Ahola!

Oh goodness, Hawai’i! We pulled into port in Hilo on the Big Island about 5 a.m. Monday morning. We all ran up the stairs to see the sunrise over the volcanoes!....and then all we saw were street lights. But when the sun did finally come up about 6:30 or so it was amazing! After we all went through customs and passports and such and had breakfast they let us off the boat around 8:00 and we were free! Connie, Tucker, Heather, Molly, and I started walking to town, just like the other 800 SASers. Cabs were really expensive and the next bus wasn’t coming for a while, so we were just getting ready to hike the couple miles to town from port when a big van rolled up by us and we got a ride for $2 from a crazy wonderful woman named Teresa. Don’t worry parents, there were about 15 of us packed into that thing with plenty of strong boys.
When we got to town we went straight to a local market and oh my gosh, the fruit and veggies! There were avocados the size of my head and apple bananas the length of my fingers. We went off in search of Kona Coffee and found a coffee shop that wasn’t open yet, but as we started to walk away the owner let out his dog Rufio and opened early for us. He gave us each a coconut shell of kava juice, which is supposedly a ceremonial Hawai’ian drink made from the kava plant, which is spelled “awa” in Hawai’ian. Then off to Rainbow Falls we went! But of course we weren’t going to walk up hill 2 miles without some sustenance. We stopped at a drive through and enjoyed a breakfast spam sandwich, a local favorite. J
After walking for about a half hour we reached the falls. There hasn’t been much rain (but don’t worry, global warming is still just an unproved hypothesis), so the waterfall wasn’t roaring, so we walked through a mini jungle, clambered over rocks, and found a few fellow SASers jumping off cliffs in a deep pool above the falls. Ah, it was great! We all jumped in from about a 15 foot ledge, but some of the guys were going from about 35 feet. Connie and I climbed and hiked our way behind the feeding waterfall to our swimming pool and discovered a whole nother world. 3 more pools, one above the previous, each had little waterfalls that fed pools that the raging water had hollowed out. It was gorgeous! But alas, it was time to move on around 1 or so, so we called our wonderful Teresa and caught a ride down to Richardson Beach.
This beach is a blacksand beach with volcanic rock all over. There were 3 HUGE sea turtles bathing on the rocks. If you hold your hands out in front of you like a ballerina, fingertip to fingertip, that is about how big their shells were. Such a graceful creature and it’s on the endangered species list. On the rocks we found a whole bunch of fellow adventurers and after a while we mosied on back to the ship and got cleaned up for dinner.
Our second day a group of us went SCUBA diving on the blacksand beach! It was amazing; turtles, corals, fish, anenamies (the sea creatures but I don’t know how to spell it, not even close enough for Word to correct! But you know what I’m talking about J), and even a turtle that was missing a fin because a shark got it. After that we went back to the market to get some goodies, ran a few errands, and got back on the ship before ‘On Ship’ time, because if we are late we can’t get off the boat for so many hours at the next port…….BOO! And that was Hilo!
That night after dinner a faculty member held a ‘spiritual dance’ session up on the 7^th deck. There were maybe 20 of us and we started dancing randomly for a couple songs and then began an hour long dance that was all about letting our bodies do whatever they wanted or needed. Every once in a while Jenny, the woman leading this, would yell “We are dancing on top of the ocean and under the moon!” Oh, what an experience! I tried explaining it to people, and the only way I could even begin to was just to say that afterwards my soul felt happy and whole.
Wednesday morning we pulled into port in Honolulu, Oahu, and Tucker, my roommate Nancy, and I headed out to explore. We ended up on Waikiki Beach for a while and went to an international market where Tucker finally had his pineapple drink; a woman cut off the top of the fruit, took out the meat, blenderized it, put it back in the shell, and put the top back on with a hole for a straw. He was one happy man. J
For dinner some of my friends and I met up with Broegy and Forrest and one of his friends. It was just crazy to see Broegster in Hawai’i!
The next day Molly and I got up early and headed to Pearl Harbor for a tour of the Arizona Memorial. What a place it was. We watched a video of actual footage of the attack from both US and Japanese archives before we ferried over to the memorial. It was eerie how part of the ship is sticking up above the surface. Oil is still leaking out and floating above the tomb that holds 1,177 men. Molly’s grandpa had a friend who lost his dad in the Arizona and we found his name on the wall. It will be quite an experience to go to the peace park in Hiroshima. We will see how the war began and ended for us. I can only imagine what we will feel there.
After we got back to the ship Molls and I headed to a café that was called Bad Ass coffee. The owner was there and told us that his business partner has one in Yokohama, so we are going to try and find it when we are there. Then it was back to the boat, not to set foot on land again until February 9^th! Oh goodness, what a voyage this is. I still can’t believe I am actually doing this; actually going around the world.

And yes, thank you all so much for reading our posts and keeping up with us, and please write so we know what is going on back in the real world!