Hiking, Waves (and whales) and Cooking

Today was utterly fantastic. Class in the morning, got a little heated but that's life. Lunch in our condos, sammiches, and then we went hiking. Denny told us we were snorkeling, but it was actually hiking. Woops.

We drove out past where the map said we were allowed to drive in a rental, but we went anyway. Denny is how he is. So we drive, the road's good, the road's good but narrow, lots of pulling over for others and having others pull over for us, some with gratitude, others not. That's life. Then the road was narrow and bad, and then we were driving on lava flows. The area we were driving through was really interesting, about 200 years' old lava flows. Still extremely rocky, extremely uneven, very little vegetation. I've got lots of photos which I'll post sooner or later. We saw some birds. So finally we get to the place, it looks about as inhospitable as anywhere I've ever been. Denny says we're going to hike for about a mile until we find a place to snorkel. We saw a lot of interesting things, some nice little coves. Lots of urchins, some limpets, some other things too. I managed to get pictures and even video of some ants dragging a caterpillar, which like the crows in Alaska was a behavior I'd heard about but hadn't had a chance to see before. Fantastic. All the coves were too rocky, had too harsh of waves, or had too many urchins (I almost stepped on several before I realized they were there, woops), so we never snorkeled. Still, though. Also saw a few goats in the distance, thanks to David, which was unexpected. Met a couple from Columbus, David and I talked to them for a bit, which was cool. They should be following this blog, in fact. Hi, Doug and Mary in Maui! (If I messed up your names I sincerely, sincerely apologize.)

So finally we got back in the vans and headed to a sandy beach. Not much by way of life. Anh saw a few fish, but I just had a great time in the water. The waves were enough to tumble in, let them push me around and up to shore, lots of that. It was utterly fantastic. Found a piece of horn coral and a cool shell, too, which I kept. Swam around a bit, and most exciting of all... David heard some whales and told us. So I tried, and tried, and tried, and it was probably over half a dozen times but I finally heard it. Very faint, very high, kind of a clicking way in the background, but I just managed to. I think it was almost out of my range altogether, actually. (Yes, David is many decades older than me and probably can hear a higher range. Shhh.) It was awesome. Saw one blow earlier, too. Might have been porpoises, we're not sure. So I played around a lot more in the surf, took several pictures of Becky and Caitlin on their request, saw a couple egrets and a cat on the way out. Drove back and John asked me to go guard a grill. I got talking to people, mostly Canadians, golfers (apparently Canadians coming to Hawaii is a big thing, who knew). So that was cool, one woman had been to Tanzania, the Phillipines and Australia before and she was interesting to talk to. Then a family from LA here for a wedding came down and was cooking, one of the women had been to Giza and she was a lot of fun to talk to. The guy, John, was really entertaining. He asked if I was doing all this for vacation, I said no, I'm taking classes, and they're actually a bit more academically demanding than I expected, and he said “oh, woe is you.” Johnny B. was taking forever to come down, I didn't realize they were assembling all the kabobs, so I gave up on guarding and just chatted. When he finally came down we went over to a different set of grills which was completely abandoned, which worked. I played runner for a bit, going up and down and carrying messages, met a guy named Dan (also Canadian, here surfing) at the grill John was at, and then got a much-needed shower. All in all, a fantastic day, looking forward to dinner.

Saturday, January 16th, roughly 6:50 PM-7:30 PM local time, with long interruption in between