Hawi & Kapa'au

A big part of this trip, apart from escaping the chilly gloom back home, was to see if Hawaii was a possible future home for us. Would we like it enough to live here, and if so could we afford it? Turns out the answer to both questions is “yes” - at least for the Big Island, where real estate is more affordable. (I'll get into more detail about costs in another blog post.) The next question is where specifically on this island would we want to make our home? Neither of us expected to be able to make that decision until toward the end of our trip after we had circled the island and exhaustively explored every community along the way. Much to our surprise, just three weeks into our trip, and after seeing only maybe a third of the island – albeit the most promising third – we have found our spot.

Hawi (pronounced huh-VEE) is a tiny town on the Kohala Peninsula at the north tip of the Big Island. It's commercial center is maybe three or four blocks long, with just the sort of boutiquey/artsy/bohemian vibe we like. Not posh, not run down, just right. There's a small grocery store, a post office, a few restaurants, art galleries, coffee shops, and places to buy vintage clothes, ice cream, and ukuleles. Hawi shows a nice sense of civic pride and volunteerism, and still feels a bit like “Old Hawaii.” It's right on the transition from the dry side of the island to the wet side. So it gets enough rain to keep it green, but not so much that you're fighting mildew. It's well located about a half hour from the islands best beaches, about an hour to the airport, an hour and a quarter to Costco and Kona, an hour and three quarters to Hilo. All doable. A mile or two down the road in the quaint neighboring town of Kapa'au is community park with a swimming pool, tennis courts, and gym – all free to use. There is even a small hospital. Further down the road is the Pololu Valley (see earlier post), a tourist draw that will benefit Deborah's plans to run a vacation rental & a skin care business.

So we're actively looking at properties in this area, realizing that our hopes to stay under $300K might leave us with a fixer. Some parts of the island are more expensive, some cheaper, but based on our experiences here, our conversations with many residents, my journeys here 18 years ago, and all the reading we've been doing more recently, this is where we want to end up. We have seen some houses that are possibilities, or we could end up buying land and building our own, or maybe we could find a way to stretch our budget. But whichever option we choose, it looks like it will be in Hawi/Kapa'au.

Here now are some pictures of Hawi buildings and, as I am famous for, not many people:

 Just manger mannequins in the foreground of this shot - not real people.

Oops, a real person did sneak into this shot.  4 out of 5 isn't bad.

Mele Kalikimaka (Merry Christmas)

We had a white Christmas, but it was of the white sand variety – we spent the day at the beach. Later Deborah made cioppino (seafood stew) and rice for dinner. Not exactly a traditional holiday, but I'll take it over turkey and cold weather any day.

 When Deborah gets sunburned she dons her prisoner monk outfit

 Rocky gets his present early (he's Jewish anyway).

 And Lava as well.

 Christmas Dinner.

 Wild turkey - who should be hiding this time of year.

Mana the cat overseas my efforts to keep the chickens from harming the plants.

Pololu Valley

The road that circles clockwise around the Kohala Peninsula on the Big Island's northwestern tip passes through the picturesque villages of Hawi and Kapa'au, then through a series of even smaller villages before dead-ending at Pololu Overlook and Pololu Valley. Here is really the only spot on this relatively young island where the powerful forces of erosion are evident. A steep trail descends from road end down to a beach at the base of the valley, with overlooks along the way. Deborah used her hiking pole and was the envy of all who were ascending or descending unaided.

News flash: Rinse Cycle Run Amok! Mount Kenmore erupts! Deborah was doing a load of laundry (dog bed covers and towels) Sunday night when the washer apparently got stuck on rinse cycle. As a result, it overflowed and flooded the converted garage room, better known as our bedroom. It must have been overflowing for quite awhile until we discovered it based on the fact that the entire floor was covered in water. We spent the evening pulling things up off the flooded floor and bailing out the room with plastic bins and five gallon buckets. By our count we scooped up over 100 gallons of water. Fortunately, in this arid region of the island things dry out fairly quickly with the windows wide open. The natural drying cycle would have been even faster if the wind, which has been pummeling us virtually every day since our arrival, hadn't chosen that day to finally cease.

 Pololu Overlook

Warning!  Warning!

Pololu Valley

Temporary Home

The owner of the house where we are pet sitting is named Tamar, a single mom with daughter Mia in high school and son Cam in college. They're a very nice family and we enjoyed getting to know them over the three days we spent with them before they left to visit relatives in California for the holidays. We gave Mia a ride to her school one day and she gave us a tour. The West Hawaii Explorations Academy is like no other we've seen. It's science-focused, outdoors, hands-on education (motto: “where no child is left inside”). It's not about traditional classrooms, it's about kids designing and conducting their own experiments in marine biology, aquaculture, botany, etc. Mia gets to clean the shark tank.

Our home base here in Waikoloa Village is a convenient one but the house, as Tamar herself describes it, is a modest one. There's a fair bit of deferred maintenance and half-finished amateur DIY projects. Her boyfriend installed a garbage disposal but the switch is always on so you have to reach under the sink and plug it in and then unplug it again to use it. At least the cabinet door is missing so that makes it easier. We just keep emptying the bucket under the dripping bath faucet and as long as we are mindful not to trip on the gaps in the laminate flooring or ungrouted tile, or to pull too hard on the doors of the kitchen cabinets, which seem already to be leaning away from the wall, we'll be fine here. We sleep in the converted garage where the bed is surprisingly comfortable. The laundry lines hang over our bed so if feels like we're in a cozy tent.

There's a strange lack of furniture in the living/dining area, with a large dining room table for all the cat bowls, a smaller wooden table and chairs for the humans, yet another table for the fish tank – which has no fish in it, just anemones and urchins – and a couple of cabinets. No sofas or cushy chairs – probably a sensible choice because of all the animals – so if you want to lounge you pretty much have to go lie on your bed. There is some reasonably comfortable outdoor furniture, but only for those rare occasions when the winds aren't at gale force.

The bigger challenge here is cleanliness. Tamar has admitted to not being the best housekeeper, and has frequently apologized for the state of the house, especially after Deborah emailed her – before our arrival – photos of our home back in Olympia to assure her that we were clean, tidy people. You can imagine the challenge of keeping a home clean with 13 cats and two large dogs, not to mention the constant gusts that blow the arid landscape in through the open windows. So Deborah cleans once or twice a day to get this place closer to her admittedly high standards. That's in addition to bathing the smelly dogs and washing their smelly beds. The cats aren't innocent either. One of them sprayed Deborah's suitcase, thereby ensuring that the whole lot of them are henceforth banned from our room. And somebody has even been peeing on one spot on the kitchen counter (I know, yuck).

Sometimes the pets get a bit naughty when we're out of the house for several hours. Once we came home to find the kitchen floor littered with the contents of full plastic bins that had been pulled down from the shelves that line one wall. A cereal box had been chewed open and partially eaten. A bag of flour had been torn open and flung everywhere. We know at least one of the dogs must have eaten some of the carnage because there were two piles of barf to clean up as well. That was the worst incident, but by no means the only one. Sometimes there are worse things than barf to clean up. The dogs might be upset that their owners or gone, or that we're gone too long, or they might just be bored. But it's hard to get mad at them. If they and the cats weren't so pleasant this would be a lot harder.

 Do we ever go on a trip without Deborah doing someones' hair?  This time it is Mia (then Cam and Tamar)

 Chicken Man

Mia holds a pincushion sea star at her school

 Purple Shingle Urchins at tidepools near Mia's school.

 A crab blends in with the dark lava rock

 Our backyard.  A little grass would be nice.

 One of the tamer messes we came home to.

How can you get mad at them?

A Mighty Wind

The Big Island is indeed big in a relative sense – it is twice the size of all the other Hawaiian islands combined. Still, together all the islands comprise a state only a little bigger than Connecticut. But from east to west Hawaii is the widest state in the union. This is what happens when you combine continental drift with a hot spot on the ocean floor that keeps spitting up magma that forms into islands. You can think of the Hawaiian Islands as a series of peaks in a huge mountain range, most of which just happens to be underwater. The Big Island is the newest “peak” to form, and in fact is still forming. Kilauea, one of five volcanoes on the Big Island (along with Kohala, Hualalai, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa), is considered one of the most active in the world.

All that mountainous topography combined with the surrounding ocean and persistent trade winds make for a surprising variety of micro-climates on such a small island – anything from tropical rainforests on the east side to desert in the west Kohala coast to alpine chill on the tops of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa – both of which are nearly 14,000 feet in elevation. It's quite something to fly into Kona airport located in the arid expanse of dark lava fields (which Deborah likens to a sea of cow pies) – not at all what you picture when thinking of Hawaii.

We are currently staying near the arid cow pies in Waikoloa Village, also know as WaikoBLOWa for the fierce winds that plague it almost constantly as the trade winds from the northeast get funneled between the peaks of Kohala and Mauna Kea and race down the valley. We could never live here. The temperature is comfortable but wind plus dryness plus open windows equals a constant battle with dirt and dust. Even if it ever got cool enough to close the windows, with thirteen cats and two smelly dogs you don't even consider that. We're really attracted to outdoor living but here you can't enjoy your outdoor spaces at all. It's like living in a hurricane. When watering the plants I have to constantly remind myself to stand upwind or I get an extra shower. No, too dry here, too windy. Despite its conveniently central location, Waikoloa will not be our next home. We'll be looking for the greener, calmer parts of Hawaii.

 The Big Island of Hawaii

 Rainfall Map - We're currently in Waikoloa Village, where it almost never rains

 Waikoloa Resort - It's amazing what you can do with a little irrigation

 Deborah

 Sea Turtle (called Honu in Hawaiian)

 Someone sees a gecko

Animalia

We were fortunate to be able to secure one of the very few house sitting opportunities available in Hawaii. But there is a price to pay for 3-1/2 weeks of free lodging. The homeowner here has a soft spot for rescue animals so there are plenty to take care of. In this case we are caring for dogs, cats, chickens, and plants. The two dogs are elderly, mangy (literally, we think), utterly pathetic looking creatures with hair falling out in large patches, and sores and strange growths marring their bodies. And one of them is prone to farting. Fortunately, both Rocky and Lava have sweet dispositions. We take them for walks once or twice a day, but their elderly bodies are sometimes reluctant. Feeding them isn't as simple as opening a can. Deborah has to prepare for them a special mixture of rice, papaya, carrots, nutritional yeast and flax seed. Every five days or so she has to mix up a big ten to twelve pound batch and then separate it into zip lock bags for individual servings. For “dessert” the dogs each get a frozen chicken thigh.

There's no shortage of cats around here either. There are thirteen – that's right, thirteen. That would send most potential house sitters running away screaming, but Deborah's parents had upwards of thirty at one time, so thirteen seems almost trivial. (Still, we are very thankful that Hawaii has the kind of climate where the windows can always stay open.) The cats are actually fairly easy to take care of. There is a cat door so they can come and go as they please, and are happy to use the great outdoors as their litter box. They eat standard kibble so it's just a matter of keeping the bowls full. Some are fully domestic and love attention, others are semi-feral and won't let you near them. Some probably belong to the neighbors. The homeowner meant to put together for us a list of the cats' names along with identifying photos, but she ran out of time before she left and we only got the list of names, which is entirely useless. We just call everyone “kitty.”

There are three chickens – also nameless to our knowledge and therefore each called “chicken.” They have a fairly big hen house so don't need to be let out too often. When I do let them out into the yard I have to watch them so they don't dig up the plants or wander over to the neighbor's yard. They are omnivores in the extreme, eating something called crumble, something else called scratch, virtually all the kitchen scraps, grass, leaves, bugs and grubs. When I need to entice them back into their coop I just dangle a bright green lettuce leaf in front of them and they hurry over enthusiastically. They aren't big egg layers, but they occasionally provide us with breakfast. Hopefully they aren't watching when the dogs get their dessert.

Rocky

Lava

Here a kitty..

There a kitty...

Everywhere a kitty

Why Oh Why Hawaii?

Hawaii? Seems an odd choice for us to choose as this year's exploratory winter trip. Not because it isn't a perfectly wonderful place to visit, of course. But because for a married couple in search of a new home overseas that offers a higher quality of life at a lower cost and the chance to experience a different culture, we've chosen to stay in the US and research a place famous for its high cost of living. It is an even stranger choice when you consider how our five months in Fiji pretty much convinced Deborah that living on a tropical island was not for her. Yet here we are on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Our reasoning? Although Hawaii is part of the United States, it is 2600 miles from the mainland and clearly like a world apart. Its rich mix of ethnicities – native Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Southeast Asian, American (mainland), European, Pacific Islander – reinforce the notion that you're not in Kansas anymore. Still, in Hawaii you have first world infrastructure (for the most part) with good roads, a reliable power grid and water you can drink. It's also easy and economical to fly home to the west coast. There's still the overpriced, mediocre American heath care system to deal with, and some things are indeed more expensive – real estate, electricity, gas, imported packaged foods, for example. But if you shop smartly and make some reasonable lifestyle adjustments, Hawaii can be what one book title suggests: an affordable paradise. And the weather's not too bad either.

Our plan, such as it is, is to do a 3 ½ week house sit in Waikoloa Village on the Big Island, venturing out on day trips from that home base. We'll also hook up with a realtor during that time to check out housing options in that region. When our house sitting duties are done we'll circle the island exploring other places of interest with their varied climates and amenities. If our circle tour turns up one or two promising locations for a future home we'll go back to them and park ourselves for awhile to get a sense of what it's like to actually live there. We might also pop over to Maui for a week or two. We bought a one way ticket so we can't say exactly when we'll be back or if we'll find it all too expensive and instead bail to the more budget friendly environs of someplace like Mexico for a few weeks. We're staying flexible.

Sunset on the Big Island