Under The Sea

This is my last post about my first trip to Hawaii. And I swear there's no history in this one, which will probably come as a relief to about half of the eight people who read this thing regularly.

If there was one thing I had to do in Hawaii (other than visit Volcanoes National Park, that is), it was get in the water. And not just once. Like a bunch of times. I didn't waste any time at all on this one: my feet were in the ocean hours after we landed. Less than 48 hours later, I was riding a gigantic trainer surfboard towards the Waianae shore trying to actually stand up for a few seconds. Which I managed to do. Barely. But I did it.

Surfing scratched my in-the-water itch on Oahu, which was the first island we visited. It was without question one of the best things I've ever done in my entire life, even if I wasn't all that successful at it. Sometimes, it's the journey and not the destination, or so I've heard. After Oahu, we scheduled a water activity that I knew I'd handle a whole lot better: snorkeling.

First time in a wetsuit. I like these things. They keep you warm and they float.

The last time I went snorkeling was at the Dry Tortugas National Park and it didn't really go that well, mostly because I was on an island off the coast of Florida in potential shark territory (I'm sure they are harmless) with about 12 other people (on the entire island!) early in the morning with no supervision and no practice. I swore Hawaii would be different. I'd spent the six weeks or so prior to our trip getting some of my stamina back by swimming laps at Arlington's Washington-Lee High School pool. Plus I'd be with a larger group of people in a concentrated area supervised by people generally no older than 29 years old. I knew this time I was ready.

We scheduled two snorkeling trips in our nine days in Hawaii: one off the town of Kona on The Big Island and one bright and early (or dark and early when we first set out might have been more appropriate) at Molokini Crater off the west coast of Maui. I also went armed with my brand new GoPro camera so I could record some of what I saw while I was floating on top of the water looking for fish and other creatures. So part of this post is really an opportunity to show off my practice run with my new gadget. And I think that's OK.

We boarded our first snorkeling boat in Hawaii just a bit north of where we were staying in Kailua-Kona at about 5 pm. Yep, that's not a typo, 5 pm. The plan was to sail (and I'm using sail in a metaphorical sense only since we were on a powerboat) for about an hour, wait for the sun to set completely and then all get in the water once it was dark. Sound sketchy? I thought so too but apparently we were under the watch of trained professionals and apparently you have to go at this time if you want to see manta rays feeding.

Now before you get freaked out about this being dangerous, we are talking manta rays here, not sting rays. These things have no real way to harm humans. They don't even have teeth. They eat by filtering plankton, fish larva and other sorts of small living things in the sea by just swimming into schools of these things and swallowing what they can. Plus if you are concerned about my safety, I'm sitting comfortably at home in northern Virginia blogging about all this. So there!

The feeding part of this whole thing is where we tourists come in. Apparently, the plankton that manta rays like to eat are attracted to powerful lights so all you have to do is shine some lights in the water and wait for the mantas to arrive. From there it's showtime. Just look down in the water and be amazed. Sounds simple, right? It actually is. The folks that organize these tours have some specially fabricated surfboard looking things with a PVC rail mounted around the perimeter in a rectangular arrangement. The surfboard is to keep the whole thing afloat; the rail is for gawkers like me to grab onto while we are watching the rays. The surfboard is also fitted with some powerful lights that shine down into the water to draw the plankton onto the dinner plate so to speak.

So we get to the anchoring spot; get dressed in a wetsuit; watch the sunset; don mask, snorkel and flippers; and then in the water we go. And then we just looked down and waited.

The first five minutes of our manta ray encounter was spent looking at maybe a hundred or so little fish swim back and forth in circles in the light, presumably snatching up the same creatures that the mantas were coming to devour. Then eventually we saw the topside of a manta ray maybe ten feet or so away drifting by, pretty much triangular in shape and generally black in color (or at least it looked that way in the dark ocean) with some white speckles. Some of these things are big (they can get up to about 20 feet across) and they all look extremely graceful moving through the water.

I was prepared for all that. I'd done my usual homework after all. What I wasn't prepared for what how these creatures actually feed and how close they would come to us. I figured the mantas would sort of zoom around below us for a while just gathering whatever they could scoop up by moving through the beams of light created by our guides. My expectation then was that we'd see maybe one or two of these things move into and out of the light then be gone until they decided to turn around and come back for some more of their all you can eat buffet. But that's not how they work.

When a manta moved into the column of light from where we were hanging on top of the water  they stayed there, generally starting by moving up towards the surface then rolling onto their back before looping around again. Imagine the manta ray moving in the path of a giant ferris wheel with its mouth wide open and you'll get the picture. It was incredible to see down into the mouths of these creatures as they did loop de loops in front of us. And when they reached the top of their loops and turned on their back exposing their white bellies, they were at most two feet from the surface of the water. And us. It was short but it was amazing.

These manta ray trips are almost a sure thing. The company we went with (the very imaginatively named Manta Ray Dives of Hawaii) advertise a 98% hit rate. If you go out. And it was almost too rough for us to do just that but they decided to go anyway. I'm glad they did. I wouldn't have missed this experience for the world. It was probably the second best experience we had in Hawaii (after surfing).

Snorkeling n the main crater of Molokini...

So after raving about our encounter with manta rays, our second snorkeling adventure had to be a bit of a letdown, right? Well, yes and no. Yes, because it certainly wasn't as up close and personal as watching mantas feed. No because it was just different from the night snorkel, it got us a good look at some different fish and it got us some amazing views of the sun hitting the deep deep ocean.

For our second snorkeling trip, we elected to head to Molokini, an extinct volcano with about two thirds of its perimeter above the surface of the ocean and the remaining third just below the surface. The result is a sheltered dive and snorkeling environment which doesn't feel the effects of the ocean's currents. That means some relatively calm snorkeling once you are inside the crater's perimeter. It's located about a 30 minute ride on one of the Redline Rafting Company's big red rafts from the town of Kihei on Maui's west shore.

We chose to leave for Molokini from Kihei because it's about as close to the crater as you can get and all the tours, no matter the travel time, seem to leave at about the same time. Proximity plus the speed those rafts can move would get us there before the rest of the boats showed up. And that was actually well worth it, even if it meant an earlier than 6 am start time from our hotel just north of Lahaina. We had the place to ourselves other than one or two other small boats when we first got there.

...at the submerged perimeter...

We made two stops at the crater: one well inside it and one just outside the submerged perimeter. The first stop got us a look at a number of different types of fish but they weren't that large, that colorful or that plentiful. They also weren't that close. If they were on the bottom floor of the crater, that was sometimes 20 feet or more away and when you got into shallower water, you had to be careful not to get too close to the edge of the water to avoid (a) crashing into a rocky crater top and (b) damaging any of the protected coral. I got back onto the red raft a little disappointed. I've been snorkeling in the Caribbean before. I remember that being way better.

But if the first stop was a little lackluster, the second made up for it. At its highest underwater point, the submerged edge of Molokini's crater comes to within two to three feet of the surface. That means you are floating on top of the water really close to the coral reef (again in a wetsuit so the effort to stay afloat is minimal) and the fish that are feeding off it. You can get an up close look at the fish, the coral and the anemones that live in the crags of the craters edge without any risk of getting too close to the shore because there isn't one. For me and snorkeling, closer is better. Maybe it's the fact I can't wear my glasses and can't see very far.

There were two other plusses of the second stop. First, there is a lot more movement in the water being outside the edge of the crater. You are no longer isolated from the currents and those things can really move you around a bit. Considering the almost complete lack of danger around me that day, it was a no risk way to experience some of the ocean's awesome power. And if you can ever do that with no risk, it's kind of cool.

But the best part was the view. When you are inside the crater, you are essentially inside a bowl which is about probably 30 feet deep at its center. When you are outside the crater, the ground below you drops off suddenly and steeply and you can't see where it ends. The result is a view into some deep gorgeous blue sea that goes and goes. And the best part is just letting the current carry you out from the inside of the crater's wall and just try to find the edge as it descends to the ocean floor. At some points you just can't! This stop was maybe 15 minutes but it was the best part of the boat trip for me.

I know I have to get in more GoPro practice. I'm hoping to get some in this summer. In the meantime, that's my underwater story about Hawaii. This is my last Hawaii post for this trip. Good thing because my next trip is Friday. I'd go back to Hawaii. I loved it! Especially for someone who never really wanted to go there in the first place.

...and looking over the edge, with the sun streaming from above.

Quest For Fire

Three years ago, my friends Larry and Rachel went to Hawaii. Larry went for business; Rachel tagged along and turned it into a vacation. They ended up getting married, which was a surprise to everyone who knew them, even if it was a long time coming. I got the news at a seemingly impromptu happy hour with some of our closest friends when they got back home. The discussion that day over beers and a couple of fireballs (as I remember) was all about the wedding and marriage. How did you do it? When did you know you were going to do this? How did you get a dress? And on and on and on.

And all that was well and good, but I wanted to know something else about their trip: "Did you go to Volcanoes National Park?" After all, what the heck else was there to do in Hawaii? The response to my question? "We didn't go to The Big Island." Now at that time, I didn't really know what to do with that answer. I didn't know what The Big Island was and I didn't understand how you could go all that way and not go to a place where you could possibly see lava flowing into the sea and creating new land. Did you read that? Lava flowing!!! But apparently they didn't go. Either that time or the second time they went a few months later. But enough picking on my friends.

Earlier this year, I wrote a post on this blog about how un-cool I was as a kid and how I never really wanted to go to Hawaii. Turns out that's not exactly completely true. Yes, the un-cool part was right. No doubt there. But the not wanting to ever visit Hawaii was not true because for a few years now I've really really wanted to visit Volcanoes National Park. So not surprisingly, this place was the cornerstone of my vacation plan to the islands. No matter what else got in my way, no matter how much it cost, no matter how long it took to get there, if I was going to visit Hawaii, I was going to visit Volcanoes. And hopefully, God willing (although it might not be my god) see some lava flowing.

Dead white trees still standing, presumably frozen in time by a lava flow.

According to ancient Hawaiian legend, Volcanoes National Park is home to Pele, the goddess of fire, lightning, wind and volcanoes. She lives in the Halema'uma'u Crater at the summit of the volcano Kilauea which is part of Mauna Loa, the smaller of the two 13,000 foot plus peaks that dominate The Big Island. She is there because she was driven out of her homeland of Tahiti by her sister Na-maka-o-kaha'i, the goddess of water. Something about Pele seducing her sister's husband or something like that. Hawaii, as it turned out, had the first peak high enough for Pele to escape her sister's reach from the ocean. So she stopped and stayed.

Pele was perhaps the most revered and feared of the ancient Hawaiian gods because to the people of the islands, she made her power and anger obvious every time Kilauea erupted, which it did frequently enough to make people remember she was there. When she was not erupting and causing mass destruction, there were very often small flows of lava on the mountain or a bubbling lake of molten rock that glowed orange in the night to remind everyone of her wrath. It's no surprise that she was one of the last ancient gods to be abandoned after Christianity spread through the islands.

We arrived at Pele's home on day four of our Hawaiian trip, having flown over that morning on a 35 minute or so island hopper flight from Oahu. About the entire length of the flight later, we had de-planed; made our way through the airport; picked up our car; and were heading upwards from the shore in our not-very-powerful-at-all Nissan Versa Note excited to hopefully come face to face with Pele for the very first time. We hit the Park after about a  45 minute drive from Hilo airport.

First stop: the Kilauea Visitor Center to get a park map and a lay of the land and to plan our day. Volcanoes National Park is divided into two sections: a limited access upper section that covers the peak of Mauna Loa and the Moku-aweoweo Caldera, and a lower section focused on the Kilauea Caldera about halfway between the top and the Pacific Ocean. We spent an entire day and night (electing to splurge for the Volcano House hotel in the Park) in the lower section which is where most visitors spend their time. A day here is great; seeing most of everything is totally possible in 24 hours without being rushed in any way.

We got the bad news about as soon as we set foot in the visitor center: there was nowhere in the park that you could see flowing lava on the day we visited. I was crushed. I felt like I did when I went to see the northern lights in Iceland, or more accurately did not see the northern lights in Iceland. Time to make the best of it anyway, I guess.

Me standing on the 1974 lava flow.

Heading out of the Kilauea Visitor Center, we had two choices: continue straight on the road towards the crater itself or head back out of the park a little and hang a right towards the Chain of Craters Road, a winding two lane road that would take us right down to the ocean. Because we knew we wouldn't see any lava near the crater (or anywhere else for that matter), we took the road to the sea, figuring by the time we got back, the day tourists might be cleared out a little.

This was a great choice. The roundtrip drive is about 38 miles. It took us four hours. We didn't expect it would take that long but almost every minute of it was completely worthwhile, starting about thirty minutes into the trip. 

Immediately surrounding the Kilauea Caldera is a rainforest, a lush tropical canopy with chirping calling birds that you look for in the palm trees but just can't quite make out despite them repeatedly making the same noise so you can hone in on them. It's pretty and unlike any sort of forest you can find near my home near Washington, D.C. and it's good for a quick hike or two. We stopped in part of the rainforest on the way down to walk through a lava tube, a hollowed out rock tunnel caused by an old underground lava flow, and on the way back up the mountain to try to find some of the elusive nene, the ground-dwelling goose-like bird that is the state bird of Hawaii. We came up empty on this second quest.

But it's when we cleared the rainforest that the drive got really interesting for us and it was totally unexpected. The terrain after the rainforest is drier but still green (albeit a lot paler), made up of grasses and small shrubs and trees that looks a lot less hospitable than the rainforest but still live-able. Until you get to the site of a 1974 lava flow, a probably quarter mile wide stripe of devastation cutting from the right side of the road to the left and down on to the ocean. The landscape in this location is nothing but black rock and it's clear from the lack of vegetation anywhere within the flow 42 years later that the destruction was complete. It was shocking to see this and quite honestly completely awe-inspiring. Any time I get a hint of the true power of mother nature, I'm impressed. As long as I'm not in the way, I suppose.

The 1974 flow is worth a stop and a little walk over the hardened lava just to think about what it would have been like to see and feel a river of lava this big flowing over the land to the ocean, cutting down anything in its path. God forbid you were anywhere near this thing when it was moving; it must have been terrifying. And 42 years is not that long ago. The current Chain of Craters Road passes right through the flow, having been chiseled out of the lava to allow tourists like me to see it and move beyond, which we did.

Greenish and black striped landscape showing the path of past lava flows.

The 1974 flow is not the last or the most recent you'll pass by or through on your way to the water. This volcano has been very active over the last few centuries and you can see flow after flow of hardened lava as you move downhill. It's a landscape of stripes of barely surviving vegetation interspersed with shimmering cracked cooled molten rock that now looks like the top of brownies that you pull fresh out of the oven (I'm not kidding; there's no other way to describe it). And it's pretty amazing to see the path of each flow when you are at the bottom of the hill looking up towards the top. It gives you a great view of just how tenuous life is in that sort of a location and how quickly it could be wiped out.

But for sure life existed down here, including people a long long time ago who managed to find ways to grow 'uala (Hawaiian sweet potatoes) and other crops among the lunar like landscape of the lower slope of the volcano. Their memory is preserved today in the Pu'u Loa Petroglyph site that sits just less than 3/4 of a mile off the road. The crude patterned and anthropomorphic scratchings in the rock have somehow managed to avoid eruption after eruption so we can see them today. The round trip is a little less than 1.5 miles and it took us about an hour to get there and back, a reminder of how difficult it is to move over this sort of landscape. Wear a hat if it's sunny and you have as little or less hair as I do up top. You'll regret not having one. Trust me.

The rest of the Chain of Craters Road gets you a look at gorgeous vistas, fossilized white trees and plenty of tsunami warning signs. You can get good education on tsunamis and how much they might destroy by walking along the Pacific Ocean shore and feeling the spray from a relatively calm sea breaking on the back rocks some thirty or forty feet below you. The whole trip made it pretty evident what kind of destruction this volcano and the nearby ocean is capable of, which is exactly what I was looking for. Once all that was done, it was time to go see the crater.

Some of the Pu'u Loa Petroglyphs.

Prior to visiting Volcanoes National Park, my only trip to see the crater of a volcano was last April when I bussed and walked to the top of Italy's Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that wiped out the Roman towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum and some others about 2,000 years ago. The crater of that volcano is about a half a mile across. I thought that was pretty typical for one of these things. The Kilauea Caldera is about eight miles across; it's absolutely enormous. And it's active, or at least the Halema'uma'u Crater where Pele lives is, which is about the size of the entire crater at Vesuvius.

At Vesuvius you can get right up to the mouth of the crater. No such luck at Halema'uma'u. While it would be cool to get a peek at the lake of molten lava, there is a very obvious cloud of toxic sulphur dioxide gas emanating from the volcano which prohibits up close access. When we visited the Park's Jaggar Museum, which at about 3/4 of a mile away is the closest you can get to the crater, we found park rangers with gas masks in case the winds shifted. Indeed at one point, we all had to be ushered inside the building until the wind shifted directions.

The gas rising from the unseen lava is cool but in the daytime a cloud of gas is all you can see. The better view of the crater is at night, starting at dusk and ending at dawn. We got as close as we could during the day, at nightfall and the next morning and the show in the fading and emerging light was worth the trip, even if we couldn't lay eyes on or walk beside (kidding...sort of) an active lava flow.

It's amazing that this sort of a sight captured my imagination the way that it did. And way more so in the evening and morning than during the day. I couldn't hear much at all and all I could see was a smoking glow, as if someone had lit a bonfire inside the volcano's crater. But it captivated me enough to just stand and stare. We spent a total of three sessions of about 30 minutes each just watching gas rise from an unseen lake of lava. But the way the glow shifted from side to side on the left of the crater and the barely audible white noise like sound in the isolated dusk and dawn hit me was was enough to make us just watch and imagine.

If I can find places that make me stop and dream for a couple of hours on each vacation, I'll be satisfied with every one of them. Even though we didn't see actual molten rock on this trip, I'm glad we went to Volcanoes. I'm glad we got a taste for just how dangerous and angry Pele could be and seeing the dawn making the lava's glow disappear as the sun rose was a definite highlight of this trip for me even if all I did was stand in one spot and look and be silent and think. I'm still disappointed about the lava, though. Maybe next time?

Run For Your Life

Imagine you have a death sentence on your head for a minor crime, something as innocuous as oh...having a another person's shadow touch you. Imagine you believe very strongly that powerful gods exist in this world and that if their agents catch you, they will strangle you until you no longer breathe. Imagine it's dark and you have no form of light, not because you can't make fire or electricity doesn't exist yet, but because carrying any sort of light would make you easier to spot. You are scared, exhausted and anxious because your life is literally in the balance and there is nobody to help you.

Imagine in this situation that you have one hope to stay alive. If you can just make it through the jungle, traverse dangerous black-as-night volcanic rocks, avoid drowning in the ocean and somehow manage to scale a ten foot high by 17 foot wide stone wall, you might just make it to a priest who can commute your sentence and save you, allowing you to return to your family and friends. Now, if you don't like this option, you really have no other choice. You can't survive on your own, won't be able to hide and you live on an island in the middle of the largest ocean on Earth so fleeing somewhere far away is not an option. So you run. To find a priest.

After miles of pushing through completely wild terrain and with the noise of the surf masking any sound of the pursuers you fear are hot on your heels, you finally spot your destination and see the wall you need to climb over to survive. There are torches with open flames to allow some sort of visibility and give you a point to head towards but the flames also cast deep shadows that make it difficult to see clearly and exaggerate the features of the rocky shore around you. Just as you are about to reach salvation, out of the shadows lurches a terrifying monster with a wide maw and huge teeth that in your deepest nightmares you imagine is just what the gods would send to capture and kill you. And it's not alone, there are others just as grotesque and hungry for human flesh all around. You fear all is lost and you're done for. It's all over.

Now if all that sounds like something out of a science fiction or horror movie, you might be correct. But it also might quite well have happened in Hawaii about 250 years ago. And that's not really that long ago if you think about it.

When English Royal Navy Captain James Cook unexpectedly stumbled upon the Hawaiian islands in 1778, he discovered a society with death sentences for stepping on someone's shadow, or looking at someone the wrong way or touching someone's fingernail clippings. I'm not kidding here. All these were actual crimes with severe punishments in ancient Hawaiian society. Of course, these crimes couldn't really be committed by the islands' nobility, or ali'i. Nor could they be committed by the priests, or kahunas, who made up these silly rules with very serious consequences. But for the majority of the people in the island chain, the common people or maka'ainana, the possibility of sacrificing anything from their crops to their lives based on the whim of someone powerful was a daily risk.

Although some sentences could be handed down based on proclamation from an ali'i for whatever reason he or she made up on any given day, most rules in the society were issued as kapus, or forbidden acts, that required punishment. There were various types of kapus, from prohibitions on women eating various types of food (and in the presence of men entirely) to specific requirements for interacting with ranking ali'i to rules about how fishing could take place. Breaking a kapu brought a sentence without trial, discussion or mercy.

But for some kapu breakers, there was a way out. If you could make to a pu'uhonua, or place of refuge, before being caught, it was possible to have your sin purged by a kahuna and you would be allowed to return to society unharmed. Seems like a fairly straightforward concept until you think about the obstacles and dangers in place: long distances; treacherous ground to cover; high walls to climb; and people on the lookout for you. And then there are the ki'i (sometimes called tikis), carved wooden representations of men with grotesque and ferocious features that must have scared the daylights out of many a man or woman trying to reach the pu'uhonua. Or so I have already imagined.

Looks gorgeous today, but climbing that wall with people after you was no joke.

In Hawaii today, you can find tikis pretty much wherever you go. They are placed outside stores or hotels or luaus with funny expressions designed to amuse tourists who likely have no idea that their original purpose was to scare people away. Admittedly, these cartoon versions of the old Hawaiian ki'i aren't very scary at all. But there is one place in the islands where you can see tikis like they had back when kapus were unbreakable laws to be feared and respected: Pu'uhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park on The Big Island. If you want to see the real thing (or more accurately reproductions of the real thing), then you have to put this place on your itinerary.

Established as a National Historical Park in 1962, the Pu'uhonua O Honaunau is the best preserved former pu'uhonua in the islands. The park features walking trails which take you through the site of a former royal village and then through and around the thick wall that kapu breakers had to get through to be freed of their crimes. Today it's just a gorgeous setting like most other spots in Hawaii but you can get a sense of how dangerous and forbidding it once was. The wall is thick, massive and seems impenetrable and the rocks on the shoreline would seem to prohibit any sort of access by water if the sea was in any way rough.

The attraction for me here, though, was the ki'i. There are a dozen or so in the Park and while they look tame today in the broad daylight of the 21st century, it's fun to imagine the impression that these would have had on people 250 years or more ago. Or maybe fun isn't the right word. Horrifying? Remember, people believed that there were supernatural beings all around them. Like the comical tikis that stand in front of tourist spots today, some of these figures seem funny but others are believably frightening to a 18th century innocent man or woman on the run. For me, it's the open mouths with their teeth showing and the strange eyes that seem to be covered over with some sort of protective shield.

The ki'i didn't survive long after the arrival of Captain Cook, whose first (and last as it turned out; he was killed less than a month after he hit town) landing in Hawaii ended up opening the door for more and more Europeans and Americans each subsequent year. By the year 1819, just 41 years after Cook sailed into Waimea Bay on the island of Kauai, the kapu system was abolished, punted forever into history by Queen Ka'ahumanu who became disillusioned with the entire system once she saw the white men repeatedly violating the laws of the gods with no divine retribution whatsoever.

So it may not have just been the lack of justice for the white man that made up the Queen's mind. She was also apparently sick of having to eat separately from the men as well as being forbidden to eat bananas and certain types of fish. None of that made any sense to her and I think she was right. Whatever the ultimate motivation, the kapu system, the pu'uhonua and the ki'i that tried their darnedest to keep people away from those sanctuaries were gone just about one generation after Cook's arrival. Christianity moved in to fill the void and Hawaii would never be the same again.

For me, visiting the Pu'uhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park was a touchstone moment of my Hawaiian trip. There's some genuine history that's chilling here but I can also appreciate the ki'i, these agents of the kahunas, both as historical artifacts and a sort of folk art at the same time. I love these things so much that I have one on my desk at home staring at me as I finish this post. I opted for the "winner" tiki from one of the ABC Stores we passed while on vacation. I don't expect to ever lose at anything from now on, although I don't have my hopes up too high. At least it's not out to kill me!

Broke Da Mouth

This is not my first post about food on this blog, nor do I expect it will be my last. I absolutely love to eat and an integral part of any good trip for me either abroad or here at home features an enthusiastic investigation of local cuisine. Now admittedly, I typically do more exploring on this subject when I travel outside of the United States because food tends to be more different when I use my passport to travel. When I stay domestic, I usually find one or two local or regional dishes along with foods that I might eat every day or week while I'm at home. It seems like everywhere I go in the U.S. has a similar sort of baseline of American or adopted American fare.

Everywhere, that is, except for Hawaii.  Hawaiian food is really like nothing else in the United States. Like it's totally different. Compared to the rest of the country, it's complete chaos. And it's mostly related to who lives there now and how they got there. So to understand the food on Hawaii, you have to understand a little bit of the islands' history. Or more precisely, a little bit of their sugar plantation history. So here comes your history lesson for this post. 

Until the late 1700s, Hawaii was about as isolated from the rest of the world as it could have possibly been (mostly due to the fact that it's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean). As a result, the diet for the islands' inhabitants was fairly limited. Food choices for the locals at that time consisted of whatever the initial settlers brought with them when they sailed there from Polynesia added to whatever existed before they got there. Their grocery list back then included taro, bananas, sweet potatoes, fish, ferns (yes, ferns), coconuts and some other odds and ends.

Then in about the mid-1800s, some Americans, most of whose families had come to Hawaii as missionaries, decided they could make a whole lot of money growing sugar cane. It seemed to them that Hawaii's climate was ideal to facilitate large scale sugar production and they were right. The big problem? Running a sugar cane plantation requires a lot of manual labor and there just simply weren't enough people in the islands at that time to make such an operation work. So they started looking around for sources of labor. Around the globe, that is.

The Chinese were the first takers. They started arriving in 1850 to work the land. And that worked for a while until the plantation owners decided there might be a risk of labor unrest if there were too many people from a single national origin. In the 1860s, the plantations started bringing people from Japan to supplement their Chinese workforce. Then it was the Portuguese in the 1870s. This sort of stuff went on for the next 30 or more years. The Koreans were next. Then the Filipinos. And each time a new group of foreigners arrived on Hawaiian soil, they brought their own food traditions. And some of them stuck.

The result of all this? A unique menu which over time became sort of endemic: part Polynesian, part Chinese, part Japanese, part American, part whoever else happened to show up to the party. Nowhere else in the U.S. will you find such a mix of dishes as we found in Hawaii last month. Hawaiian pidgin for absolute deliciousness is "broke da mouth." Here are some things that broke our mouths in February on Oahu, The Big Island and Maui, along with some foods that decidedly did not.

Plate Lunch

Plate lunches are a Hawaiian staple. There's no other way to put it than that. Our first meal about two hours after we landed in Honolulu was our first plate lunch and it would not be the last. There would be four more to follow over the next nine days. Plate lunches are about the simplest kind of food you can find, which in a way presaged a lot of our experience with food on the islands. Take two scoops of rice, one scoop of macaroni salad, add a protein and maybe some sauce or gravy, and you have yourself a plate lunch. Need to eat a lot really cheap in Hawaii? Have at least one plate lunch per day.

Roast pork. Mahi mahi. Shoyu chicken. Beef curry. Chopped steak. Ham steak. Kalbi ribs. Eggs. Lau lau. Think of any kind of protein and you can likely either make a plate lunch out of it or find a restaurant somewhere on one of the islands that already has it on a menu. It's as versatile as it is simple. We ate plate lunches on picnic tables, in covered porches of restaurants and sitting on the grassed in curb area of a grocery store parking lot. And we never paid more than about $8 for any of these meals.

The invention of the plate lunch is a bit of a mystery. I'm not even going to try and track that down for this post. But I'm craving some mac salad with some sort of protein while I'm writing this. The mac salad, we found, was (with one exception) about the best part of these meals, especially if mixed with a little shoyu chicken sauce. Eat as much as or more than I did if you go. And plan on some exercise afterwards.

Malasadas

How a group of people from Portugal decided that the way to jumpstart their lives was to travel across the Atlantic Ocean, sail around South America's Cape Horn and land on some tiny islands in the middle of the biggest ocean on Earth to work on a sugar cane plantation is absolutely beyond me. But I'm glad they did. Because if they didn't, Hawaii wouldn't have malasadas.

Think donut here but not quite cooked all the way through and rolled in plenty of sugar. That's a malasada (which literally means under-cooked) in its truest form. Admittedly, some folks fill them with flavored cream these days but we opted for the original and stopped there. Malasadas in Portugal were traditionally a Mardi Gras food; in an effort to use up all their butter and sugar before the beginning of Lent, the Portuguese made malasadas in profusion. Can't say I blame them. These things are good. As a result, Fat Tuesday is actually known as Malasada Day in Hawaii.

Our single malasada experience was at Champion Malasadas in Honolulu, about 12 hours after our first plate lunch (it was a healthy first 24 hours). We stopped there at the beginning of our first full day of sightseeing on our way out of town and grabbed ourselves a couple of 85 cent (yes, you read that right) fried puffs of goodness each. Our malasadas were handed to us in a wax paper bag inside a brown paper bag and we were cautioned to let them cool down a bit first. These things were so pillowy soft that they almost deflated on the first bite. A little more time got them to a perfectly delicious temperature and texture. I shoveled mine down in about five minutes. The picture above which seems to show me eating them as if they were in a feedbag is pretty much correct. Plan on more exercise.

Poke

If there's one food I crave more than any other from our Hawaii trip, it's poke (pronounced poh-kay). Poke (the name is from the Hawaiian word for "cut") is cubes of raw fish (traditionally tuna) or other sea creature (traditionally octopus and not raw) flavored with some sort of mixture of ingredients that might include oils, vegetables (predominantly some kind of onions) and spices. The dish was originally prepared from the spare cuttings of fish after they had been butchered. Today, of course, people use premium cuts of fish specifically to make poke. And why not, the stuff is generally just awesome.

The most popular base ingredient for poke that we encountered in Hawaii was ahi tuna, which was just fine by me because I love raw tuna. We ate poke from a sushi restaurant, a take out poke place (seriously) and a supermarket (not kidding). At each place we paid vastly different prices, from market price ($32 per pound as it turned out) at Da Poke Shack in Kailua-Kona to $14 for a small plate with macadamia nuts at Banzai Sushi Bar in Haleiwa to $14 per pound for California roll poke at Foodland in Kihei.

While prepping for this trip, we bought a Lonely Planet guide to Hawaii to get us ready to take maximum advantage of our time in the islands. One of the places or maybe THE place that guidebook pointed us for poke was to Foodland, claiming the supermarket chain offered some of the best in the state, complete with free tastings for the asking. Considering the source (I trust Lonely Planet a lot), we humored ourselves and put a stop at one of their stores on our agenda. I still didn't really believe their poke would be better than a place like Da Poke Shack, whose fish was ultra fresh.

It was a kind of an apples and oranges comparison. Foodland's California roll poke is flavored to taste like a (no surprise here) California roll whereas Da Poke Shack's flavors are designed to let the fish shine. Both were delicious but Foodland's arguably had more flavor. And considering the price point, I have to say if I lived in Hawaii, I'd be shopping at Foodland for poke a lot. This stuff was amazing. And all things considered, fairly darned cheap. For sure right now as I write this, it's Foodland's poke I'm craving.

Kalua Pig

Kalua pig or kalua pork is likely one of the biggest misnomers on most menus in the state of Hawaii. The word "kalua" literally means to cook in an underground oven, yet today most pork labeled as kalua pig is not, in fact, cooked underground at all. The process of slow cooking, braising or smoking is way more likely to be used to cook your pig in most Hawaiian restaurants today.

Kalua pig today is most likely found as the centerpiece of a luau meal. A typical imu (or underground oven) is a pit dug in the earth where wood is used to heat up lava rocks which will be used to cook the meat. Once the wood used to start the fire is burned up, the pit is lined with banana leaves and some of the hot rocks are removed from the pit and placed inside the pig. The meat is then seasoned with sea salt and wrapped in more banana and ti leaves and the pig placed in the pit and covered, first with a barrier to retain the moisture, like burlap, and then sand. The result is a super hot slow cooking oven. About 12 hours later, dinner is ready.

According to the menus I read, I allegedly ate kalua pig three times in a week in Hawaii: once on what was surely a frozen pizza; once as part of a plate lunch; and once out of a genuine imu. I'm not a big believer in pork as a tasty meat. Mostly I see it as a protein vehicle to carry other flavors and in the case of my pizza and plate lunch, that's exactly what it was. I got nothing out of those meals except sustenance.

But the kalua pig I had out of the imu was absolutely delicious and I was shocked it was so good. The meat was succulent and perfectly salted to bring out the flavor of the pork. I'm not sure I've had simply salted pork this good in my life. The Old Lahaina Luau deserves a lot of credit here. I'll remember that meat for a while.

Taro / Poi

How to begin with the story of taro? Well, I ate it in solid form twice when I was in Hawaii, once as an accompaniment to a dish of mahi mahi and once as a starch in a helping (or two) of taro leaf stew. Both times, I thought it was delicious. Taste-wise it's sort of like a nutty sweet potato flavor, although not quite as sweet. Texturally, I thought it was like an upgraded potato, not as starchy and stodgy as I find that vegetable to be sometimes. I had never before had taro in my life and I was really really pleasantly surprised. I'd eat this stuff all the time if I could get it locally and learned how to cook it properly (which can't be that difficult). All that is not why I'm writing about taro here in this post.

Taro is a starchy root vegetable with leaves that grows best in flooded conditions. It was imported to Hawaii when the first Polynesians set out to settle the island and it formed the core of the diet of those people both before and after they arrived in Hawaii. Both the root and the leaves are edible (as suggested in the previous paragraph). Roasting, boiling, baking and frying all work to get taro root from its raw form to the deliciousness I experienced while on vacation last month. But in Hawaii, taro is more famous in another form: poi!

If there's one food I knew I had to try but I was definitely not looking forward to eating in Hawaii, it was poi, a purple barely runny liquid made by adding water to cooked taro that is continually mashed until it achieves a paste-like consistency. Sounds yummy, right? How people get food to this point is beyond me. Did someone one day just decide to pound on a cooked taro root to see what would happen and then taste when it turned purple?

Taro isn't eaten in poi form any other place than Hawaii and after eating it, I can understand why. It's totally tasteless, feels like cold-ish rubbery raw egg whites in your mouth and is quite likely the least satisfying food I have ever eaten in my life. I imagine it tastes like the amino acid goop that Neo and Morpheus' crew ate on their ship in The Matrix, although that might actually taste better. I managed to swallow a half a small paper cup (and I mean like one of those small paper ketchup cups they make you use at Wendy's) of this stuff and that was enough. Forever. I have no use for this "food" ever again.

Hilo Farmers Market

No, Hilo Farmers Market is not a food but we did have some of the tastiest morsels all trip there and we could have eaten a lot more. For those reasons, I thought spending a few paragraphs on this place was worth it. Here's my tip about this place: GO! Especially on a Wednesday or Saturday (we went on Wednesday) when the place expands into a super duper food and crafts market.

I love the idea of markets and food markets and try to hit them when I travel if I can. I always have this idea of these wonderful places where cheery vendors sell fresh fruits and vegetables with other stalls hawking artisanal foods that smell and look wonderful and that have samples that make you want to buy, buy, buy. I've visited markets or farmers markets in Italy, Germany and England in the past few years and have been mostly disappointed, sometimes coming away with a bite or two or maybe a full-ish meal that sort of satisfies.

If I imagined the perfect farmers market in the world, one that satisfied everything I've dreamed of in one of these, the Hilo Farmers Market is it. Maybe it's the exotic and tropical foods for sale. Maybe it's the fact that there are folks selling fruits and vegetables alongside stalls with homemade macadamia nut butter, local goat cheese and jams like habanero pineapple. Maybe it's the amazing craft stalls with soaps and pearls for sale. Maybe it's all of it. We parked in a two hour parking spot and, honestly, we needed all that time and could have stayed longer. We almost used all the float in our schedule for one day in this spot.

We planned to hit the Hilo Farmers Market just before lunch. We hoped we'd be able to find something tasty for lunch to keep us going for the entire afternoon (quick drive north to 'Akaka Falls) and maybe into the night (the most amazing stargazing EVER near the peak of Mauna Kea). We found what we were looking for in a small outdoor food court with picnic tables across the street from the main food stalls. Just like plate lunches, once again our meal proved to be extremely affordable; unlike some of our plate lunches, the food here was amazing.

I ended up mixing and matching food vendors for my meal, opting for a $6 green papaya salad paired with a $3.50 pork skewer. The pork was brushed with some sweet glaze and sliced thin so it cooked quickly which rendered off some, but not all, of the fat; what remained were crusty and tender inside pieces of meat with a little moist fat around the edges. I thought this paired well with my papaya salad which had about two whole papayas and some chiles to make it "hot" on the spiciness scale. I chickened out on the highest spice level ("Thai hot") which was smart. I don't often back down to heat but my instincts proved correct here. I ate slowly, letting the heat from each lime-y spicy bite cool down before proceeding.

Our trip to this farmers market was one of the pleasant surprises of this trip. It far exceeded our expectations. There may be some ordering from some vendors later on this year.

Shave Ice

For most readers of this blog ("most" here being about four people), the picture above appears to show me eating a snow cone. Say that to someone in Hawaii and there are likely to be some tense words exchanged. There's a big difference between a snow cone, which is made with crushed ice drizzled with sweetened syrup, and shave ice, which as the name suggests is made from shaved ice and then drenched (meaning a lot more) in the same sort of sweetened syrup used in a snow cone. The result of shaving ice (which starts as a big block of ice dropped into a shaving machine) is a snow like consistency which holds the syrup better than does crushed ice. It's different for sure.

There are a number of stories about the origins of shave ice, but the one that makes the most sense to me is that it was invented in Japan and brought to Hawaii starting with the Japanese immigration to work the sugar plantations in the 1860s and transformed from there. Told you it was all about the sugar plantations. The tradition of shaving ice, rather than crushing, is the Japanese influence. The flavoring syrups (and let's face it the flavored sugary liquid is why we're eating these things) make shave ice uniquely Hawaiian.

Shave ice comes in various sizes, sometimes has ice cream or azuki bean paste somewhere in the assemblage and can be saturated with one or more mind blowing flavors in various wild colors. I opted for a plain shave ice in coconut, pickled mango and tiger's blood (a cherry / coconut mixture) flavors. I've never been much of a snow cone guy, mostly because I don't like eating ice and the syrup never seems to last. Shave ice was a definite improvement and it's not even close. But I'm not dying for another one of these. Give me some ice cream anyday.

Maui Brewing Company

A few months ago, I stopped by my local beer store to stock up on beers for the Christmas holidays and to see if there was anything else interesting until we got to December 25. Among my haul that day was a six pack each of Coconut Porter and Kihei Kolsch from Maui Brewing Company. I knew I was headed to Hawaii in a couple of months and thought why not get a head start on both drinking local beers and the holidays, I guess.

To that point in life, my Hawaiian beer experience was limited to Kona Brewing Company's various offerings, in which I had been historically disappointed. Maui Brewing Company changed my opinion of Hawaii beers as soon as I took a single sip of Coconut Porter. From that moment on, stopping by Maui Brewing Company was on my itinerary for last month's vacation to paradise.

Maui Brewing Company's brewery and beer patio is located in an industrial park on the east side of Piilani Highway in Kihei. Their tap list is huge and it features both the brews that I can get in cans at my local beer store here in northern Virginia (Norm's Beer and Wine, if you must know) and all the other beers they make in keg form only. And by all the other beers, I mean like 12 or 15 types I had never even heard of. I feel like I struck gold.

One of the things I love about Maui Brewing Company is how their beers really really specifically and obviously reference their point of origin. Mana Wheat Beer is sweetened with pineapple juice (it works!) and the Coconut Porter is finished with toasted coconut, which gives the beer a nice tasty finish to follow the rich, exactly-what-a-porter-should-be flavor. Their on-tap offerings continue this theme and in some cases, ramp it up a bit.

Because we had limited time (it's a crime, I know...), I opted for a sampler tray (shown above) and then a full glass of whatever won the sample test accompanied by a couple of Maui Cookie Lady cookies (total surprise but the Grown Up Samoa...OMG! good). Clockwise from the upper left in my sampler: Hot Blonde (MBC's Bikini Blond brewed with comapeno peppers); Haleakala Sunryes Rye IPA; Barefoot Brew (amber with local honey); 'Uala Pale Ale (made with Maui grown sweet potatoes); Ka'anapali Coffee Porter; and Imperial Coconut Porter (made with MORE coconut than the standard Coconut Porter).

I expected the Imperial Coconut Porter would win the sampling because (a) I love porter and (b) I love imperial stout. I expected this beer would be the best of both varieties with the same sort of delicious finish as MBC's standard Coconut Porter. But the extra sweetness for me made the beer too sweet and heavy for a porter (porter is my favorite beer variety, hands down). I'll stick with the standard non-imperial variety of this one.

The actual winner turned out to be the 'Uala Pale Ale which is brewed with sweet potatoes (also known as 'uala). Surprised this could be really good? So was I. The 'uala imparted a gentle sweetness to the beer and Maui Brewing Company laid off on the hops enough to create a beer that strikes a great balance between flavor and hoppiness. It's still clearly a pale ale, but it's like none that I've ever had. Pale ale purists probably wouldn't approve. I went home happy. Now I just need to get back over to Norm's sometime soon so I can keep drinking Maui's beer.

Loco Moco

So I realize some of you reading this post may be getting ready to call me out at this point. Let me save you the trouble. Yes, I realize loco moco, a dish featuring hamburger patties, rice, macaroni salad, gravy and fried eggs (yikes!) is technically a plate lunch. But I'm giving it some special attention here for two reasons: (1) it's an absolutely over the top cholesterol bomb that you just can't eat too many of without really getting yourself into a significant health crisis and (2) it wasn't always so plate lunch-like.

According to Hawaiian legend (it seems like all origin stories in Hawaii have become legends), the dish might have been created in 1949 as a hamburger, rice and gravy concoction at the suggestion of some kids looking for a cheap meal from the now out of business Lincoln Grill. The name loco moco was allegedly applied because the owner of the Grill, Richard Inouye, told his wife that the kids were crazy or loco. The egg, apparently, came later. Somehow, somewhere along the way, some mac salad was thrown in there, making it part of the plate lunch family.

So what's it like eating all this fat and carbs? Well, for us it depended on how the hamburgers were treated. Get a little crust on those things like we had at Aloha Mixed Plate in Lahaina and it's a pretty tasty dish. I'm not sure how I feel about the gravy on rice; that's not quite a combination I was really ready for. There's also no doubt I felt a little sluggish after downing a loco moco. There are some foods in Hawaii I'd jump at having again. Not sure I feel that way about this one.

My plate of loco moco was the last true Hawaiian food I ate in state. It capped a full week plus of pigging out on the unique fare you can find in the islands. Having said that, we barely scratched the surface. We didn't even touch other signature dishes like Spam musabi, saimin, lomi salmon or chicken longrice and there must be a dozen or more signature plate lunches that we didn't get to.

There's a lot of writing in this post and I didn't cover everything we ate. Having said that there isn't a lot that's fancy on this list. That's deliberate. I wanted my eating in Hawaii to explore the variety of everyday dishes that are local to Hawaii and very few other places. The unique mini-melting pot that is our 50th state has taken its input from every food culture that has touched it throughout its history and has spit out something very different than you can find anywhere else.

In that vein, we tried to stick to places that served food in as traditional a way as we could find. But we did seek out a couple of spots that seemed to be taking a new spin on Hawaii's food history. Of these places, I thought the best meal we had all week was at Town Restaurant in Honolulu. They source all their ingredients locally and historically, referencing Hawaiian food while updating it into something more modern. If you are on Oahu, I'd highly recommend stopping by. I'd go back for dinner if I ever had the chance. Probably after some takeout poke from Foodland. And a couple of malasadas for breakfast. Now about that exercise...

Umm...yeah, we definitely like poke!