Aloha, mele kalikimaka

For the first time I did not spend Christmas in a wintery location with family. Instead, Christmas passed while Merijn and I honeymooned on Hawaii, on the Big Island. Hawaii is a dream destination, one that had spoken to my imagination ever since I saw a film about Hawaii in the Omniversum theater in The Hague with my brother and father. That must have been in the late nineteen-eighties. In my memory it was about the jungle and full of loud sound effects, prompting my brother and me to rename it "Lawaai," which is dutch for loud noise. And now I've been there, in the middle of the Pacific. Here's a list of things that made Hawaii special, in no particular order:

• Disembarking the airplane and feeling like you've entered a greenhouse.
• Wondering if the loud, crisp bird calls are real or come from loudspeakers.
• Waking up in a pool of stormwater in the first night out camping, deciding that you don't like the tropics.
• Eating tropical fruits for breakfast on a coffee farm with a view of the ocean, deciding that you love the tropics.
• Having the rainiest place and most sunny coast in the US about 50 miles apart.
• Drinking from a coconut picked from the tree under which you spent the night, while watching the sun rise over the clear blue pacific.
• Sunbathing on the beach in swim wear while watching snow-covered volcano peaks.
• Almost stepping on a chameleon that slowly and clumsily tries to cross the street.
• Picking cannonball-size avocados from a tree.
• Learning about the threat and management of invasive species. For example: feral pigs eat the starchy core of native tree ferns, creating places for rain water to stand in which mosquito larvae can thrive. Mosquitoes feed on honeycreepers (native birds) and infect them with malaria and pox, decimating the population (see here).
• Being told that vegetarians are free to eat pork on Hawaii; they would do nature a service.
• Seeing mongoose all over the island. They were introduced as a countermeasure to the rats in the sugar cane fields. But the twain never met, as rats are nocturnal and mongoose are not. Besides, the latter feeds on anything but rats.
• Witnessing an Hawaiian owl catch a prey on the ranch lands.
• Watching one splendid sunset after the other.
• Camping on the beach with the campsite's 'permanent residents' and being told that most of the campers around us are 'longstay.'
• Enjoying a cocktail in a picture postcard coconut grove to celebrate our ten years together.
• While enjoying that cocktail, watching the same couple we advised not to take that same rainy, stormy, extremely muddy hike we did that afternoon scrub the mud off their shoes in the surf.
• Waking up to the most beautiful concert of unfamiliar bird sounds.
• Learning how coffee, papaya, coconuts, mango, guava, lemon, jaboticaba, macadamia nuts, pomelo, avocados, breadfruit, lychees, starfruit, dragon fruit, pineapple, passion fruit, bananas and taro actually grow (most of which if not all are non-native to Hawaii, by the way).
• Drinking 100% Kona coffee.
• Putting your mask under water and discovering you're actually standing in the middle of an aquarium and are surrounded by hundreds of colored fish.
• Being warned to race uphill when you experience an earthquake, because you're camping in a 'tsunami evacuation zone.'
• Experiencing that a Chevy Aveo is not that bad a car after all.
• Concluding that the rainbow on the Hawaii license plate is very much justified.
• Learning about Hawaiian warrior ways without having to fear them.
• Feeling that on Hawaii, too, relationships between new and native culture is not without problems.
• Walking on a green sand beach, colored by olivine.
• Watching mighty waves pound the rocky coast and being amazed by the Polynesians who traveled thousands of miles across that water in small double-hulled canoes to arrive here.
• Walking across miles of black lava fields.
• Walking across miles of black lava fields to see fresh, glowing lava flow from the mountain into the sea, creating and lighting up plumes of steam.
• Feeling the heat of the lava.
• Having your butane camping stove, on which you're preparing your morning coffee, admired by local young men who gather at the same picknick table to smoke water pipe and share homemade cupcakes.
• Discovering that the river is too deep to ford and accepting that the hidden valley needs to stay hidden for you, at least until your next visit.
• Driving the roads on which the monstrous Hawaii Ironman triathlon is held every year in October (not flat, windy, hot).
• Visiting a Kohala coast resort and not having to stay there.
• Finding that mainland giants like Target, Macy's, Walmart, Sears are just as big on Hawaii and their huge parking lots just as full.
• Discovering a 9-inch centipede exploring your shoes in the middle of the night.
• Being knocked off your feet by a coastal storm while hiking with a heavy backpack.
• Not having to lock the door to your house.
• Breathing the cleanest air on the planet.
• Singing along with tutu and brother Lindsey doing the "Twelve Days of Christmas" Hawaiian style.
• Meeting people who found their paradise in Hawaii (and now run a B&B and grow fruits and coffee).
• Enjoying warm hospitality.
• Hearing German everywhere you go.
• Paying USD 4.33 a gallon for gas (compared to 3.25 on the main land, but still half of what Europeans pay).
• Learning about Hawaii's experiments with Ocean Thermal Exchange Conversion (OTEC) to generate power form the difference between cold deep-ocean water and warm surface water. Yet to be scaled up as a power plant, but the cold water pipe already serves a cascade of aqua- and horticulture businesses, such as sea horse, abalone, mushroom and strawberry production.
• Failing to spot spinner dolphins.
• Hanging loose. (Well, we tried.)