The day started with meeting Roland, a local who invited us to share a pomelo with us or perhaps more accurately to show us how to crack it open to eat it. It is like a giant grapefruit but sweeter. Roland showed us and then he was off to Waimea days to go to the rodeo.
Last night was a lesson in the world of chickens. As dusk approached, the head honcho roosters made their way to a tree with a large, wide branch structure and hoped and flapped up into the canopy, at which point they let out a cockadoodledo as if to say ‘Everybody to bed.’ This scenario was repeated, cockadoodledo, throughout the campground, cockadoodledo, as the various groups invaded the trees, cockadoodledo. I didn’t see any moms with chicks, I suspected they hid in the bushes across the road. Cockadoodledo. You get the picture.
At this point, Ian and I (Trudy being somewhere else) looked up at the tree, loaded with noisy chickens above their tent and then looked down at the tent, then at each other and silently pulled up stakes and moved it into the open field.
Roosters everywhere.
I had the good fortune to be sleeping in the van; poorer view but more relaxing soundscape or so I thought until woken by 4 police cars with blue lights flashing, interested in someone in a deep sleep inside a car parked nearby. They were quiet but determined to wake him. Knocking on the windows didn’t budge the sound sleeper. This wasn’t a big city take-down, this was a Hawaiian wake-up. One police officer went into the chicken-and-chicks infested bush causing some clucking and came out with a long thin stick which he poked through the cracks in the window and poked the guy awake. There was a brief quiet discussion and then the four police cars headed off and the guy, chickens, chicks and me, all went back to sleep.
At around 3a.m. the roosters again cockadoodledo-ed as if to say ‘it’s 3a.m. and all is well’. This was repeated up and down the campground before settling down for a couple of more hours when they cockadoodledo-ed again around dawn to wake everyone up.
We headed north up the Waimea Canyon seven mile up hill all the way to over 4,000 ft, as far as the road goes, stopping at every lookout where we fed on each spectacular view both to the canyon on the east and to the dramatic coastline on the west.
At Pu’u o Lila lookout we started to hike further up to the Alaki Swamp, the wettest place on earth with an average annual 423 inches of rain! We however were lucky enough to hike in on one of the rare dry days.
A couple of hundred yards
Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa 