-
Japanese holidays
Japanese lawmakers are angling for more long weekends. This year saw the change of two holidays (Coming of Age Day in January and Health-Sports Day in October) from fixed dates to floating Mondays to create long weekends. This is great for overworked salarymen and a boost for the economy as many people turn these three-day…
-
Jet lag nap
I made a serious error last night. After arriving home from Hawaii, I let myself take a nap at about 6 pm, when I felt too tired to keep my eyes open. The nap lasted until 3 am (which is 8 am in Hawaii, the perfect time to get up). Oops. Normally I force myself…
-
Limo service
After two weeks of relatively frugal vacationing on Maui, Tod & I treated ourselves to one blow-out night in Waikiki before boarding the plane back to Tokyo. We stayed at a hotel called W. After showering with all the hotel beauty products, we wrapped ourselves up in fluffy hotel robes and ordered what turned out…
-
Maui no ka io
The Hawaiian language is integrated into everyday speech here. Aloha replaces hello and goodbye. Mahalo (thank you) springs up on signs–Mahalo for not smoking–and in announcements–Passenger Smith please pick up the blue courtesy phone, mahalo. Kapu (private) enhances the no tresspassing signs posted on fences. In the real estate listings, I discovered that an ohana…
-
Sea kayaking
Sea kayaking is great fun. This morning, we joined a kayak/snorkel trip with South Pacific Kayak. Our guide, Lee, paddled with extreme grace making us look like the clumsy amateurs we are. Tod & I paddled right into a big wave. We headed out to the Coral Gardens to snorkel. After the big wave, the…
-
Waterfall
We trekked through a forest of dense bamboo, splashed across a chilly, knee-deep stream, and clambered over rocks to reach the waterfall. We weren’t the only visitors to hike in. Eight well tanned, mud smeared naked people were perched on the boulders surrounding the swimming hole. We watched as they stretched arms to the sun,…
-
Volcano
To celebrate the equinox, we drove to the top of Haleakala, Maui’s 10,023 foot volcano. Above the clouds, we saw the landscape change from lush tropical greenery to sparse shrubs and rocks. An endemic plant, the silversword, which looks like a cross between an aloe and an artemsia, captured our fancy. It grows for twenty…
-
Fruity dinks
No tropical holiday is complete without plenty of fruity drinks. Every afternoon, we fill our daily quota of blended fruit ice and rum. We’ve made the classics, most remarkably pina coladas with a coconut from a tree on the property, and we’ve invented some of our own. As the sun set yesterday we sipped cantaloupe,…
-
Uluhe
Uluhe is an indigenous groundcover that has the most unusual growth pattern. It unfurls, fernlike, into two leaves. Each of those spreads two additional leaves and so on until it reaches its end where the leaves branch out to form a pointy-ended fern shape. These plants cover everything that isn’t forested. Roadsides, clearings, recovering lava…
-
Mysterious boat
The mysterious boat comes by every morning. It cruises past quickly at a distance about 3/4 of the way to the horizon. There’s no sense of scale–it could be a twenty person yacht or a radio-controlled toy. Our binoculars bring it into clear focus but there is nothing to see that indicates how big it…
Archives