Relevant History

Poipu Beach, this afternoon

From my flickr set:

[To the tune of Johann Sebastian Bach, "Sonata for Flute and Harspichord in G Minor, BWV 1020: 1: Allegro," from the album "Flute Sonatas Vol. 2".]

Technorati Tags: beach, hawaii, kauai, poipu

Sea turtle!

Today we saw a sea turtle on Poipu Beach.

Technorati Tags: beach, hawaii, kauai, poipu

Gaylord's

This morning we went to brunch at Gaylord's, a restaurant on an estate near Lihue. We were attracted to it by the fairly absurd advertisements that say, "More than a great breakfast buffet, it's HISTORY!"

The back of Kilohana

Technorati Tags: food, hawaii, history, kauai

I'm no art critic, but...

This morning at Gaylord's I came across an exhibit by an artist who describes herself as a "Hawaiian impressionist"

working primarily in oils and pastels.... "I have been drawing and painting as long as I can remember. Fairies and angels have been part of my life since I was small and have always been very real to me.

Now, I know it's been a long time since I read Robert Herbert's magnum opus Impressionism, on art, leisure society, and Parisian culture, but I don't recall Monet and Degas working very much with fairies and angels. Ballerinas and absinthe-soaked prostitutes, yes; fairies hiding under buttercups to escape the rain, not so much.

[To the tune of Johann Sebastian Bach, "Sonata for Flute and Harpsichord in B Minor, BWV 1030: 2: Largo e dolce," from the album "Flute Sonatas Vol. 2".]

Technorati Tags: art, hawaii, kauai

Drinks at the Poipu Hyatt

Last night my wife and I went over to the Hyatt resort for a drink. We read about a bar there named after Robert Louis Stevenson, and is all dark paneling and expensive cocktails-- Stevenson's Library, it's called-- and decided it was worth a try.

They make a pretty good martini, and a better than average black Russian.

The hotel, which is huge, reminds me of nothing so much as the pharonic palace in The Ten Commandments. You keep expecting to see turn a corner and see Yvonne De Carlo making eyes at Charlton Heston.

Or maybe catching a hula lesson.

[To the tune of Paul McCartney, "Band On The Run," from the album "All The Best".]

Technorati Tags: hawaii, kauai, poipu

Salt Pond Beach

This afternoon we took the kids to Salt Pond Beach, just south of Waimea.

It's a pretty nice beach. There are far fewer tourists than Poipu Beach, and the surf isn't too strong for kids; the snorkeling isn't quite as good, though. However, it does have clusters of palm trees with "Beware of Falling Coconuts" warnings.

Kids think those are amusing. Of course, more people are killed by falling coconuts than shark attacks.

Off to one side there's a "keike beach," a sheltered area for babies and toddlers.

This picture is the cover of either the first or second Pablo Cruse album, I can't remember.

[To the tune of Evanescence, "Imaginary," from the album "Fallen".]

Technorati Tags: travel, beach, hawaii, kauai

Cook statue

On the way back from Waimea Canyon, we stopped in the town of Wiamea, and I paid homage to the statue of Capt. Cook, who landed on Hawaii not far from the town.

I was glad to see that they've cleaned the wasps' nests off the statue.

[To the tune of Evanescence, "Haunted," from the album "Fallen".]

Technorati Tags: kauai, james cook, hawaii, waimea

Waimea Canyon

We went up to Waimea Canyon today. It's your basic "pictures don't do it justice" kind of place. Nonetheless, I've put some on the Kauai photo set.

Technorati Tags: hawaii, kauai, travel, waimea canyon

More moon

From early this morning (thanks, children!)

[To the tune of John Lennon, "I'm Losing You," from the album "Working Class Hero - The Definitive Lennon [Disc 2]".]

Technorati Tags: hawaii, kauai, poipu

Blogging by moonlight, updated

Got a couple....

Technorati Tags: hawaii, kauai, poipu

Blogging by moonlight

I'm uploading pictures to my Kauai photo set, and trying to catch up on some e-mail and blog posts, when I looked up and realized that we've got a nearly full moon tonight. It's pretty cool, especially since, from my little bench, it's framed by palm trees.

Okay, it's also a bit South Pacific-meets-Ocean Pacific kitsch, but still, it's beautiful.

I might have to try to get a picture of it.

[To the tune of George Harrison, "Wah-Wah," from the album "All Things Must Pass (Disc One)".]

Technorati Tags: hawaii, kauai, poipu

Kauai photo set

I've started a set of public pictures of the Kauai trip on flickr.

[To the tune of George Harrison, "Let It Down," from the album "All Things Must Pass (Disc One)".]

Technorati Tags: hawaii, kauai, travel

The Rime of the Ancient Wayfinding Blogger

After our first full day in Kauai, featuring an exhausting regimen of swimming, swimming, and more swimming, punctuated by attempts to catch fish with plastic drink cups, the occasional meal, more than occasional snacks, and forced rehydration by a tyrannical father, the kids are asleep. So I can upload pictures, and catch up on my e-mail.

There's no wireless in my condo. Or rather, my wife can get a signal, but I can't. I know the base station is a few buildings over, so I close my laptop, and head out.

Down the hill, there's a bench. I stop, flip up the laptop, and give it a try. Okay, a signal, and I can get online, but it's slow.

More down to another bench. Another network, this one faster.

Interestingly, none of them are the official network that the rental agency told me about. So I guess I'm borrowing people's connections. Thanks, fellow visitors!

It probably looks pretty weird, this guy sitting at different benches, illuminated by the glow of a laptop, post-Beatles Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison tunes faintly audible. Or maybe I just look like a visitor from Silicon Valley, doing what they all do when they can't find a signal and want to download their e-mail. Who knows.

[To the tune of John Lennon, "Imagine," from the album "Working Class Hero - The Definitive Lennon [Disc 1]".]

Technorati Tags: hawaii, kauai, poipu, travel

In Kauai

I'm in Kauai, taking a little vacation. We arrived yesterday, spent the afternoon at the beach, then went to bed early-- the kids were on California time, and had played hard at the beach.

Lots of pictures to come on my flickr account.

Technorati Tags: hawaii, puppy, travel

Another Internet cafe in Kauai

Here are pictures of two other Internet cafes I spotted in Kauai. The first, and far more unlikely of the two, is the Atomic Clock Cafe, in Hanapepe.

I'm back!

Back in California, and back at work. The rest of the vacation was pleasant, though I am glad to be back in my regular life. I mean, I go away for a week, and Arnold Schwarzenegger decides to enter politics? What would have happened if I'd been gone two weeks?

Cook monument

We drove to Wilaea today to see the Cook statue and monument.

I've always looked up to Cook

For such a momentous event, it's a rather modest piece of work: a marker to let you know where the statue is, the statue itself, and a plaque on the beach.

The sign for Cook's monument

It turns out that this is "a replica of the original statue in Whitby, England by Sir John Tweed, R. A." Cook learned to sail in Whitby, working the coal barge routes. In fact, the ships he used to sail to the South Pacific were from Whitby, and were designed to be relatively spacious (for their size, anyway), and capable of withstanding heavy weather (which the North Sea provides generously).

The plaque at the base of Cook's statue

I understand that the Royal Navy visits yearly to care for the statue. They'd better bring bug spray the next time they come: several wasp colonies have built nests in Cook's left arm!

I then went down to the beach where Cook landed.

The landing memorial: a piece of volcanic rock with a plaque. The plaque is on crooked

It was clear immediately why Cook would have chosen this as a landing spot: this is where a river empties out into the ocean, so his ships would have had access to fresh water, as well as a way to explore upland.

There aren't many foreign visitors here now. I suspect there's not much tourism here, except perhaps the "rough guide" visitorsthis is one of the few beaches where camping is allowed.

Note the tents just to the right of the boat

The site was declared a national historic landmark in 1963

Lydgate State Park

This morning we went to Lydgate State Park, which has two very nice little man-made lagoons on its beach. One of them is just for kids, as it has no real waves to speak of and is about 4 feet deep at the worst; the other is larger and full of fish.

The children's lagoon at Lydgate State Park (left). The kids loved it

The latter is basically a great place to go if you want the experience of snorkeling without the difficulty, which was just what I needed. While I did once live near a beach in Bahia that had some great snorkeling (thanks largely to a Dutch fort and pier that had fallen into disuse in the 400 years since the Dutch were a significant naval presence in the South Atlantic), that was 30 years ago, and whatever instincts I developed for the sport are as rusty as my command of Portuguese. So the easy-to-handle snorkeling experience was just about right for me. And in fact there are some pretty good fish there.

Daniel's idea of fun on the beach: bury Daddy!

Daniel and Elizabeth make a sand castle

There's actually a Russian fort on Kauai, on the western side of the island. Apparently the Russian fur traders were looking for a warm-water port, and built a fort here that they used for a year or two, until they were ejected; it's since fallen into ruin, but you can still make out its basic star-shaped pattern.

These fortsboth so old, and so far from their creators' homesmake me a bit more generous towards European reluctance to go to war with Iraq (and whoever's next). Europe seems to be on the verge of putting politics by other means behind it; given that these are nations that spent centuries fighting all over the worldthe Dutch and Portuguese fought all over the Atlantic and Indian Ocean for control of the Indes trade; the French and British struggled for a century over North America; the Spanish, French, Bortuguese, and British had world-circling empires, and the Belgians and Germans tried hard to match them, with the world much the worse for it; and then there's the twentieth centurytheir reluctance to take up arms in the name of preemptive defense may, on balance, be a very good thing. A peaceful Europe that has no interest in destroying itself or occupying the rest of the world would be a remarkable thing. (Of course, they thought they'd some something like this after 1815.)

Another historic building: this movie theatre in Lihue has been converted into apartments for senior citizensone of the more creative reuses of old architecture I've come across

After our morning in the Lagoon of Fish, we drove up to Princeville.

Elizabeth hiding

Princeville basically takes the aesthetic of a luxury hotel or golf course, and tries to apply it to an entire town. The result is beautiful in a highly manicured way, but also a little eerie: I kept expecting to see Uzi-toting private security guards in SUVs. It differs from a real town the way a really nice hotel differs from your house: there are certain basic similarities, but you don't go around stamping your logo in the sand in the cigarette extinguishers and putting little mints on your pillow. (Or maybe you do, in which case, more power to you.) Partly on the advice of a friend who recently spent his honeymoon there, we didn't stop, for fear of being run down by David Hasselhof, who apparently is a regular there.

The mountains of Kauai

Instead, we kept going west on the island, nearly to where the road runs out. One of the charms of the drive is that there are a number of old, one-lane bridges that you have cross; it's a bit like driving in some parts of Vermont. (I'm still thinking of the New England-Hawaii potato chip connection.)

One of the mountains on the northern side of the island

On our way back to Poipu and Suite Paradise (shudder), we stopped at the Paradise Bar and Grill in Princeville for lunch. Not a great moment in the history of service: the place is decorated like a beachfront shack, and the service is similarly faux laid-back. Skip it, and drive on to Hanalei.

Daniel drinks some lemonade

Daniel ate his weight in French fries on the way back to Poipu. It was as if we'd fed our other son lunch, and ignored him

There are Internet cafes dotted all over the island. Not many of them, but I keep meaning to stop in and do a little impromptu fieldwork. Are these mainly used by tourists? Are they more of a local resource? Maybe I'll get some time in a couple of them before I leave.

Wild Bill's Internet cafe

There's also a Computer Hospital

After we returned to the condo it was time for another swim with the kids.

Elizabeth with a flower in her hair

It often seems to me that my life is an exercise in managing the children's blood sugar and fatigue levels, with the aim of keeping the former within certain parameters (no sweets, but you don't want them to get cranky from hunger either), and manipulating the latter to suit your schedule (run them around for a couple hours so they'll go to sleep easily).

Daniel in his Hawaiian shirt and matching shorts

Of course, it usually doesn't work. Fortunately, they both have been running around so much that it's been relatively easy to put them down, even in strange quarters.

A day in the water

Spent much of today in the water: we did something called "snuba," which I'll describe at length later, and then both children wanted to go swimming in the pool, at different times. I hope the salt and chlorine cancel each other out.

The childrens' favorite destination! Conveniently located just outside our door

Inventing traditions in potato chips

Some years ago, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Rainger published a collection of essays on "The Invention of Tradition," on the ways things we think of as timeless, local, and spontaneous are often carefully planned and manufactured. Hugh Trevor-Roper had a brilliant piece on how Scottish highlands culture was largely manufactured in the eighteenth and nineteenth centurieshow the kilt was invented by a prudish English factory owner determined to clothe his Scottish workers, how clan tartans came from a catalog, etc..

This came to mind when we bought some "authentic Hawaiian potato chips," which the bag describes as a local favorite, made the old-fashioned way, etc.. Now, when you buy something that is supposedly authentic to a place, you expect something distinctive, maybe a little unusual or exotic, exempt from the tides of time and caprices of globalization. In short, something that you haven't had before.

I opened the bag up, expecting them to be mango flavored, or have bits of guava essence, or something.

They taste exactly like Cape Cod Potato Chips. Both claim to be local forms of the potato chip; and both are kettle cooked. This cannot be a coincidence. Some odd calculus of potato chip marketing now declares that

kettle cooked = local

I have no clear idea of what "kettle cooked" means, except that it's different than the Evil Chemical Process that Large Faceless Corporations use to cook their impersonal, placeless starchy signifiers of global capitalism. They must be opposites, after all. One is traditional in both Hawaii and Cape Cod.

Perhaps whalers or missionaries brought kettle cooking. And someone would have had to bring potatoes, come to think of it. If memory serves, on Cook's third voyage the crew trades iron and other goods for yams, not spuds.

And maybe in some part of the world, there's a traditional potato chip that's perfectly round, and comes in a little tube.

Day 2 in Kauai

I should say that while the place we're staying in isn't a thatched hut, thats a GOOD thing as far as I'm concerned. I have this romantic vision of wild nature (or maybe it's an Enlightenment notion; no matter), and as appealing as it is, it always lacks one thing: me. To be honest, my notion of roughing it is being somewhere where my cell phone doesn't work. So a condo with a nice kitchen and washer/dryer? Works for me.

Welcome to Paradise. Please stay on the path

As Woody Allen said, I am at two with nature.

Though there's an occasional bit of a dark edge to the well-manicured hospitality. When we checked into the condo, they gave us the keys, and plastic cups with pink stuff on ice. "Here are your keys, and here are your complimentary mai tais." Great. I've been here ten minutes, and I'm already in danger of getting hammered. Are there people for whom a constant drunken stupor really spells "vacation?" Assuming, of course, that you could spell if that's what it meant to you.

Today we spent the morning at the beach. Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of snorkeling in Salvador, near an old Dutch fort and pier that had long fallen into the sea, and turned into a coral reef; so the experience of going to the beach has some deep resonance with me. We went to a small lagoon that's sort of a children's beach, so I didn't do anything really elaborate; but just the feeling of being in salt water, and wandering over rocks, was quite enough for me.

The ocean. The south pole is straight ahead

The sand here is very fine, and it stays with you for a long time afterwards.

Greetings from Kauai

I'm sitting on the patio of our condo in Kaipu, on the island of Kauai. The palm trees are rustling, the sky is one of those dark, velvety tones that Cook's artists struggled so mightily to accurately record, and the evening is filled with the sounds of frolicking in the hot tub, post-dinner adolescent antics, and televisions.

Still, it is Hawaii, and it is a vacation.

Koipu is on the southern side of the island, which is said to be the drier and less developed side (and if both are true, I wonder what the north looks like). Kauai is one of the westernmost of the Hawaiian islands, and I think one of the less-traveled; if you want to know more, go to a library or do a Google search. This is my first time in Hawaii in almost exactly 31 years: I changed planes here once on my way to Japan in 1972. It's my first vacation on a tropical island since Tobago a dozen years ago. Come to think of it, I'm here to celebrate a major wedding anniversary (not one of my own), and I was in Tobago for a wedding. So there's some weird synchronicity.

For reasons I can't divine, before I came here I imagined staying in a thatched hut on the beachGaugain in Tahiti, with kids and sunscreen thrown in. Of course, the island is about as undeveloped as Singapore. We're staying at a place named, I am not making this up, Suite Paradise. I shake my heads writing the words. Despite the highly questionable name, it's actually a very nice place: a collection of two- and three-story condos, with your basic over-lush tropical landscaping. It reminds me, alternately, of Summit County, Colorado, where my folks have a condo, and a laid-back, more luxurious version of Stanford faculty housing.

Though what little I've seen of the architecture on the island has been an exercise in dj vu all over again. There's the expected Modern Resort Development kind of stuff, the sort of mass-produced luxury that's trowled onto hotel chains that cater mainly to business travelers. There are lots of Typical American houses, often raised a couple feet off the ground, presumably because of flooding danger. But then you turn a corner and see something that could be out of some small town in Nevadaa general store that should have a horse tied up in front of it, a commercial building that a Wells Fargo stagecoach might park in front of. And then we also passed a pagoda.

Most of the people here seem to be families. Clearly we're smack in the middle of a serious target market.

We're about a five minute walk from the water, though there's also a swimming pool and hot tub just outside our building. The latter reminds me of my summer exchange to Japan, the first day of which consisted of 24 hours of traveling on planes, airport shuttles, trains, buses, etc., and culminated with dinner at Denny's. 5000 miles for a club sandwich and a Diet Coke felt alternately anticlimactic and surreal, just as a swimming pool in view of a warm-water beach seems kind of odd. But the kids like it.

Speaking of which, Elizabeth declares that she misses her home (she's a sensitive sort), and Daniel managed not to notice the three-hour time difference for a log time, then crashed hard and is snoring in his Pack-and-Play. They were both really great on the flight over. Daniel was exceptionally laid-back a flyer, given he's 18 months old and spent a lot of the flight stuck in his car seat.

As someone who lives in the Bay Area (and hardly ever goes a day without declaring his great luck and intention to by buried there, though preferably not by a collapsed building), it felt slightly absurd to take a vacation to Hawaii. I mean, the Bay Area is about as beautiful as it gets, so why leave? Well, Mr. Science has observed the local flora and fauna, and come to the following conclusion: Kauai is a lot more lush than Menlo Park. We've got our share of palm trees and so forth, but this place is EXPLODING with growing green things. The main reason is that it gets a lot more rain, which we Californians don't get that much of, a fact that we're rudely reminded of every few years.

Of course, this is a typical reaction to tropical islands. Driving in from the airport, I couldn't help but wonder what a young sailor from Ireland or Cornwall, maybe the youngest of a family of hardscrabble farmers, who'd spent the last two years living with fifty other people on a ship roughly the size of a large mobile home, eating salt pork and biscuits, must have thought when he reached the Pacific islands. It must have been pretty overwhelming, the Enlightenment version of shock and awe.

I plan to see Cook's monuments before I go, and have the vague thought that I should go to the local library and look up Cook's entries about his landings here.

It's just about 8:30 local time, and I'm ready for bed. More anon.

All packed

Finally got everything packed up, we think. Now a quick five hours' sleep, and then it's up and on the road....

I'm taking virtually every pair of shorts I own, a couple shirts, and FOUR battery chargers/adapters. An argument for micro fuel cells if ever I saw one!

Off to Kauai

I leave for the lovely island paradise of Kauai tomorrow. The minivan departs at the crack of dawn, with two kids, and 400 bags. My habit in packing for a vacation is to take maybe two changes of clothing, and about 60 times as much reading material as I could ever possibly hope to get through. (But given that this will be the first time either of my children are near a warm-water beach, AND that they're both completely fascinated by water, sand, and containers that can hold/transport those two states of matter, realistically speaking, my reading list can consist of a matchbook cover.)

I'll be taking my computer, and trying to blog from the island. (Another reason I wanted that geocoding to work!) We'll see how successful I am.