Hawaii - go go go

My second morning in Hawaii I woke up at 4AM and went for a mosey, ate breakfast at our hotel's lackluster buffet. and asked the concierge a gazillion questions to aid my planning for the rest of the week -- all before Sika woke up. (Actually Sika had also woken up at 4AM but decided to lay there quietly until she fell back asleep instead of go go go.)

In my questioning, I discovered that the hotel offered a shuttle to various snorkeling locales (and the airport) and that there were some ridiculously touristy trolleys that circled Honolulu at rates much higher than the buses and schedules much less convenient...but it's the experience of the thing.

Our first day we decided to go full chill and booked massages at a parlor. Evidently, there is a cottage industry in massages as we wound up in an apartment (in a building filled with apartment-based massage parlors) for our treatments. There was a beautiful view from the somewhat squicky room we were in. I chose a lomi lomi style massage - a traditional Hawaiian style the incorporates long strokes from "loving hands" and theoretically incorporates the Hawaiian concept of aloha, which means love, unification and breath, and promotes personal harmony. Therapists are taught to focus on the massage with love and intention. It was a nice thought but for some reason the therapist spent an awful lot of time on my beat up feet - perhaps because they were in rough shape.

We followed up the massage with an insane mango shaved ice and beach lounging.

The next day I again woke up at the crack of dawn, and watched the sun rise on a run on the Ala Wai canal. Once Sika was buttoned into her jumpsuit we moseyed to a fancy breakfast and then took a trolley to the Foster Botanical Garden. The trolley driver was a young man who told a wide variety of tree jokes and laughed at all of them. The Garden did not let me in at a discounted rate but the small urban park was lovely and totally worth the $5 entrance fee with a wide variety of tropical trees (and a corpse flower!) We glommed on to a tour and Sika broke my cover by telling the guide that I was an arborist and had already told her much or what he was telling the group.

(I will revisit this post with notes on specific trees when/if I ever get my journals back. I do remember the sausage tree (Kigelia africus) which has hard sausage-shaped fruits. Like break your head hard. And the calabash nutmeg (Monodora myristica) tree the flowers of which smell like, you guessed it, nutmeg. There was also a butt nut. The Lodocieae  is a one-specie family of endangered coconut palm. The male flowers are arranged in 1m long catkin which produces pollen over a ten-year period (That's a super long time non-tree nerds). The fruit is 40–50cm in diameter and weighs 15–30kg, and contains the largest seed in the world. The fruit, which requires 6–7 years to mature and a further two years to germinate, definitely looks like a butt and is sometimes also referred to as the love nut. I think the Foster Botanical Garden planted 10 and three have germinated. They are rightly super proud of them. (Also they offered me a job because their arborist left so if the Seattle rain gets to me, I have a back-up plan.)

Sika and I struck upon a division of labor where I chose the things that we did and she chose the things that we ate. It worked especially well on this day where we visited Chinatown and ate at Maguro Brothers in one of the fish markets. Best. lunch. ever. I did note that there were very few people in Chinatown as racist economic reprisals had started in response to the coronavirus. Sika and I were also stopped by a pair of (hot) cops for jaywalking. They explained that in Chinatown we were more likely to be run over (which is also racist).

After this adventure we returned to the beach to chill.