Contrast: Real Town vs Fantasy Land, Hurricane?!?!???

We stayed two weeks in Hilo, mostly doing repairs.  We put in a new windlass to lift the anchor, mended the steering and replaced bushings on the gooseneck of the boom.  We took three days to be tourists and saw the all time best food truck, a pizza oven!

Complete with wood pile 

And sink

We traveled to Mauna Loa and saw the complete power and destruction of the lava flow as well as the night time glow of the hot lava in the cauldron.

The nene, national bird of Hawaii, is still threatened but is coming back from the edge of extinction. It still has many loses to vehicles and the mongoose.  We saw several of these fast creatures, brought here on the 1800's to deal with the rat population in the sugar cane fields.  Unfortunately, this diurnal animal did nothing to control the nocturnal rat and instead, decimated ground nesting birds like the nene, a long time descendant of the Canadian Goose.

At the National Park, displays about CO2 emissions of volcanoes vs people helped folks think about their carbon footprints.

vs the carbon footprint of the volcano.

While we found there was good recycling for homes, almost no businesses used recycling and the harbor only recycled bottles and cans.  Hilo had almost no public transportation and we ended up needing to rent a car to go for the hardware store, used book store, groceries, and volcano exploring. 

We enjoyed eating in restaurants again, but here's one we skipped for some reason, specializing in chocolate "donkey balls".

We have seen amazing trees on both islands. I will save the most spectacular for last, but here is the first, an eco system all its own in Hilo.

One defying gravity in Kona.

A banyan tree we thought was amazing,

Until we found this tree which we were drawn to briefly for its gnarled shape,

And then learned that what we thought was a tree, was actually one of 43 different trunks of the same banyan tree covering an entire city block/city park. It's main trunk was amazing, but only the beginning.

There were trunks everywhere!

And from outside the park you could see the whole, but only if you went to both sides of the park! These next the pictures together are just one tree!!!

We left quiet, unassuming Hilo mid afternoon and sailed through the night to Lahaina on Maui. What an amazing contrast! Hilo was full of folks working, farmers markets, and day to day life.  Lahaina is a tourist attraction, full of mostly Americans spending money like water, having arrived by plane, an expensive carbon footprint! Restaurants, gift shops and hawkers of "adventure activities" abound. The next bay to the three miles north is packed with high rise hotels, white sand beaches, and golf courses.  What a contrast from some of the tiny islands we have visited. There are a thousand ways to part with your money here and the sidewalks and shops are teeming with people doing just that. I can't help but wonder how even a small economic downturn would affect this community which is so reliant on tourism. No sign of farmers markets here.

One of our daughters and her sweetheart are coming to spend a week with us and we will be tourists, too, riding bikes down into the volcano (dormant!), snorkeling, diving, and more, but take a pass on the sport fishing, helicopter rides, golfing and zip lines and more.

Then, weather permitting, we will sail to quiet Molokai and see the lepper colony which is surrounded by the tallest sea cliffs in the world. Historically, people of any age suspected of having leprosy, even young children, would be taken from their families and shipped near the shore.  They were forced to jump from the boat and swim to shore if they could.  Many never survived the trip.  Leprosy, now known as Hanson's disease, is a germ which damages the most remote nerve endings on the body, causing people not to be able to protect themselves from the normal injuries of life. Lack of pain created loss of fingers and toes by undected accidents and thus, many leppers were disfigured.  Today, there is a drug cocktail which can cure leprosy in 24 hours! A few of the members of the colony still live there.  For these elders, it has been home since they were children and they have no desire to move away, even though, as of 1962, they are now allowed to leave.

Today we teeter between preparing for family to arrive, and preparing to leave them in the lurch.  A storm is brewing off of Central America and we have been on every weather site we know of to determine if it is a danger to us.  It is truly to far to predict for sure, but currently appears to come this way at severe storm level, but not hurricane level.  If you re interested in such things, I recommend www.windyty.com or the NOAA hurricane prediction center.  Early this morning it said we will be hit, and so should leave now, later this morning, it said it will go north of us and we would be safer to stay put.  We are watching carefully.