Hawai’i is one of the few places that looks precisely like what you expect it to. At least, the ports that I’ve been fortunate enough to visit do. Even the big cities here look like the idealistic postcard versions, with palm-trees lining the streets and throngs of multi-coloured tropical fish in the harbours.
Lahainia is a tender port, one of the few that we’ve had this contract, but tendering in ports like this isn’t really a hardship. I just grab a seat next to the opening of the tender door and let the wake splash up on my face as we speed over to the island. This is one of those places where the water is so blue that it seems nearly impossible, as though you’ve stepped into a child’s imagination where the colours are just too perfect to be real.
It’s a tourist town of course, nearly anywhere we stop is, but it’s a lovely one. And we couldn’t have asked for better weather.
Of course, it’s the end of November, which means that I was once again faced with the mind-twister of ‘reversed’ seasons. No matter how long I work for the company, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to wandering the streets in baking 90 degree temperatures and hearing Christmas music pour out of all the store windows! It’s a very surreal experience. Now, fresh-made macadamia nut ice cream is a whole other kind of surreal experience (a very yummy kind!) …it would appear my life is just full of surreal experiences.
While I was enjoying said ice cream, I wandered across the street into what at first looked like a small forest in the middle of the town square – but I soon found out that it wasn’t a forest at all, it was one single HUGE banyan tree. Apparently it’s the largest in Hawaii, planted in the 1800s! This is one amazing tree, seriously. Normally Banyan trees grow from the middle out, the roots drop down mostly in the center and the truck gets wider and wider as the years go on until the truck is essentially a thousand little tiny trunks. This one however, had been carefully cultivated so that there were dozens of separate huge trunks, connected by huge low-lying arching branches that stretched across an area that was as wide as a small building. It was like walking through a jungle made up of all one tree. I was absolutely dying to climb it, as it looked as if it was simply made for climbing – but alas, there were signs neatly posted all over it ‘no climbing or swinging’ , which of course only made me want to climb it more but I was a good girl and kept my feet on the ground.
Besides, I probably would have dropped my ice cream.
This was our second to last port, tomorrow we’ll call at Hilo, before setting off on our homeward crossing, where the ocean will stretch uninterrupted all around us for five long days before depositing us in San Diego.