It’s the triumphant return of Where in the World Wednesday! Since blogging in real time isn’t going as I expected (as in, I haven’t even finished the first week of Hawaii and here I am six weeks into the trip), I thought it’d be good to set up some weekly photos to keep you interested.
Langford Sand Bar sunset, Whitsunday Islands, Australia, October 12, 2012
One of the benefits of travel is, of course, encountering new people and learning about their cultures. This can be a profound experience, but just as often it’s funny, as different ideas of ‘normal’ meet. Here are a few funny/just different things I’ve seen in Australia:
The Freshmaker of Australia
Orange air spray in the toilet: Almost every toilet I’ve been to in Australia has a little spray can of orange-scented air freshener. Several of the toilets I’ve been to haven’t been ventilated at all, so it makes sense that you’d want to put something other than poop fumes in the air in that enclosed space. But several toilets have open windows and seem to be ventilated fine, so why the can? Does poop have to have an orange flair to it here? Whatever the reason, there’s a can in every can.
Breakfast in aisle 1
Eggs in the aisles: I haven’t seen this in every grocery store I’ve been to here, but in several, the eggs aren’t refrigerated at all. This just about blew my mind, y’all. Eggs in the regular aisles?! You might as well leave meat out of a cooler! I’m pretty sure eggs left out of a fridge hatch overnight and next thing you know, you’ll have baby chicks chirping around the cookies.
He needs a little laser gun in his hand.
Lasers in the streetlights: At busy intersections, there are crosswalk “walk/don’t walk” lights, just like in the States. They have a similar red man standing and green man walking. But Australian crosswalk lights are better fitted out for people with visual impairments. When the crosswalk is red, there’s a steady “blip blip blip” sound, and then, wonderfully, when it changes to green, there’s a shooting lasers sound. It’s like, “pew pew pew” and you’re walking across the street like a sci-fi hero. I love it.
Images mine except for the last one.
Before arriving at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, I thought the park’s name was misspelled. Surely they meant volcano, singular? But as we learned in Part 1, the island of Hawaii is made up of five volcanoes—one is extinct, one is dormant, and three are active. “Active” apparently means it’s erupted in the last 200 years, which seems like a long time to sit around doing nothing while still getting credit for being active, but who I am I to quibble logic with a force of nature.
There are so many photos like this from our childhood. This one’s for you, Dad!
One of the volcanoes is serious about its active status, though. Kilauea has erupted in the last 20 years (taking out most of the town of Kalapana), and now a part of it is constantly erupting, spewing smoke into the air in the Halemaʻumaʻu crater. You can take a helicopter ride to see lava flowing, or you can do a night walk to try and spot lava as it enters the ocean. These were both expensive options, and heavily dependent on the mood of the weather, so Heather and I skipped them. Instead, we paid our $10 national park entrance fee and got more than our money’s worth with a full day of natural wonders.
Volcano!
We had good luck from the start—a ranger-led tour started just 15 minutes after we arrived at the visitor center. So we joined up and learned about various plants on the walk out to Waldron Ledge. We were struck by the alarming statistic that 90% of the island’s flora and fauna is not indigenous, and we learned about the efforts to contain the spread of some of the more pernicious plants. Our guide pointed out two plants that look very similar; one is an invasive, and one is a rare native. This is why visitors are not encouraged to weed out any invasives on their own time. More likely than not, they’d pick out the wrong plant. The park does sponsor days where volunteers weed out invasives under the watchful eye of a park ranger, though, so you can contribute to the effort. (This is what my friend Matthew does in the northern part of Michigan’s lower peninsula—invasives are found all over the world.)
A koa tree – not an invasive
Lehua blossom on the ohia tree; this has a tragic love story myth behind it
The path out to Waldron Ledge is actually the old road that used to circumnavigate the volcano. The park realized that the road was in a dangerous spot, and they built the current road, which takes a wider path. Sure enough, in 1983, the old road buckled in an eruption and much of it crumbled away into the giant mouth of the volcano. Now it’s overgrown with plants and part of it intersects with the path out to the lookout.
We didn’t quite get up to 25 MPH on our walking tour
Once we were there, we saw just how vast the volcano is. It goes on for miles, and at the other end is the a vent, huffing and puffing into the air while the crater around it sits silent and nearly barren. I say nearly because plants are unstoppable; they will grow anywhere. There are plants dotting the floor of the crater, pushing their way up through the volcanic rubble and stubbornly holding on in that alien landscape. Those plants impressed me almost as much as the crater they’re growing in, actually.
Vast, I tell you
Stubborn little plants
We drove over to the vent and gazed at it while munching on lunch. The Jaggar Museum there has a few good displays on the volcanoes, and also a seimograph that draws a shaky zig zag if you jump up and down near it. After lunch, we went for facials at the steam vents. These aren’t sulfuric vents, so there was no smell of rotten eggs, just warm water soaking our faces and fogging up our glasses.
Hot ‘n’ steamy
Next we went to the lava tube. It sounds like an amusement park ride, doesn’t it? “Shoot down the lava tube from 50 feet off the ground! You’ll be positively glowing from all the excitement!” It wasn’t quite like that, but it was pretty cool. A lava tube is formed by lava running down a hill, and part of it cooling into rock before the rest of it does, so that lava flows through the hardened lava rock. What’s left behind is a cave made up of lava, tunneling through the tropical plants.
A cave that isn’t a cave
After walking through the lava tube, we got back in the car and went off to see more evidence of what these volcanoes can do. We drove along the Chain of Craters Road, a phrase both literally descriptive and wonderfully poetic. I’m not sure exactly how many craters are found along this road, but we saw many. Most of them look like rock quarries that have been used up and abandoned—uniformly gray rock, a steep wall down to the bottom of a pit, empty of life and machinery. Soon enough, we were in sight of the ocean, and the views got more dramatic from there. We took hairpin turns down the side of the mountain, losing elevation rapidly, and ended up on an eerie plain of misshapen volcanic rock stretching out to sea.
These names!
There were several signs warning to slow down for nene, a rare native bird that inhabits the park.
The road was pretty scary to drive on.
At the end of the road, you hop out and you can walk farther down the road to see what Kalapana might have looked like, or go across the road and scramble down a few rocks to the cliff’s edge. Here, you can see where the rocks cut off abruptly into space, dropping down in a cliff to the ocean. Holei Sea Arch connects a little bridge to nowhere, and the surf crashes underneath it.
Toilet at the end of the world
Holei Sea Arch
After wending our way back up that mountain and through the chain of craters, we went to Volcano Village for a little rest. We treated ourselves to a milkshake and fries at the Lava Rock Café (haha, yes), and Heather caught glimpses of football games on the TV while I retraced our route on the national park map.
It was raining when we arrived back at the Jaggar Museum but we were prepared. I zipped up my raincoat and Heather donned her yellow poncho, and we waited for the sun to set. Lots of other people were there for the same thing, so we chatted with a couple from California and watched the smoke rising from the vent grow brighter as the sky grew darker.
At first, Heather wanted to know how much longer we needed to stay, and to be fair, it was cold and rainy. But after a while, she wasn’t asking that anymore, because she, like the rest of us, was mesmerized by the glow. This was one of my favorite parts of our time in Hawaii, watching the glow of an active volcano as it breathed smoke and fire into the night air.
Life goal!
Finally, we left the park about 10 hours after we’d first arrived, and headed back to our rental house, which was an hour and a half away. It was a scary drive, in the near total dark and at times torrential rain, but we made it back safely, and that night I slept with visions of secret caves and lava glowing in my head.
I haven’t made it too easy for those of you following along at home to know where I am any given week, oops. Here are some plans: For the next three weeks I’ll be traveling down the eastern coast of Australia by bus. It’s pretty tightly packed, and all the activities are outdoors, so cross your fingers I get better weather than the rain that’s been following me around since Alice Springs.
October 8-9: Magnetic Island
October 10-13: Airlie Beach and Whitsundays
October 14-15: Rainbow Beach
October 16-18: Fraser Island
October 19: Noosa
October 20-24: Byron Bay
October 25-31: Melbourne
Plans include sailing, sleeping on a boat, driving a 4WD on a sand dune, snorkeling, sunbathing, swimming, and generally frolicking on the Sunshine Coast. Exciting stuff!
Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world
It’s been a little trickier than I’d thought it would be to find time to blog, not to mention to find cheap and reliable internet. But I’m working on it, never you fear, dearest fellow travelers. In the meantime, here are some things I’ve done in the past two weeks:
Backlit as all get-out, but there I am with the opera house and the bridge. Sydney!
In the Royal Botanic Gardens of Sydney
Surf’s up (haha, no, I did not surf, but I watched)
view of Kings Canyon from the dry riverbed
Kangaroos aren’t hopping down the street here, but they are nibbling around the edges of their spacious cages on camel farms (yes, camel farms)
There it is.
We went to the island of Hawaii because our parents told us to. Not that we were given strict instructions to follow, but the people who showed me how to travel have a good idea of what I like to see and do, and having themselves visited years ago, they knew I’d like this. In the maddening manner of good parents, they were, of course, totally right.
Beaming in the Puna district of the Big Island
The island of Hawaii is often called “the big island” because people get easily confused when you say you’re going to Hawaii, in Hawaii. It’s the biggest island by far, and the youngest. It’s made up of active volcanoes that are still playing around with geography, knocking out a village here, adding miles of black coastline there. Its 4,000 square miles contain 4 of the world’s 5 major climate zones, which didn’t mean much to me until we drove from the east side of the island to the west, and saw tropical rainforest give way to lush farmland, which turned into bone-dry desert, all in just a few hours’ drive.
A palette of blues and greens
We flew into Hilo from Honolulu, and after some car rental shenanigans, we set off to see a couple waterfalls. The area around Hilo has many waterfalls, and if you go further northwest in the Waimea region, there are even more, although those require more of a hike to see. We went to two: Rainbow Falls and Akaka Falls. Rainbow involved parking the car and walking 10 yards down a concrete path to a lookout. Voila! Instant gratification waterfall, as my guidebook put it.
The grin of a waterfall enthusiast
I don’t care how little effort it required; I was just happy to see the water rushing down the rocky face of the hill. Waterfalls are about my favorite thing in the world, and I could have looked at that one for a good hour, but we had a more impressive one to visit while the sun was still bright.
on the approach to Akaka Falls
By the time we’d parked near Akaka Falls, it had started raining, but that only lasted a few minutes. Heather and I split up to take different paths to the falls. I took the longer loop, which gave me a glimpse of Kahuna Falls in the distance and plenty of green canopy to gawp at before I arrived at Akaka. The sound of water rushing over a cliff and plunging into a river below is thrilling and soothing all at once, and again, I could have just stared at it all day. I’m glad we started with a short hike in the rainforest. This, more than anything else I’d seen so far, impressed upon me that I really was far from home and well on my way to new and exciting places.
Bamboo canopy on the trail to the falls
We went on to our house rental, which was one of my best finds on Airbnb. It’s in the Puna district of the island, right off what is sometimes known as Red Road, named for the color of the pavement years back. Heather and I toasted our drinks on one of the two porches and watched the sun set with the ocean visible in the distance.
Sunset from the balcony
The next day, we drove down Red Road in an exploratory mission. We discovered it is harrowing driving. It’s a super narrow road that twists and turns, as well as goes up and down in dozens of little blind hills, and of course natives drive it like it ain’t no thing, so just as you’re starting to feel confident about a stretch of road, a 4WD comes barreling down from the other direction, and you’re swerving and hoping you don’t put the rental car into a tree, especially as you declined the damage coverage. Or at least that was my experience.
Red Road
Roadside gravesite, looks like for one family
It’s a beautiful road, though. We stopped for lunch on a volcanic rock beach, watched surfers at Isaac Hale Park, walked around Lava Tree Monument, and cruised through downtown Pahoa.
Isaac Hale Beach Park
Lava Tree State Monument
Our final full day in Puna, we went to the tidal pools out at Kapoho. These apparently are great for snorkeling, but we didn’t have any equipment, so we just got in the water and paddled about. Heather and I are both water babies, so we don’t really mind where we are, as long as we get to float and play around. The tidal pools were pretty enough, but they were painful to get in and out of, since there’s no real entrance point and you just find a rock that seems less sharp than the others and creep down that into the water, then repeat the process on the way back out. I was so worried about slipping on our way in that I had Heath and I sit down and scooch in on our butts. We both tore up our hands and knees crawling back out again. Not really what I’m looking for in a relaxing swimming experience.
The treacherous tide pools of Kapoho
We had an ice cream at what used to be Kalapana. In 1986, the Kilauea volcano erupted and wiped out almost the whole town. We saw a few dilapidated structures and a sign explaining about the eruption, then just black rock far out into the ocean. It was eerie to see a reminder of how unpredictable and powerful the island remains.
Okay, that’s it for the Big Island, Part 1. Part 2 will cover our time at Volcanoes National Park, and Part 3 will be the drive to the Kona side of the island, and the luau we went to there. You’ve already seen the snorkeling we did over there, which was another amazing part of our time on the Big Island.
I’m off to tour Uluru and Kings Canyon tomorrow (so exciting!), so I’ll be away from internet for a few days. Please comment as usual, but if your comment gets caught in moderation for some reason, that’s why I can’t get to it right away. Have a wonderful week, y’all.
Hello dearest fellow travelers! I have arrived in Australia, and the adventure has truly begun. I had a fantastic time with Heather in Hawaii, but that was more of a really good vacation. Now I’m on my own (I miss her already!) and feeling out what it means to travel more slowly.
My trip to Sydney was not the best. I paid extra to get an exit row so I’d have more legroom, but it turns out that Jetstar’s exit rows have physical barriers as armrests, rather than the armrest and space below as in other planes I’ve been on (and in the regular rows on this plane). That meant my hips were introduced to a whole new meaning of the word “squished.” But happily I did fit, and didn’t have to arrange a new seat while everyone watched and I squirmed in embarrassment.
The extra legroom was nice–when I was able to use it. The exit row was right by the bathroom, of course, and despite all the flight crew warnings to not congregate, people grouped up waiting to use the loo and I had to pull my legs in to keep from being stepped on. The movie screens in the exit row were the kind that fold under the seat, so you pull them up to watch the latest summer blockbuster/flop (The Avengers/Snow White and the Huntsman, in this case). Fine, except for the several times the same woman walked by me to the bathroom and tried to use my movie screen as a handhold, which sent the screen crashing down onto my shin. She finally realized after the third time and apologized, but by then I was already bruised.
But these are annoyances that come with flying coach, not really a big deal. The big deal was the four hours of stench on my ten-hour flight. Six hours in, one of the guys waiting for the bathroom suddenly fainted. He hit his head on the bathroom door on his way down, which made everyone look up, and then he was on the ground. His fiancee came running, we got some flight attendants, and they quickly revived him and determined that he was fine, thank goodness. He went back to his seat with an oxygen pump and a worried fiancee, and we all breathed a sigh of relief.
And then we tried to stop breathing. Because when he hit the ground, the poor guy vomited. The flight attendants cleaned it all up in yellow bags marked “biohazard,” but they apparently didn’t have any air freshener, so I inhaled vomit fumes for the rest of the flight.
It was gross, it was uncomfortable, it was long, but at last the flight was over. The captain dipped the wings over the city so we got a nice view, and we landed almost on time. I breezed through immigration, got my bag in a few minutes, and flew through customs. Were things looking up?
Yes, almost. People were not joking when they said Australia is expensive. I got cash from the ATM and broke my $50 with a chocolate bar–a $4 chocolate bar! It was cold and wet outside. Cold, wet, expensive–had I landed in London?
After an interminable shuttle bus ride, I arrived at Blue Parrot Backpackers. It’s been ten years since I last stayed at a hostel, but it all came flooding back as soon as I got inside. TV blaring, people running from common room to kitchen with beers in hand, animated discussions taking place in every nook and cranny. The guy at reception, Mark, was nice, if a bit distracted. He showed me to my room and went downstairs to argue over pizza toppings with a guest.
I looked around and realized the fears I’d had when booking the bunk bed had come true; all the bottom bunks were taken. Well, ok, I’ll try the top. I put a foot on the first rung to pull myself up to make the bed, and the bed literally started falling over. I do not remember that happening ten years ago. Shit. I was definitely too fat for a top bunk. I went downstairs and asked Mark for help. He went into the kitchen and made an announcement, asking if anyone would swap with me. Meanwhile, I sat on a couch and hid my face in embarrassment. No one volunteered.
I went back upstairs to turn on my laptop to search for a new place to stay, trying to stay practical and focused, trying not to cry or panic. Another guest came into the room and chatted with me while she put things on her bed–a bottom bunk. She’d just arrived and hadn’t heard Mark’s plea, so I asked her if she’d mind switching bunks. Right away she agreed, and was super nice about it. What a relief! I’m trying not to dwell too much on how that whole situation felt, but suffice it to say, it did not feel good.
After that, finally, at long last, things improved. The women in my women-only dorm room are friendly. I got some food and chatted a bit and went to sleep. I woke up when someone’s alarm went off at 5am and didn’t really get back to sleep after that. But that’s ok; I’m here, I made it, I’m in Sydney. It’s looking good from here.
And today I did this:
When my sister Heather and I started planning this trip, we drew up a list of things we wanted to do in Hawaii: visit a volcano, swim at Waikiki Beach, go to a luau, and snorkel. But that last one actually made me a bit nervous. I love swimming and could easily spend all day frolicking in the water, but that’s all under the power of my own breath. Breathing while under water is just unnatural. I can’t see myself ever scuba diving, but I thought maybe I could handle snorkeling, seeing as how it’s much easier to surface if necessary.
Turns out snorkeling is really easy. (You probably already knew that, but see how I’m growing and learning on this trip?) You just put the mask on, tip your head down, and breathe. We took the advice of my travel book and asked for prescription goggles at the rental place, which ensured that we saw fish instead of brightly colored blobs once we got in the water.
We drove five miles south of the center of Kailua-Kona to Kahalu’u Beach Park and joined the many other snorkelers. At first we tried putting the flippers on and clown-shoeing into the water, but that was comically difficult, and we noticed other people were walking into the water barefoot and putting flippers on once a little further in. This was a much better plan.
And then, the fish! For two hours, we paddled around staring at fish, giving each other the thumb’s-up, and taking photos with Heather’s underwater camera. Yep, there are pictures. They’re mostly cloudy, since the area we were in on the first day of snorkeling was full of people kicking up sand, and we ran out of batteries on the second day, when we were in a quieter, clearer area. They’re still pretty cool, though. Enjoy!
Aloha, dearest fellow travelers! I’m sitting on wicker furniture in an airy open-plan house on the island of Hawaii. The ocean surf was audible earlier, but night has fallen and the chirruping of the coqui frogs has taken over. Heather has fallen asleep and I’m typing up this short post before going to bed myself. We have an early morning tomorrow, heading to the tide pools up the coast before they get too crowded.
Today was our fourth day in Hawaii, and I think I’m just starting to believe that I’m here. I still can’t believe I’ve actually started my trip–I expect landing in Sydney might help with that–but I can believe that my sister and I are really in paradise. I mean, we’ve swum in the Pacific, sunbathed on Waikiki, hiked to a waterfall, and seen dozens of plants and birds we’ve never seen before. Definitely not in Kansas, etc.
More to come as the trip continues! For now, have a slideshow to tide you over.
And I’m off!
My sights are set on the horizon, so off I go
All right, dearest fellow travelers, be sure to follow along by setting up an RSS Feed or liking Stowaway on Facebook or just compulsively checking this site.
The main point of this blog is to keep you updated on my travels, so don’t think that just because I’m on the other side of the world I won’t be posting photos, essays, and oddities. Stay in touch!
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