Twelve Days of Kauai

Having been here a good long while, but only the beginning of the full adventure, it's been excellent. With an abundance of time it's easy to take it easy and not cram every day with activities in an attempt to "do it all" like a vacation. Just what I wanted to do.

From my first trip to the Big Island I learned that it takes about two weeks just to settle into a new rhythm and that's about where I am now on the arc of this journey.

For example, yesterday I slept in and then went to Lihue to do a few errands.

• Bought shoes for garden work - I will be volunteering doing work at the National Tropical Botanical Gardens later this month and they require closed-toe work shoes.
• Picked up Apple OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) to upgrade this laptop (more below).
• Hamura Saimin for lunch.

It was a good, leisurely day.

Addendum on computer stuff

I brought the six-year-old MacBook Pro out of retirement to take along on this trip. I actually considered not having a computer - well, just my Android phone, which is quite a computer - but of course in the modern digital age that would have made blogging and photography quite difficult. Definitely glad I have the laptop now, even though I spend too much time on it, though nearly all is documenting the trip in the blog and photo post-processing. With the original Tiger (10.4) version of OS X, I'm happy with it; however, the world has mostly moved on, and most software today requires a newer version.

So I finally gave in and for $39.95 got the OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) disk at the Lihue "Mac Made Easy" store (not an official Apple retail store) from the friendly genius-looking guy. Glad I did: after about two hours I had everything running again and also could now install Google Chrome, at last.

Hamura Saimin

This venerable hole-in-the-wall in Lihue is the place to go on Kauai for saimin (a noodle dish similar to ramen). Japanese in origin, but evolved with other ethnic and local influences to where both the name and the food are changed, this is uniquely Hawaiian food by now. The noodles are similar to ramen but half-translucent like a rice noodle, very firm. Served in broth with toppings or fried, it's basically the only thing on the menu. The (yakitori style) chicken skewers are popular as appetizer.

Hamura is tucked away on a side street off Rice Street (the main drag) with limited parking. If you are eating there you need to find a seat yourself and they will take your order; only take-out orders at the register.

For more on the considerable history of saimin, see this article.
For dessert try the Lilikoi Chiffon Pie.

Pineapple Mochiko muffins

I'm baking lots of muffins lately because the available baking pans are quite limited. Including tropical fruit, it seems to always end up upside down cake whether I plan it or not.

Combine butter and pineapple chunks in over-proof pan and bake 15 minutes (starting while preheating oven is fine).

• 1 stick butter, melted
• 1/2 medium pineapple, peeled and cut in chunks

Beat until well mixed in another bowl:

• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup turbinado sugar
• 1/4 cup honey (Kauai honey, preferably)

Mix dry ingredients and combine without over-stirring with liquid above:

• 1 cup fine rice flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp baking powder

Place pineapple chunks in bottom of muffin pans and mix remaining liquid into batter.

Spoon batter into muffin pan and bake 30 minutes or until done.

Alternatively, bake in flat pan as a cake: expect longer baking time.

Kauai Guacamole

The local avocados make terrific guacamole, they are large (with very large seed to match) and have a nice consistency for smashing up. I'm using pearl onion because I can prepare small amounts for myself without dealing with whole full size onions and the mild flavor is a nice touch, though these were expensive, they should keep fresh in small quantities a long time.

(All the spices and hot sauces are optional to taste. Just do a little salt and pepper to make it mild.)

• 2 pearl onions, chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, diced finely
• 1 Tbsp lemon juice
• 1/2 tsp rosemary, crushed
• 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1 large Hawaiian Avocado, mashed
• 2 Tbsp Chipotle Cholula hot sauce (with the wooden top)
• 1/2 tsp Hawaiian Habenero Heat hot sauce (optional: serious heat)

With Juanita's tortilla chips this was a meal in itself.

Kauai-made Hawaiian Habenero Heat hot sauce is not just local, it's quite good. Definitely hot but it does have plenty of habenero flavor, not just pure heat that overwhelms your sense of taste. Add little by little to taste and be sure to mix it into the guacamole thoroughly, don't try it straight.

Nualolo Cliff Trail video

Update: unfortunately, this cliff trail is now closed indefinitely.

Finally slapped together a video of the Nualolo Cliff Trail from last week and put it up on YouTube.
Likely the trail condition has changed already - thunderstorm last night probably brought plenty of rain to much of the island - and as always be careful out there.

Thunder & Lightning

Tonight quite a significant thunderstorm moved through nearby: close enough that the floor shook when the thunder rolled. Saw a couple of strikes in the area of the Port Allen power station - where all electricity for the island is produced - accompanied by a momentary power loss.
Before the storm moved in, I managed this shot of the lightning lit sky above the valley. This was shot bulb; the tiny white dots are defects in the R-D1S sensor noticeable in the long exposure.

Later on the storm intensified with plenty of rainfall; the view over the valley was completely obscured by the mist and drizzle. However, I did manage to catch a lightning strike that was intense enough light to cut through all that and left a crisp image in one frame.

The storm is spent, outside a light rain is falling quietly. The blinking oven digital clock informs me, conveniently, that it has been 1:30 since the last power loss.

www.westkauaivisitorcenter.org

This week I've spent a very enjoyable two days at the West Kauai Visitor Center in Waimea. The Center provides many educational and cultural activities as well as practical resources to visitors and locals alike. My contribution over the past 24 hours has been to put up a very simple web site for them: they have wanted a web site for some time, but faced with thousands of dollars to do anything never even begun.

For $9.95 I registered the domain westkauaivisitorcenter.org for one year for them and set up Google's enterprise services (free to non-profits), including a little web site built with Google Sites. It's very simple but they are set up now and I've trained the staff to edit and add new web pages to keep it running. It's terrific that Google offers such a nice package for free to small non-profits and educational institutions, but with domain name registration the setup is non-trivial. Perhaps a bigger obstacle is that people simply do not know that all these services are available for free much less how to use them. By putting up a skeleton site quickly I was able to show them live what a site might look like, much less, Gmail, a Google calendar, and so forth.

Aletha runs the Center and is a real gem, full of enthusiasm and sharp as a tack at an unbelievable 82 years of age. It was a treat to work with her and hear stories of the Center, the town's, as well as her own personal family history. Carrie will be the new web site administrator, quickly picking up the site maintenance. Last night I copy-pasted a bunch of raw content Aletha had on hand, and today we reviewed and revised everything together to train Carrie.

It's been a nice day hanging out at the Center, helping the visitors who stop by, and plugging away at the web site, especially getting them self-sufficient at it. While I can manage fine without much trouble it's striking that relatively simple things are actually quite tricky to get right. For example, we were adding photos to the web pages -- simple, right? Actually, it was quite tricky and on their own they would have been stopped at several stages -- and I certainly would not blame them. To add one photo today we had to ...

• Browse photos on Aletha's PC to find something from past events.
• Copy the photo to Carrie's PC - without a local network, this required several steps.
• Find a flash drive with room on it.
• After mounting the flash drive, they couldn't find it (confusingly, the PC had numerous removable drives; I noted that it mounted as K: but if you missed that it was hard).
• They didn't know how to copy to the flash drive (I used the Send To / K: right click).
• You have to know to Safely Remove the flask drive before unplugging it.
• Over on the other PC, same problem finding the flash drive once mounted.
• As is the photos were way too big for the web site layout and need modification.
• We used Photoshop Elements to resize the image size (I didn't even try to explain "canvas size") and re-render down resolution for the web. Very non-intuitive step here.
• Saving the lower resolution image copy, next you have to edit the web site page itself.
• Insert / Image... and select the photo(s) to add to the web site.
• Finally, tweak the photo layout and alignment to look decent in the page flow.
• Hit Save (I thought you would get a warning if forgotten, but no, got a confusing "lost draft" dialog when I neglected doing this).
• In one place we set centered layout but don't get centering on the page (a bug?).

This is a lot of work for one photo to go up on a web site, really elementary stuff.

Flora

Without commentary I wanted to put up some images of the local flora (hit Slideshow button for easy viewing) I have been shooting. These are mostly from the Alakai Swamp hike shot macro with the Canon DSLR. The ferns here are especially elegant and constitute perhaps half of the images. During my time here I should get to know the names of the common plants seen on the trail.