Vitamin D Deficiency Prescription

Around the darkest days of the year we got a wild hair (hare?) to visit Hawaii. 

We started North of Kailua-Kona at Puako Bay.

There were strawberries at the Waimea (Big Island) Farmers' Market.

Not to mention bananas, papaya, rambutan, oranges and lillikoi (passionfruit).

It was Mid-January.

We saw honu (turtles) and whales.

I practiced Tunisian Crochet on the beach.

We smiled A LOT.

Then we got in our little rental car and drove around the north side of the island to Pahoa.  On the way we saw Akaka Falls where someone had left a little yarn bomb friendship ring on the rail.  

One of the highlights of the whole trip was seeing brand brand new bits of Earth's crust.  Excitingly, it is headed right for the little town of Pahoa where our friends live.  No big rush or danger, but it may well cut off the highway in a while, and after that, only Pele knows which way she will flow, or if she will stop and simply head elsewhere. 

While we were in the area we went to the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden. 

There are a lot of invasive plants and species thriving in Hawaii, and most of the botanic garden was non-native, but it was a pleasant way to  spend a few hours.

Two cuties pies were spotted amongst the ferns and bromeliads.

  After Hilo/Pahoa we kept going south on the ring road to visit the center of Pele's domain at Volcanoes National Park. On the way we saw where she had obliterated a favorite black sand surfing beach and an entire semi-occupied subdivision in the 1980s and 1990s (maybe you watched this on a National Geographic special) and replaced it with fresh pahoehoe and a new mini-black-sand beach.

On to Volcano!

Steam vents!

Calderas!

Sulfur Dioxide!

Hydrogen Sulfide!

Magma glow!

Volcanoes National Park is not overly huge, but there is plenty for a few days.  

The next day we drove down the chain of Craters Road.

 We stopped at a Lava tube within a native Ohia Tree forest.

We leaned that the fluffy stuff from new fern fronds was used for nice soft bandages and such. 

We saw pictographs, which are largely associated with blessings of new babies. 

We saw every shape of lava imaginable.

 Best of all, we saw Nene which are an endangered native goose.

      We continued to continue southward. Stopping at yet another black sand beach (yes, the sand gets really really hot),  I watched a sea turtle haul itself out to bask (I think I stayed 30 feet away like the sign said, so the zoomed in photo may be a little pixelated).  Then we drove out a tiny one lane road to South Point.

  Southernmost point in the U.S.  

Next stop, Tahiti. 

Our last few days were spent south of Kailua-Kona at a nice B&B, Kawa'aloa Plantation. We chilled out, watched geckos check out my collection of  new Tunisian Crochet, gecko colored dishrags,  and watched sunsets before heading back home to good old dark Eugene. 

It was just what the doctor ordered.

To be taken annually for best results.

Penultimate Installment

Summer break is over here in Eugene, and I am still writing about summer break starting in Chile in January! The drive back to Valparaíso was uneventful. The high point of the drive was when we took some photos of a giant copper smelting plant which took about 5 minutes to drive through. Copper is used for all kinds of stuff from medicine to space shuttles according to the billboards along the road, and is one of the most lucrative industries in Chile.


Getting close to Valp'o, the traffic became pretty thick. When we had left there was almost none, but summer vacation was gearing up into full swing for the New Year! Charles and Reida showed up at Kate and John's, and we started a new segment of the trip together. First we explored the Casablanca Valley wine region for a day since we still had the car. Kate and John had to work so we were on our own for navigation, but there is only one big road out of Valp'o east towards Santiago, and that's the Casablanca Valley, so we did OK. We ate lunch at a vineyard calledIndomita . The architecture of the building was too much in my opinion, but the food, wine, service and setting were fabulous.



After lunch we had a bit of trouble getting across the highway to our other vineyard, Emiliana, and missed our tour reservation, but they still did a wonderful tasting for us. It was very civilized--sitting at a table with a bi-lingual hostess who poured us hearty tastes of their delicious bio-dynamic wines and told us about the discovery of the Carmenere varietal which had been thought extinct (and was in Europe), but which some visiting European vintner found among the Merlot vines in Chile. It's a delicious varietal; try it if you ever find it. It has more oomph than Merlot, but is easier to take than a big Cabernet or Pinot Noir. This was a lovely vineyard with guinea hens and chickens running about and flowers everywhere; I quite liked their building as well!



Another day while Kate and John were busy dealing with their real lives, Charles, Reida, Seth and I went traipsing about Valparaíso. The city is made of steep watersheds running down to the sea, which create a succession of hills. Each hill is a neighborhood with it's own particular flavor. The famous Chileno poet Pablo Neruda had one of his several houses/wives/mistresses in Valp'o, at the very top of the road system on one of these hills and it is now a museum. It is called La Sebastiana, and you can only take pictures through the windows to the outside (the views are quite lovely), but you really should patiently check out this website: http://www.fundacionneruda.org/imagenes_sebastiana.htm as he was one goofy quirky collector of a man. His houses and belongings were all partially destroyed/stolen by the Pinochet regime (they didn't like people speaking for the common man, and that was what he did) but this foundation retrieved/restored several of his houses around the country.

One day, as Reida and Kate are both very horse-y types (and Charles holds his own) we went on a little trail ride through the hills East of Valp'o at a place called Caballo Puro. They had some awesomely expensive horses there (not the ones people like us got to ride) and one of the hands told us (Kate) about them and all the security they have to have as horse theft is crazy-common. It was a pretty nice place with a nice restaurant and all, but they were a little disorganized, and maybe trying to rip us off the tiniest bit (that's just how things work some places), so Kate had to pull out her "Crazy (yet entirely fluent in Castellano) Gringa personality" to get things straightened out. It was awesome to sit back and watch her "negotiate." I had the nicest horse in the world (Mariposa --means butterfly, and also a kind of Lily), but I could barely move afterwards--oh my achin' knees! I did it though, and we did get a nice view of the landscape. Somehow John managed to slip out of this one. Hmmm.










Each day brought a new mini adventure it seems. On yet another day we headed down for a day trip to the quaint little fishing village of Quintay (notice it has all the letter of quaint right in its name!) which used to have a whaling station but since that is not so legal anymore, one of the universities in Santiago has turned it into a marine science research facility. That is where Kate was about to have her special summer course, which Charles was down there to teach part of, which led to this whole trip we all took to Chile in the first place. Being guests of Kate we got a nice long tour. Their main focus it seems is to help create methods of raising nursery stock of commercially important fish which can be released into their real habitats, thus helping maintain fisheries without the problems that come with many fish farming operations. They had pretty much figured out the conger eel (which is delicious and hearty and a favorite there, and which is not really an eel) and are now working on sea urchins! We saw tiny baby ones which I could barely even photograph they were so small (but they looked just the same!).

We just spent the afternoon in Quintay, but Charles and Reida went back after we left for the course of course and reported that the little restaurant on the beach was most excellent!

Then we headed back to Valp'o for New Year's weekend, when things really get going down there!