I never got around to journaling last night, which is a little unfortunate, but I'll do the best I can. In the morning we went to a NOAA marine sanctuary facility and learned about humpback whales, some general information and then a fair bit about the threat of entanglement and how they deal with it. Very interesting stuff, it would have been worth it for either part of the presentation alone. Even after the whale-watch the other day I learned a lot more about the whales, the different subpopulations and their migration patterns are especially interesting. What really grabbed me about the whale rescue work was how many of their techniques had been borrowed or adapted from the whaling industry. It was really interesting to see methods used to kill whales in the past being used to save them today.
After that we went to the Iao Needle, a geological formation in the rainforest of Maui. Unlike the last “rainforest” we were promised, this one actually was a rainforest. Far too many plants to keep track of, though we didn't see much fauna. The most interesting find was when Nikki saw a small brown lizard, which I managed to get a couple pictures of before we scared it off. She and I were both checking the water for invertebrates, but no luck. The needle itself was enormous, a pillar of earth just slightly separated from the rest of the mountains. The entire area was intensely green. Down below, they had made a “cultural area” of sorts to show some rough layout of an indigenous village. There wasn't much there, only a few signs, but I think I actually preferred seeing it laid out with little explanation. The system carrying water from man-made pool to man-made pool was surprisingly complex, but I'm not sure if it was based on ancient techniques or a modern innovation (it used PVC piping).
We came back to the condos, had lunch, sent some things home (I had some... creative packing. Enjoy, mom and dad!). We had the afternoon off, so Clay, Liz, Becky, Caitlin and I walked out to get some shave ice. It was absolutely delicious, an excellent choice. I spent the rest of the afternoon just lounging, dinner was mostly just an attempt to wipe out our left-overs. We had a ridiculous amount of brown sugar left, so John caramelized a bunch of fruit, but that didn't get finished and there was still a full bag of brown sugar sitting around, unfortunately. After dinner we went down to the professors' condos for 45 minutes of preparation for leaving and class. We discussed Haleakala in the Biomes course. Most of my notes related to elevation, but we learned that what really mattered was winds bringing moisture. I haven't been very good with winds, historically, so I'll obviously need to work on that for the future biomes. (My altitude notes weren't wrong, they just weren't the driving factor behind the plant growth, or lack thereof). Apparently there really was a rainforest there two years ago, so we discussed what could have changed that as well, Denny and David are wondering if Maui might be in a drought. But the big lesson was definitely winds bringing moisture, and how land formations blocking the wind affects the life there.
After that it was back to the condo for cleaning, sitting around and trying to eat whatever we could to get rid of it before we had to throw it out. Woke up at 4:45 this morning, finished up the last few things, cleaned the condo and here I am at the Kahului airport. Our flight for Honolulu leaves in less than an hour, then we have a three hour layover, and from there to Tokyo, from there to Bangkok. We're supposed to have wireless in Bangkok, but I'm not holding my breath.
Leaving the country for 2.5 months today... it's an intense thought.
Thursday, January 21st, roughly 7:10-7:20 AM local time
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