they usually quickly fade away, although this particular one has been around for centuries.

We stopped by Hana Harbor for some hamburgers and continued on to the "Seven Sacred Pools" in a National Park there. I first heard about these pools on a Meg Ryan movie, IQ, but apparently the name was totally a marketing ploy (there aren't seven distinct pools, and they've never been sacred as far as we could tell). This was a great hangout--more waterfalls and freshwater pools overlooking the ocean. It was the weekend, so there were a lot of locals there swimming and it was a bit crowded. We were satisfied with this as our destination and turned around to make it back to Lahaina for some quick pasta and a restful night's sleep.