Hitching, Dolphins, Kava and a Gig

A little bit more about what we’ve done here so far.

We have no wheels here, but that hasn’t proven to be a problem on Hawai’i. To get anywhere you simply stick out your thumb and someone will pick you up almost straightaway! We’ve hitched rides with some really interesting people so far, including Californian free-divers, Mexican wide-boys (in huge SUV) and even little old ladies. One airport security guard even turned his car around on the highway to drive us the 20 miles to Kailua – the place he had just come back from after a night shift! The generosity of the locals is incredible, and they’re always interested in what we do and where we’ve come from…

The single best day of the trip (and possibly of our whole lives) so far was when we visited Kealekekua Bay. We hired a double kayak from some local Hawai’ians and paddled across an emerald bay with crystal waters and towering cliffs. We knew there were spinner dolphins in the bay as it is a resting area for pods, but we still were amazed when a group of twenty surfaced close to our kayak! We saw a few breach and spin right out of the water, including some of the babies. We took it in turns to snorkel off the side of the kayak and see if the dolphins would come over to see us. Luckily for us they did and we swam with them whilst they jumped and played around us for about an hour; it was an incredible experience! We then paddled to the other side of the bay and moored up near the monument dedicated to Captain Cook (the bay is where he died at the hands of Hawai’ian locals in the late 18th Century). There we ate lunch and cracked coconuts on a deserted volcanic beach with palm trees and white sand, before donning our gear and snorkelling amongst the best shallow reef on Hawai’i. We saw thousands of brightly coloured fish, big cliff drop-offs, moray eels and azure sea urchins in the warm waters. We also came face to face with a green sea turtle, happily munching on reef algae as we watched him from about 4 feet away. What a magical day!

We took a trip to Kailua Kona, the nearest big town to our farm. It was a bit of a tourist trap due to the cruise liners mooring offshore, but we got to see some pretty cool things. The Kona Brewing Company had a bar in the town, so we sat at the bar and ordered some passion fruit and banana flavoured beers. Interesting to say the least! Deciding that one alcohol-based visit wasn’t enough we wandered through the morass of gift shops and rental stores to this little kava bar. Basically the drink, which is made from crushed kava root mixed with water, looks and tastes like a swamp and is served in a half coconut shell. It does however have some ‘mild intoxicating’ properties, which involved numbing our mouths and tongues and making us fairly unable to get up from our stools for about half an hour! On the way home we stopped in at a beachside burger spot and had the biggest meal of our lives - a half pound burger with pineapple, teriyaki, cheese, salad and a host of other unknown additions. All this combined with about two tonnes of fries. Needless to say the walk back up the hill was a bit of a waddle!

We’re eating really well and very healthily here. We only have a double gas hob but its amazing how inventive you can be with cool ingredients! So far we’ve cooked shark meat, dried and fried tropical fruit, eaten cheesy yam mash, mixed up dragon fruit smoothies and brewed up red wine and organic vegetable stew. We’ve also managed to acquire a guitar here so the post-meal times here are often taken up playing a few numbers to accompany the crickets as the sun sets over the ocean below the plantation.

It’s Thanksgiving today, and we’ve just come back from a huge party at another farm. About sixty people were there, including locals, friends, family and volunteers. There was enough food laid out to feed an army! We all joined hands at the start and the farm owner gave his blessing, before we all dug in. The unbelievable choice of food included pumpkin pie, turkey and cranberry sauce, sushimi, tofu salad, pineapple butternut squash, vegetable lasagne, banana bread, apple and pecan pie…and LOTS of beer! After half an hour of eating there was a lot of lazing around on sofas and playing of guitars and ukuleles. A microphone and P.A. was set up in a little gazebo, and we were asked to play a few songs as guests. We played four songs and they seemed to go down well – some guy even accompanied us on the bongo. Big thumbs up to Mellowstar from the locals! Spent a bit more time chatting and drinking before catching a very fast, bumpy and quite scary lift back to the farm on the back of a pickup truck in the moonlight.

We don’t want to leave…

Hawai'i The Big Island (The Orchid Isle)

We have now moved islands and are staying on the Big Island, the youngest of the Hawaiian islands, where we are volunteering on an organic coffee and tropical fruit farm near the town of Captain Cook.

Konacopia farm is paradise. We are staying at an elevation of 900ft, which means sunny 25-30 degree C mornings and humid rainy afternoons. The farm is built upon volcanic rock and lush plants sprout of every crevice of the fertile rock. Our little jungle includes avocadoes, mangoes, limes, oranges, mandarins, jack fruit, noni, breadfruit, coconuts, macadamia nuts, bananas, papayas and Hawaiian firecracker chillies… and all free for the picking - brilliant!

We are staying in a screenhouse that is surrounded by a coffee plantation and avocado trees; it’s rustic but we love it. Essentially we are sleeping completely outdoors, and have a little wooden platform lanai with a table and chairs that looks out over the plantation and papaya trees down to the sea, complete with a little cooking area with a gas stove and electricity.

We have some resident pretty little green lizards and 5 cats and a dog, Alani. And quite a few mosquitoes that find us tasty. We've also held a chameleon! There is a little bathhouse up the road with a lovely hot shower and washing machine and some cockroaches (!).

The stars and sunsets here are fantastic, and we fall asleep to the sounds of crickets and are woken by the chickens crowing. We’ve already got used to waking up at dawn as there are no curtains! The place already feels like home and the two of us can’t believe our luck at having found such an authentic little piece of Hawai'i off the beaten track.

We work 12 hours a week in exchange for a place to stay and unlimited tropical fruit. So far the work has been back-breaking manual labour – weeding below the mango trees with gloves and little cutters. The work itself is fine, it’s just our backs that protest! Work breaks include sitting in the shade of trees talking with Hawai'ians, looking over the sea and feasting on ripe mangoes (we have never tasted such great fruit!). At this rate we are turning into ‘fruitarians’ – mealtimes have become fun making exotic fruit smoothies and fruit salads, and tonight Gaz made breadfruit chips.

The owners of the farm, Steve and Elizabeth, are really nice, and there is another volunteer here called Dave. Folks here are more relaxed and amiable than either of us have come across anywhere – the other day we were invited to a nearby lettuce farm’s BBQ and played volleyball and ate pineapple steaks and grilled fish on banana leaf plates until sunset. Everyone made us feel so welcome.

Below our farm the sea is teeming with fish and there are many marine protected areas making for great snorkelling. The sea is warm and clear, and we have spotted angel fish, trigger fish, moray eels and pipefish already. There are no beaches in the area, just black lava flows leading straight to the sea with coconut palms along the shore.

O'ahu (the 'gathering place')

We’re now a week into our travels and have experienced the first of four Hawaiian islands – O’ahu. From beautiful rainforest cliffs to picture perfect white beaches to old surfing dudes with beards to massive waves and heavenly fruit smoothies, the island has had us grinning from day one.

We arrived on Saturday night after a pretty horrendous thirty straight hours of travelling on no sleep. Air Canada managed to be just about the worst transatlantic airline ever by providing next to no entertainments and not giving us enough food. However, we arrived at Honolulu and got to Waikiki with no hassles - the driver on the airport shuttle bus was so chilled it made us want to pass out just by listening to him!

Luckily the sleep deprivation worked in our favour by giving us a good night’s sleep and we miraculously escaped the 10 hour jet lag. Waikiki is a tourist paradise. For a tropical island there certainly is a LOT of high rise accommodation, shops, bars and traffic. However, seeing the famous mountain skyline and surfing that day in 28 degree aqua coloured waters certainly made up for the initial shock of the concrete jungle.

We headed for the North Shore the next day, the stuff of legend. We cut through the middle of the island, with pineapple plantations and shrimp pools on either side of the road, before topping a hill and getting our first glimpse of the infamous waves. Driving down the coast, past Hale’iwa, we saw perfect corduroy lines of surf everywhere. Suddenly we dropped down a little hill and we were there…on Waimea Bay. We bodysurfed in the infamous shorebreak – seriously heavy waves that pound you onto the beach! Great fun being picked up by the 4ft glassy wall and then flying towards the beach, sometimes losing control and ending up on your head covered in sand. We then drove along the North Shore and stopped at Pipeline and Sunset Beach to watch the surfing pros do their thing in the 6 foot-plus surf before heading onwards to the campsite on the north east coast.

We set up camp that night in a little clearing on a beachside site and ate roast chicken whilst watching the incredible sunset and then the bright stars once dark had fallen. The beach was a sweeping, almost deserted curved bay with palm trees and little ghost crabs that scurried into their holes when they felt footsteps on the sand. We watched the sun rise over the Pacific with pretty colours as the sun lit up the clouds over the O’ahu mountains – magical stuff.

That day we drove around the north and east coasts of the island, which are much less touristy and extremely picturesque. We took in towering fluted green cliffs covered with rainforests, little offshore islands amid turquoise blue lagoons and white sandy beaches during the morning and early afternoon. Treated ourselves to fresh smoothies with mangoes, pineapple, apple, blueberries and frozen yoghurt - yummy!!! We made it round to Diamond Head by mid afternoon and walked the 700m, wheezing American-filled, climb to the summit. At the top we could see right across to the high rise world of Waikiki again – it seemed a different world to what we’d experienced that day! We had to make it back to the campsite for 7pm so we took a shortcut back via the Pali highway, again stopping to see breathtaking views across the mountains from a lookout spot which hosted the last battle of the Hawaiian tribes in the late 18th Century – lots of warriors driven over the cliff edges in similar fashion to Thermopylae...

Our final day on O’ahu started with us packing up camp (and being caught by a big rain storm whilst doing so!) and then driving back to the North Shore. We stopped to watch the Reef Pro surfing competition at Hale’iwa for a while, before Gaz rented a board and headed out to Papai’loa to surf the 5 foot waves wrapping around the point. After a shave ice each (a Hawai’ian specialty), we headed back towards Honolulu. We had a bit of time before the flight so we drove to Hanamau Bay to snorkel. However, we ended up in a bit of a rush due to being forced to sit through a pointless, cheesily soundtracked, induction video about ‘how to look at fish’ or something. Consequently we ended up with 20 mins snorkelling and then did a mad dash back to the airport through lanes of busy traffic. A few wrong turns, a very efficient car rental return service, and an extremely understanding Aloha Airlines check in clerk (we were 15 mins late for our check in deadline) later, we were set to fly out to Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii.

There our adventures continue…

First stop Hawaii

Only 3 days until we leave!!!

First stop is Hawaii...

• Couple of days in Oahu to surf some 30 footers
• One month volunteering on an organic coffee farm on the Big Island
  
• Several days in Maui to cycle down the volcano
  
• A week in Kauai to hike the lush Na Pali coast