Month: May 2004

A little more cartoony than the first one (Bridget battles her archnemesis, the Barbie-vampire “Rebecca” and then becomes a drug mule), but still retains the same flavor as the first.

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A quick shopping trip, lei lesson, snorkelling, and a dinner cruise.
We drove to Down to Earth this morning- we had to get Diane some oil for her insect bites. We have gone through about 10 different products trying to get her to stop itching, including I think benzocaine(?!), ammonia, and hydrocortizone.

We eventually heard about Tumanu Oil (courtesy of Newchapter), which you can get at Down to Earth, Maui’s flaky organic food food mart. In other words, if we lived here, the place we would get all our groceries. The oil did the trick, and I picked up some wacky drinks for myself… including bottled kombucha, which was a trip.

I can’t decide whether I like kombucha or not. It sort of tastes like a oolong tea soda, with vinegar in it.

We had a quick lei-making lesson. Basically you just have a 6 inch needle and run a string straight through the center of the flowers. We made leis for our mothers; I hope they survive the trip and the fridge until Sunday (Mother’s Day). We got free drink coupons so tonight is THE NIGHT WOOOOO.

Did some more snorkelling in the lagoon at the resort. I took a bunch of underwater photos; I hope they come out. I really should have taken them yesterday when it was clearer!

We had a cocktail cruise, which I thought was going to be a lot more formal than it was- good thing we didn’t wear formal wear! We basically just took the boat out and drank mai tais. This turned out to also be produced by the Pacific Whale Foundation, although we didn’t get any propaganda this time.

Although the cruise wasn’t what I was expecting, it was still pretty cool- the boat had a sort of trampoline for the front, so you could sit and look below at the blue water. Awesome.

Actually the best part was the guitar player “Nathan.” He was this burned-looking Hawaiian guy with a headset mic and a mullet, with giant sunglasses and a constant patter. He really didn’t give a damn if anyone was listening or not; he just did his show.

We were speculating how the Minnow could possibly have gotten lost, considering they were going out for “a three hour tour” which means only an hour and a half out, and then an hour and a half back… and on both our trips we had around an hour of travel and never got to a point where Maui did not dominate the horizon. We decided that we were Ginger and the Professor, and the rest of these fools could stay on the island, but we were going to take Nathan and get back to Maui.

Afterwards, Diane treated me to dinner at the resort. You know all those wacky tropical “Specialty” drinks you see at the hotel but are too cheap to buy? We tried a bunch of them; our coupons came in pretty handy.

Tonight there were some major gecko sightings- 8 on the way back to our room from the resort restaurant.

Style Network is very scary. There is a show called the Brini Maxwell Show which I thought was a joke at first.

Mainly a spa day- I had promised Diane I would treat for some serious spa action, and today was the day.

I did some putting (there are two putting greens at our resort!) and then we went to a Luau.

I tried to force poi on our table mates, who were from Utah and own two “Taco Time” franchises. Jeff and Steph. I had never heard of Taco Time. I guess we all learned something!

Things to look for in a luau:

• How many guests will be there – less is better
• how close guests get to the pig- I prefer the luaus where you are actually around the pig when they pull it out of the ground
• if there is a stage, etc- are they really cooking the pig in the ground? I think that adds to the experience
• I also prefer grass and enclosures to an established stage, incidentally
• What else is on the menu. I think every luau should have poi and lomi salmon!
• How many drinks you get
• Whether they will have all-flower leis for everyone or not. Usually the answer is “not”- the men get small shell leis, the ladies get leaf leis with some flowers in them
• fire dancing – some don’t have this. After years of Burning Man, I don’t really care either way, but this is a big deal for some people

I bought real sunglasses- Oakleys. I have never owned non-dimestore sunglasses before, and I have to say these are pretty nice. They perch on my face just right, only touching the bridge of my nose and the tips of my ears. They have rubber ends and springs to keep you from bending them out of shape if you yank them off sideways or just have a wide face.

Today we took a snorkeling trip run by the Pacific Whale Foundation, then did a bunch of random lounging and ate at Longhi’s in Lahaina.
Things to ask about your snorkel trip:

• how big is the boat (for seasickness issues)
• how many people will be on the boat (less is better)
• how long each stop will be (longer is better)
• where the stops will be

We tried to get to Molokini but alas, the water was too rough and cloudy. Next time for sure!

I had really forgotten how much I love snorkeling in the open ocean- it was liberating to break away from the surface and swim free in the middle of schools of fish. I definitely appreciate the check valves on the bottom of modern snorkels too… they didn’t have those last time I went snorkeling in… uhm… the late 1980s.

It was really funny watching the masses of snorkellers paddling out to various areas- they mostly had those bright orange floating noodles tucked in front of them, so there were all these noodle ends sticking out of the water like giant insect parts.

We saw a spot the guides called “coconut” and another called “turtle cleaning station” where the sea turtles would go to meet the fish that eat algae off their shells.

Our trip was produced by the Pacific Whale Foundation, and all the guides had a bachelor’s degree in some sort of Life Science. At one point on the way back, one of the guides started geeking out about a cancer the sea turtles have been getting recently, and breeding habits of the humpback whales. It was kind of like being at a dinner in Berkeley.

I could swear I saw a gecko on the wall with two tails. Just the tip. Maybe it was a mutant. Or a house god of some sort.

I sure am getting sick of eating resort food. It’s all the same. Maybe I am spoiled by living in the San Francisco Bay Area™, but I need a little variety. What happened to all the Hawaiian food I remember from the last time I was in Maui? Where is my lomi salmon, shredded pork, poi, spam musubi, and random Japanese pickles? After a few days I still couldn’t find any… So I finally called my mom and found out where we were getting all that stuff. It turns out we got most of it from small restaurants away from the resorts in Kihei, like “The Kitchen,” places which serve “plate lunch.” I eventually found lomi salmon in the grocery store.

There is a supermarket called Star Markets, but every time we drive past it we misread it as “Stan Market.” So now we just call it “Stan’s.” Stan’s is a little overpriced, it turns out. Napili Market was much cheaper.

I found my jam- it’s called Poha jam. Named for the Poha berry it is made from. I still have no idea what a poha berry looks like, but it has a lot of seeds apparently.

Diane has so many mosquito bites she looks like she has polka dots. 30+. Gah. We need some repellant with DEET in it- somehow ours is defective.

Yesterday was mainly a travel day- we took BART to the airport, which was pretty cool.

Once in Maui, we rented a car and looked around Lahaina a little bit- we went to see the big banyan tree, which I vaguely remembered seeing something around fifteen years ago. I remembered it was large, and in a downtown area somewhere, and I wanted to see it before we left… by dumb luck we stumbled onto it. It is the second largest in the world (the largest being in India) and is 131 years old.

Today:
At the resort we had a demonstration on husking and preparing a coconut, and a hula lesson. Then we did the Road to Hana.

Coconut preparation:

1. A metal spike is placed in the ground- the coconut is impaled onto it, and rotated.
   The spike holds the rind in place and allows the husker to peel the inner “nut” away from it
2. The bare coconut is examined and a cracking point chosen- this will be along one of the more “flat” sides of the nut, in line with the space between two of the three eyes. This space is a sort of “pressure point” of the nut.
3. The back end of a machete is smacked against this flat, perpendicular to the coconut’s axis. This is a chopping motion, but the aim is not to cut through the nut, only to crack it.
4. The nut is now in two pieces and the meat is ready to be pulled off the shell, using the back end of a butter knife or table knife.
5. The knife is driven towards the outside of the nut from the center, embedding as little of the knife in the meat as possible. The back of the knife is used, for its rounded edge. The motion of the knife will follow a thin sliver along the edge of the meat, as close to the edge of the shell as possible.

After this, we got a brief hula lesson by our incredibly flaky hula instructor. The power was off in the gazebo so her stereo didn’t work, and she had somehow forgotten all her musical paraphernalia as well… so we did a “sing through” of the song we were doing (Huki Lau) while we learned the motions.

The hula instructor was very entertaining in her freakishness… she had a lot of mannerisms that would have made sense on a very young girl, but on her (40+) were just odd.

Example- every time she said “our song” she would make a giggling expression and actually say “ha ha” while holding her palm in front of her mouth, making a small joke since we had no actual music.

Went on a hike this morning- we drove the Road to Hana. I remembered it a little from when I was here with my parents, more than 15 years ago… I think we had to turn around back then, about a third of the way through. The road is VERY twisty and interminably long. We listened to a audio guide to figure out what the various stops were.

On the way we got some really good avocado sandwiches. The avocados were spherical! Bizarre.

One of our stops had a trail through a bamboo forest- bamboo when growing by itself will become impenetrable. However, bamboo growing amongst eucalyptus is more sparse. I think it has something to do with the leaves on the ground.

One of the tourists we saw had on what appeared to be a bootleg Rogaine™ baseball cap on- navy background, circular logo, with the word Regaine on it. Regaine. I guess that would make more sense than the word Rogaine wouldn’t it? Maybe that is what it is called in Europe? Then again why would you advertise that you are taking Rogaine?

The Road to Hana is very long. We made it though. Looking at the map, I saw the road around the rest of the island had some very bad roads on it, but was shorter overall, and connected to a major freeway sooner… also I didn’t want to drive the same twisty roads back to the airport. We asked a fireman in Hana and he told us our convertible would make it.

Well we made it but damn- dirt roads lasted a very long distance, and the “freeway” (route 37) was another small road. So it took us a bit longer than driving back.

Yesterday I got married!

We still have a ton of cake. Diane got a little carried away and made over three times as much cake as we needed for our 110+ guest attendance… we gave some away to people at Thai Brunch this morning.

We stayed at the Rose Garden Inn in the Fey Suite, which I highly recommend.