Wall of Photos and Board of Stats

The gulches of the coast
pooof!
Found this in the trash
This is my house
meow!
Day 1
Day 45
Days spent illegally camping: 18
Days actually working on farm: 8
Hours at Starbucks: 100+
Number of insect bites: 75
Distance driven: 1631 miles

Number of coconuts harvested and eaten: 40-50
Number of $5 footlongs eaten: 50-60
Fish caught with hooks: 7
Fish caught with net: 3
Fish caught with spear: 0
Fish caught with trap: 0
Dead fish found: 3
Percentage food gathered: 10%

Volcano Wine

The only thing I did this day was a few rounds of wine tasting at the Volcano Winery. This place is okay for being the only winery on the island. For some strange reason, the folks here like to reference UC Davis in the description of their production process. I found that a little curious so I revealed to them that I was alumni and asked them what they knew about UCD. They knew nothing. They'd simply purchased their vines there.
So basically, they were stealing the Davis namesake. I guess that's the wine business.

I bought a bottle of their guava and macadamia honey wine. Pricey.

Day 44: Kalapana

See that ReMax sign? It's for sale you know. A bargain buy.

"Aloha.", said a man who came out on the second floor balcony. He was barely dressed in a white pair of underwear. "How did you get here?"

"From the black sand beach over there.", I yelled, "Where am I?"

"This is Kalapana.", he said. I'd read about this place in a magazine. Kalapana was once a prominent Hawaiian community, home to the Royal Gardens, but was buried by a lava flow in the 90's. Now it was nothing more than a field of glossy black volcanic rock. Back then, a handful of residents had refused to leave and rebuilt their houses on top of the cooled lava. This was an isolated community of stubborn, rustic people.

"What you did was very dangerous. People often try to cross this lava field and twist their ankle. Just 3 weeks ago, a fella and his son was airlifted to the hospital.", he continued to say. The old man was wrong. Crossing the rocks was easy, but I preferred not to argue with him.

"I suppose I should count myself lucky.", I said. "How do I get out of here?"

He showed me the road out and asked me if I could make it. It was a few miles. No problem. "So long", I told him

"Aloha", he said in departing.

Day 45: Nice Night for a Walk

Walking out of Starbucks, I saw a bunch of kids drive into the parking lot with a pickup truck full of snow. They started throwing snowballs at each other. What the hell? Oh yeah...I'd heard it was snowing at the top of Mauna Kea, altitude 13,803 feet.

I had to get up there. But when I did, my car couldn't take the thin air on top of the massively steep grade. At around 9000 ft, I stopped at a visitor outpost, where the University of Hawaii system hosts nightly stargazing hours. This is considered one of the best places on earth to see the stars. The combination of thin air and the island's natural isolation gives the starscape particular clarity. There were thousands of them, with so many visible stars that you could see the rough shape of the galaxy. Several powerful electronic telescopes were in the courtyard, where at the click of a button you could see any celestial object you wanted by inputting the name. Some physicist from Caltech was hosting the visitor center that night, pointing at things with a green laser and talking excitedly about all the things in the sky. Our neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. The 7 star cluster. The 12 constellations in the Zodiac. They were all clearly visible. The mark of winter, Orion, actually looked like a guy with weapons.

As a kid, I used to love this shit. I've always liked planetariums, aerospace, and all that. But as I got older, I looked up at the sky less frequently and instead, looked down to whatever pedantic piece of schoolwork was on my desk that night. Right there, I felt like I had gotten it all back. I hadn't been missing anything.

After a few hours, the cup of hot water I was drinking had turned completely cold and I was freezing my ass off. I headed down all the way to sea level to a warm night on the beach.

Day 47: Bye Bye

After eating sparingly this entire trip, I used one of my unused meal tickets from the hotel dining lounge and for the first time, ate a ridiculous amount of food. Man, what a boost.

My last day here was unremarkable. "Last days" of anything usually are. I threw away all the funny trinkets I'd gathered during my trip. In preparation for my return flight, I started buying up all the things on my exportation shopping list, spending nearly $300 within the hour. To get used to living like a civilized person again, I checked into a hotel. It was the first time I had taken a piss in a toilet all week.

I dislike leaving familiar places. I suppose it's human nature to get materially attached and to want things to remain the same or stay comfortably preserved. Of all the things people are required to face in life, I probably hate this one the most. So ends this opportunistic and whimsical vacation. Cold weather awaits me at home.

Week 5: The Guava Farm

In Hawaii, there is a system of work-trade here that pairs small farms and transient people into a temporary agricultural collaborative. Farms provide food, supplies, and shelter to people who come to work on their farms. This is a common practice among hippies on the Big Island and is usually called "WWOOFing".

The one I ended up on was a family farm working a guava orchard. The guava crop picked from the orchard was turned in for money several times a week, a critical supplement to their household income. The farmhouse was constructed out of sheet metal. The windows were made out of mesh. Water came from the rain, electricity came from a generator, and food from Walmart. A pit toilet was short walk from the front door.

As I continued to live and work there, I found more and more things that I didn't like. These people were highly religious. They were conspiracy theorists that were afraid of things like Fluoride in the drinking water, GMOs, and government plots to poison people with dairy. They believed in unusual diet fads. They had greedily speculated in the housing market gaffe. They were obsessed with harvesting from their guava orchard, believing that it would lead them to fortune at the pace of 17 cents/pound. The relatives secretly hated each other. The 4 kids were hyperactive and annoying. Why did they have so many freakin kids?

Despite this weirdness, I found them to be decent and sociable people. They worked hard and actually cared about the affairs of the world. They were polite and didn't impose. Life on the farm was a mundane normalcy. After 2 weeks, I felt that I had nothing more to gain. It was time to move on.

As I started eating the pieces of taro I'd stir fried, I got this tingling feeling in my mouth. The tingling turned into a sharp pain that made it hard to swallow. Was this taro or had I made a mistake?

I rushed to the local public library and got the librarian to log me onto the internet so I could look up "oral/throat pain upon ingestion" in the online medical sympton dictionary. "Go to google, please", I told her.
She got me to http://goggle.com and asked if this was what I was looking for. The librarian had never heard of Google before. Son of a bitch. That explains why Hawaiian kids are so dumb.

I took over the console and started doing searches in a database of poisonous plants. As it turns out, all taro are naturally poisonous and are spiked with an irritant called Calcium Oxalate. I hadn't cooked the root long enough to denature the toxin. Damn. That was a pretty stupid move.

Lost and Found

For weeks, I've been searching high and hell low for wild taro. I found nothing but useless ferns and a few spare berries. Where the hell are they? Once cooked, delicious taro root is one of the best local foods available. The native Hawaiians have cultivated them for centuries. Wait...since they farmed them at the banks of rivers, where would wild taro be found today? It was in the gulches of these waterways where I found them growing amongst the thick jungle brush. I found not only taro but a bounty of purple sweet potato as well, all of it left by the native settlers long past. They were massive plants, hiding in front of my face the entire time.

I'm at a Starbucks/Borders. Just now, a guy started seizing at the magazine racks. He fell to the floor and started shuddering. Classic Tonic-clonic seizure. A guy came over and shoved a baseball cap into his mouth and looked around for help. People stared. A few folks came over, kneeled down, and started petting him.
....
The EMT crew came and stuck him on their stretcher. By this time he was fully conscious and was able to speak. I hope he likes talking, because he is going to have a lot of dumb questions to answer at the hospital.

After they left, I went over to see what magazine the seizure guy had been reading. It was a DC comic about the Green Lantern. The illustrations were dark and overtoned in sepia, a twisted 10 page story with a morbid theme. Ah shit. A bit of that guy's sputum had been sprayed on the cover. I tossed it in the trash.

Pidgin Speak

"we wuz driving down I-5 and den one guy jes wen buss out da kine howzit brah - throwing us da shaka - he mussa wen spock ouwa dakine Kam skoo sticka or da fish hook on da mira. We wen give him da howzit back too. He had da Hui sticka on his one."

What the fuck is that?

Day of Infamy

"I'll take this.", I said to the lady at the bookstore. I was buying a guide on local edible plants. She ran my debit card and looked at the receipt.
"Let's see...what's the date today?", she said. "Uhhh December 7th. Oh yeah -Pearl Harbor Day."
The woman chuckled and said something about not remembering these things.
It didn't seem particularly infamous from my perspective. I looked at the manual I'd just bought. It had Japanese translations. Outside, some fobby looking tourists were hanging out and talking to each other in rapid-fire Japanese. Down the street, the flag was flying at half mast.

Day 32: Unlimited Coconuts

are at my disposal now that I've figured a way to climb the trees. Not being particularly lightweight, the conventional methods that the natives use didn't work for me. I had to think of something else, a smarter way to create enough friction on the tree to negate 200 lbs of downward body weight. The answer was 2 pieces of cloth and a clever wrapping, allowing me to leapfrog up the trunk.
A few weeks ago, a friendly local guy saw me throwing rocks at a coconut tree and furiously trying to scale the trunk with my bare hands. He came over, took off his shoes, and at no obligation, climbed up the trunk with ease and tossed down a few coconuts. He briskly shredded the husk with a knife and handed me the final product. Just unbelievable. He said he did it because he'd just had a beer and he was bored.

Recently, I've been having this urge to be around people that are similar to me. It would be nice to be around some people that are about my age for a change. A few Asian people here and there would make the scenery much more interesting. It would be a refreshing perspective to talk to someone about something besides Hawaiian social issues, wild animals in the gulch, or the status of the Volcano. Hearing somebody talk in normal English rather than this garbly island tongue would be nice too.

Psychologists say that all people seek the things in life that most resemble the world as they would like to see it. I obviously haven't found that yet.

Day 31: How Innovative

While Californians are wasting time watching videos of skateboarders faceplanting, this is what Hawaiians are watching on YouTube. It's a guy on a surfboard fishing for marlin! He is surfing, sport fishing, and water skiing all at the same time. What will those groovy dudes think of next?

When I got back to my tent tonight I found the cat there mewing at me again. For some reason I was happy to see it. As a traveler, I rarely see anyone twice around here. I struck up a fire on the beach, which the cat was afraid of, and made some deep fried breadfruit, which is just the best shit ever. Damn I love breadfruit. The taste is consistent with potatoes but tastes succulent like fruit.

I caught a tiny fish fry for the cat. It didn't want it. What the hell.

I went to get shit from my car. The cat was following me again, but this time at a closer distance. It followed me into my tent and started clawing at my blanket. I picked it up and put it in the corner and laid down. It walked all over my laptop and then climbed onto my stomach and started sleeping. It was snoring. I mewed at it. It woke up and mewed back.

A voice in the back of my mind started listing all the diseases I could get from a feral cat.

In the morning I woke up as usual. There was no wind and the waves were calm. Boats full of tourists were sailing by. The sun was really beating down. I heard a meow. The cat was hiding in a nearby patch of grass. Today I am leaving the harbor and going to Hilo to work on a farm. I said goodbye to the cat and scratched its ears. I'm going to miss this cat. We get along so well. It would've been nice if I could keep him. If I did, I think I would've named it "Stray".

Day 30: Stray

Last night as I was brushing my teeth at the harbor, a stray cat came up to me and started mewing loudly. It had a shiny mixed black and white coat and gleaming green eyes. Cute cat. I made some mewing sounds at it. It walked circles around me and started climbing up and down the nearby rocks.

As I went back to my tent, it started following me. Every time I walked 20 feet, I would look back and it was back there trailing me at a distance. Cool. It followed me across the beach, over a jetty of lava rock, and to the patch where my tent was. The cat walked a few circles around my tent. I gave it some ramen and soymilk, which it didn't want.

I zipped up my tent and went to sleep. It started clawing at the tent fabric and climbed all over it, walking on my face on the process. Augh.
I heard it hiss. There were now 2 cats outside my tent.
Too tired to keep mewing at it all night, I went to sleep.
When I woke up in the morning, it was gone.

How does one adopt a cat?

Island Tuner

I've been driving around a lot during the last few weeks. According to that odometer thing, the total is in the ballpark of 500 miles. That's a lot. In the time it took to drive this distance, I've been listening to the radio the entire time. Since Hawaiian NPR broadcasts from Honolulu and isn't always in range, I've had to settle for second choice. The only good station I could find was Native FM, which always has some kind of Polynesian funk playing or any song by Bob Marley. This also seems to be the station favored by many shops for ambient music as well, so not only do I hear it on the road but also when I make a stop. Take this song for example:

Much of the music here seems to be either about eating wild animals or not giving a shit about civilization. I just have to look around me for this to make sense to me. Music like this accurately describes many of the people I've seen milling around on the streets. The local ones, anyway. How about this one:

I just like the line in this song about having a house on the moon. That would be so awesome. I live on the moon, bitch. Next?

Who the hell sings a song about being too shy? How can you be too shy and be singing about it, that is a paradox. But wait -what if you threw in an acoustic guitar and sang it yourself- my god, it's just too perfect. Teen Idol Rockstar Status is suddenly a reality!

Can't think of any others at the moment.

Day 27/28: Nights on the Pier

I've been night fishing off the docking area where they launch boats on the Kona shore. Lots of local characters gather here to fish, many of whom seem to sleep on the pier as well. Casting here is great fun because open access to deep water makes the sport very easy and you can see the fish illuminated by the lights on the dock. The fish that come up at night are very different than the ones you see during the day. They are pigmented red and have huge eyes for adaptation to low-light conditions, such as that Squirrelfish pictured above. Around 2AM, I pulled up a Spotted Puffer, which caused it to partially inflate, so I excitedly threw it back in the water. It floated on the surface, slowly deflating until it was back to normal shape and then swam off into the darkness.

Question: What country's flag is this??

Answer: wtf why would that be the Hawaiian state flag? What is this some kind of pseudo British colony? I'm sure if I grew up here that I would know the history of this design, probably having to do with Captain James Cook, but as an outsider it just doesn't make sense.

I love this show Man Vs Wild because the guy is so dramatic about everything. Fake callers are all over him, ruining his squeaky clean survivalist image with a barrage of FAKE FAKE FAKE FAKE.
This video is fakers gold. They filmed him walking over a supposedly dangerous lava field just a few feet away from a Hawaii Volcano National Park scenic point on Crater Rim Drive. It's a faaaake!

Despite that little gaffe, I still use this show as a reference for climbing coconut trees.

Day 22

Build me an army worthy of Mordor
Worthy of Mordor
Worthy of Mordor

Build me an army

Worthy of Mordor

Worthy of Mordor
Worthy of Mordor -dor -or
That is a secret crater.

Day 22: Volcano Town

As I left the Southern end and approached the Volcano area, a sullen grey fog began to roll in around my car. A partially obscured roadsign read "Welcome to Silent Hill" or something like that, which made me increase my driving speed a little. No really, it said that. I swear it.
This is the current state of the island's active volcano, Mount Kilauea, which has recently been spewing all this heavy gas into the air, hazing up the entire island with Vog. The air was particularly thick as I approached Volcano National Park, which overlooks a barren crater of charred black rock and vents of skulking steam here and there. A thick column of white smoke was streaming out of one of the craters to the South, an area of the park that had been closed off and considered too dangerous for the public. I spent 2 days kicking it in the park. No matter where I went, a faint sulferous smell was drifting.

Day 20: Giant Avocado

Despite my best effort, I couldn't finish eating it. It's like a eating 2 bowls of raw egg yolk. Tropical avocados are freakin huge. I'd say one of these is about equivalent to 4 of the hass variety.

Day 20: The Deep South

I'm entering the South end of the island. This is an area that has been hit hard in the last decade. Both the macadamia nut industry and the sugar cane farms in this area lost to South American farms, putting everyone out of work. In parts of the southern tip, locals tough guys are known to be hostile to outsiders. Some of the land here has been under contention for decades and still is today. One of the funny things about this area is a cluster of houses called HOVE, which you can see on the map as the matrix sliced into the rainforest.

Day 19: What you Need

The spiteful gravestone of a local candy store.
The contracting US economy has hit the State of Hawaii especially hard. The Big Island industry is built mostly on tourism and thus relies heavily on the "trickle down effect" to run an effective market. As non-Republicans well know, this type of economic system has some glaring flaws.

For ordinary Hawaiians, it has exacerbated the downturn and made them more vulnerable to the instability of boom/bust. It has made a proportion of the population exit the market and switch to self reliant "live off the land" hippie lifestyles, burdening the provision of public services. Generally, native residents here are undereducated, in need of medical services, and alarmingly poor. Although dubbed "paradise", this place is considered by many to be a dead zone.

Day 19: Pride of Hawaii

Hawaiians love Obama. Why not? He is considered one of their own, despite being on the Senate for Illinois. One of perks widely expected to be passed with Obama in office is the Akaka Bill, a provision for native Polynesians in Hawaii to receive the same benefits as Native Americans. It's not as simple as it sounds. The terms of the Akaka Bill touch on controversial issues of questionable linage, racial discrimination, and some kind of "native only" trust fund creeping around here.

Week 3: Hotelu

I've moved into a hotel room as a change of pace. I'm staying at the Manago, a famous historic inn run by several generations of the Manago family who are prominent Japanese Americans here. This place is popular among travelers on the move, as the accommodations are spartan, without the exorbitant spendthrift of resort style hotels.

This got me thinking: what happened to the Japanese here during WW2 Japanese internment? Japanese people have been living here for centuries as work hands in tropical agriculture. Were they interned here or sent to the lower 48?
What about after the attack on Pearl Harbor? Was there an anti-Japanese race riot here? What happened to all that rampant 50's Jap racism? God damnit conventional history sure is half assed.

Day 13: Scooore

Walking out of the local McDonald's today with my "Taro Pie" I had a stroke of luck. Outside was a macadamia nut tree that I'd never noticed before and on the ground were hundreds of fallen nuts. Holy shit! Free mac nuts! Picking them off the ground, I filled a plastic bag full, which was the equivalent of about $30. Awesome. I will have to be more watchful for them from now on.

Day 12: Market of Farmers

Hawaiian marketplaces are very lush. Unlike drab California Farmers Markets on tired Saturday mornings, the Hawaiian market is open 6 days a week and features brilliant tropical fruits and wares, a bounty of the tropical yearlong harvest and a strong tourist bent. Hawaiian merchants also happen to be very effective salesmen, frequently taking the time to converse, freely giving out fresh samples, and playing the "things in common" card to make things more hospitable for the buyer. However, visitors to the marketplace should be aware of rampant price discrimination between the higher tourist price, and the lower resident price.

This affects me because I'm trying to buy food but I want to evade the tourist price, which isn't always easy. I'm after prominent local food: papayas, starfruit, macadamia nuts, coconuts, pineapples, mangoes, and tangerines. I have found that the best way to go about this is to put up a certain amount of money (say five dollars) and ask how much of "X good" you can get for it. Pictured above is "ranbutan", a fruit similar to lychee that's great on the road. I put up a dollar and got a "handful". The stated price was $5/lb.

Day 14:

Damnit! I touched a spiky urchin and now I've got barbs embedded in my foot. Online medical treatment guides said to take a piss on it, which I did, but it didn't seem to help. On the other hand I caught this "Stocky Hawkfish" today. After taking the hook, it proceeded to tangle the line in some coral, so I had to dive in and retrieve it by hand. I find it pretty weird that even though I'm always using the same bait (shore crabs), something different always comes up.

Day 13:

I've got a great fishing system going here. First, I go to the shoreline and start turning over rocks, which yields shore crabs. I crush the crabs and use them as bait by affixing one to a hook and line. Then I swim out into the water with this contraption and look for places with clusters of fish to drop my bait off. It's the most engaging and satisfying form of fishing ever because you can watch the fish the entire time to see what they're doing. Using this method I caught this Saddle wrasse, which is considered a common bait fish. Not enough to eat.

Day 11: Vog

The Vog is really rolling in. Vog: noun. Volcanic Smog
This guy told me that it was coming from this lava dome on the South edge of the Island, and was ruining everything from perfectly blue skies to idyllic sunsets. Might even bad for your health. Whatever man, this is great. If it wasn't for this I would be sunburned all over.

Day 10: Public Anomaly

On the inter-community bus line from the airport I saw this bewildered looking guy with a backpackers hiking pack wearing winter clothes. (the temperature is 85 degrees) He was fresh off the plane and he didn't have enough money to make the bus fare, which is a freakin dollar.
I asked him what the backpack was for. He said he was a college dropout from Oregon who came here to make a new life. His speech had a bit of a noxious frat boy sort of accent. He knows a few people on the Island but that's pretty much all he seemed to know, and he bought a 1-way ticket. Crazy plan huh?
"That's what everybody says.", he said. He was a little defensive about discussing this subject and asked me if I was being "facetious", which made me draw an eyebrow. Zach was his name. I directed him to a local hostel and left to pick up a car rental. I gave him my number and invited him to a drink on the boulevard if he got his shit in order by tonight. I could use a few acquaintances around town.

Later he texted me saying that he "found his place". Whatever that means.

Day 9: Beach Bumming

I've been camping on the beach. I have a tent on a patch of dry sand. All around me is lava rock, pitch black volcanic stone that is frozen in a state of fluid turbulence. One of the fun parts about this living arrangement are the opportunities to forage for food. Fish can be pulled of speared from the shoreline 50 feet away. Palm trees provide coconuts to people than can figure out ways to scale the trunk. Coconuts are so satisfying. Once cracked open, they provide a cocktail of sweet richly tart water and succulent coconut meat. Throw the leftover coconut husk on the ground near the shore and droves of hermit crabs will come to salvage it.
I sit all day on the rocks watching ships go by, some filled with fat tourist snorkelers, others filled with what could either be the merchant marine or fucking buff local kids doing "Stand up Surfing", which is all the rage. Fishing and foraging for food takes time, and I've got a lot of it. I pass the rest of the day playing with my machettes or sharpening them.
Local hobos show up every now and again, camping a few clicks away but keeping to themselves. Yesterday I swam into 40ft of open water to see where the fish were. The ones I wanted to catch weren't around.

About once a day I drive into Kona town for some civilized food and the internet connection at one of the many Starbucks here. As I return to the shoreline, the full moon is usually sky high, lighting up the night with a florescent glow and moving the water level up and down a few feet. It's about when the moon is highest that I go to bed. The sand is lumpy and kind of tough but for some reason I never have any problems sleeping.

Day 5: Fresh Catch

After countless failures, I succeeded in catching a flagfish by using hobo fishing with a bit of bread on a hook. It took several days of trial and error to get this rather unscientific formula to work.

In California, fishing is a huge pain because of licensing and seasonal requirements, but in the State of Hawaii, fishing is 100% free so it has a ubiquitous popularity on every shoreline. Even fish harvesting with nets and spears is legal, so often you see people wandering around the reef collecting food the ancestoral way.

Hawai'i Island

I'm on the "Big Island". I'm here on a 50-day trip to hang out on the island as if I was one of the 150,000 people actually living here. I'll be on the move a lot, traversing tourist resorts, blocks of city, barren rock deserts, pockets of rainforest, slopes of the volcano, and bodies of water. I'll have to find ways to get by in an island society and think of ways to survive in isolated areas. I'll be making dealings with the people here to get what I need. I'll make little trades to get what I want. Knowing me, I'll probably do some dumpster diving too.

The Island is 4000 square miles. It contains temperate zones comprising every climate on earth from frigid permafrost to tropical jungle. As an added bonus there's "new land" or lava zones that are still in semi liquid state. Society here consists of 2 classes: euphoric tourists and hotshot locals. ...I suppose there are also stupid locals but I like to pretend those don't exist... There are pockets of affluence where the disgustingly rich reside and places that scream of ridiculous poverty, and on top of that there's a good skew in ethnic distribution to make everyone contemptuous. And there's me, the guy passing through. Hey there.