Day 1

Today was my first full day on Kauai - arrival and travel yesterday I will designate Day 0.

It was a very full day and this will be particularly detailed and long I'm afraid. Feel free to skim or skip (skimp?) If you do skip, let the very bulk of this entry serve to describe how packed the day was. I promise every day won't be this much verbiage but wanted to portray the life that I have managed to drop into: it feels as if I was never away. And without skipping a beat the whole day flowed, full of so many experiences as far from life just a few days ago on the mainland as they were pleasant.

I should explain first that I am with the kumu (guru, essentially) master hale (Hawaiian building) builder doing some miscellaneous finishing tasks on the two hale that I was able to help build the past few months. When I booked my flight I was surprised to see my friend from Maui was on Kauai then, and it happened they were driving from the one hale to the other and were going by the airport at about the right time so they agreed to pick me off and immediately on arrival I was in the midst of an adventure.

This morning, awake before 5am we headed out from Limahuli (that's nearly end of the road, north shore) and drove to the Nawiliwili (the main port near Lihue airport on almost the opposite side -  the southeast corner - of the island. There he picked up a truck shipped from Maui, did some errands around Lihue, and drove back to Limahuli arriving mid-morning in time to help with the hale work already started, mostly roof patching and tightening.

Lunch was terrific, featuring green kale from the garden here with balsamic vinegar, steamed taro, lau lau so tempting I decided to declare a pescatarian exception and have two servings, and blueberry pie for dessert (Happy birthday, Katie!)

At lunch met a very interesting couple from Moloka'i working on an ambitious project restoring ancient fishponds to productivity. The term "pond" misrepresents the scale of these fishponds: "fishlake" is more like it - these are on the order of sixty acres and will take many years of work to recover but the process is begun already. I'm interested in visiting to see this work and to see Moloka'i which is said to be even more rural and undeveloped than here: my kind of place.

In the afternoon we loaded the truck picked up in the morning with wood to ship back tomorrow. After work was done I walked down to the end of the road at Ke'e Beach for a swim. The cool water was delightful and turning back to shore I had a stunning late afternoon lit view of the green cliffs soaring about the beach behind the beginning of the Kalalau Trail there. Back to the garden house a group of workers and volunteers was chatting, and after a bit I drove 3 of them back home (about halfway back towards Lihue). That's a lot of windshield time.

Dinner was back at the garden house featuring pupus (appetizers) from Pono Market in Kapa'a. Every one of the four types was scrumption: ocean salad, langoustine poke, lomi lomi salmon, and spicy ahi poke. (Poke is chopped sashimi with seasonings, a Japanese influenced Hawaiian food.)

Discussion of logistics for tomorrow concluded as "nalu" (meaning wave, as in "go with the flow"). We leave again at 5:30am and hit Young Brothers shipyard at 7:30am to send off the truck for Maui and meet a long-time friend of kumu's there (he's also shipping something it turns out). Kumu and his niece fly back to Maui in the afternoon - probably I will take them to the airport - but that's as far as we know. I have some leads on a place to stay tomorrow.

It should be interesting to see how it works out from there.