Kilauea Point - Lighthouse and National Wildlife Refuge

We come to this location each time we visit Kauai. I am looking to photograph the following things - the birds and bird habitat, the beautiful island and surrounding water, and the lighthouse. This location offers viewing of all of these sites from a cliff. You can also see whales from this location and we saw several, but they are too far out for my telephoto.

The lighthouse

The issue with this lighthouse as far as photography goes is that you are right on top of it and there is no easy way to get the distant shot that makes for a good lighthouse photo.

The Island

The island is beautiful. I have better photos from previous visits that do a better job of showing of the color contrast between the green and black island and the blue and white water. But, you deal with the light you have on any given day.

It is difficult to provide a sense of the wave size when shooting down, but again the color of the water from this location is very interesting.

The birds

As far as I can tell, the wildlife refuge is all about the birds. This is a large nesting area for several species.

The thing about a refuge is that is prime habitat and the wildlife is protected so you can't get too close. All of those white dots on the hillside are birds.

Trying to use a long lens to photograph birds on the fly is tough. It is easy enough to get an image in your viewfinder, but tough to get a shot that is in focus. I did get a few.

This is the Red-Footed Booby - it has red feet that are similar to those of a duck and a pale blue bill. Get a good shot of the bill and you are pretty certain you can name what you are shooting.

I am calling this a Great Frigatebird

Brat man

I seldom make small talk with strangers, but when I do it could very likely be a brat man.

Another day and another farmers’ market. Today’s market was small and nearly at the point of critical mass where there won’t be enough venders to draw customers. It was located near the severe Kauai flooding of a year ago.

Markets are one of the few shopping outings I tolerate beyond just finding what I need and making a purchase. Markets have interesting and unusual stuff and interesting people. The vegetable farmers have to really work with hand labor to generate crops worth mass sales. Those who sell food typically must have a unique offering. I am drawn to the brat guys and I have a collection of photos. 

This guy did not work ahead so your brat was not ready when you wanted to make a purchase. I suppose this tactic was necessary because of the relatively small crowd. So, I stood around and talked while he prepared my brat. I told him I had high standards because I purchase brats in Minnesota and Wisconsin where the brat is sacred. He said he would do his best. He said he was having trouble with his brats exploding that particular day and thought when he made them with his partner the night before they meat was too wet. I responded that I new little of the art of brat creation, but weighed in more on the quality of the consumption. I told him he would be added to my collection of brat men and showed him a few photos. 

I thought the brat was average, but I do award extra points for the island condiments. The combination of fried onions, peppers, and pineapple was pretty good.

I am curious about the existence of brat women. Women vendors in the market trade seem focused on baked goods. 

You could make this at home

We eat some things here on a regular basis that we could eat at home, but usually don’t. Here are some examples.

This is Spam Musubi. It is kind of like the round rolls you get in a sushi restaurant, but square. From what I can tell, you can get the form to shape the musubi somewhere here and we will have to see if we can find one. The ingredients are available and simple - spam, rice, nori sheets, and soy sauce. The spam is fried. Here is the recipe. 

This is an açaí bowl (a - sigh - ee). This is a fancy and more expensive version, but you can get a basic version at the food area of Costco to enjoy with your hotdog. Again, we have discovered that açaí (it as evidently a berry that is frozen and then run through a blender and frozen) is available at our Costco in Minnesota. That is peanut butter on top (Cindy said it is probably made from peanut butter powder and not the consistency you get out of the jar), bananas, and granola on top. 

Farmers markets and farming

A good part of our entertainment in Hawaii involves going to farmers’ markets. For those who come for the golf, the beaches, and shops, this may seem strange. We like the farmers’ markets in the Twin Cities too and those are far larger. They also have brats. Here, it is mostly fruits and vegetables. The produce is different enough to be a learning experience. We try lots of different things and some have become part of our year round diet. Some trials result in rejection.

I grew up on a farm - hogs, a few cattle, corn, and beans. I spent some time farming as a kid, but I knew early on this work was a temporary commitment to my family and nothing I wanted to pursue as a vocation. My childhood experiences were likely more similar to the daily lives of those selling produce at these markets than to the large farms with the huge and expensive equipment, the massive amounts of land under cultivation or the feed yards with hundreds of animals, or the high costs and risky borrowing necessary to get from one year to the next. 

Big ag markets itself as feeding the world. The core idea of the claim somehow brings to my mind the sign associated with educators suggesting that if you can “read this sign thank a teacher”. Both professions want to be understood by others as essential and often worthy of government support. As I garden myself and partake in the work of those who cultivate and sell produce on a small scale, I have come to think of large scale farming as about raw material that contributes to multiple industries (fuel, fiber, food) as a way to differentiate this category of agriculture from those involved directly in growing and selling me food. Ag folks sometimes lament the lack of awareness of city kids who don’t understand where food comes from. I am not certain visiting an Iowa farm would do much to make the connection. Visiting a truck farm would. 

Chinese New Year

We attended a Chinese New Year celebration in a commercial area located apart from any community referred to as the Shops at Kukui ula. The eating establishments here are great and if you are into shopping I would guess the shops are too. We have one other brush with a Chinese New Year celebration and that was by accident when we chose a Chinese restaurant in Orlando. 

The event in Kauai seemed an annual thing intented both to mark the occasion and to raise funds for the local school. The celebration contained the elements I think of as part of a Chinese New Year event including fire crackers, dancing dragons, lots of food and drink, drumming, and music. It was on a smaller scale than you might find elsewhere, but the size allowed more access than one would have in a large city. 

So, as I explained, the event was partly a benefit for the local school. One source of funds came from the gifts given the dragons in seeking good luck in the coming year. Money is inserted in these envelopes. 

The drum group was an after school club. 

The late entertainment was a decent band and I recorded a snippet of a song for my friends back in the Midwest. 

Midwest Macs

I decided I would not necessarily generate a post every day. After I have spend as much time here as I have in past years, we do not necessarily something new each day. However, I did have some photos and some comments for today. We attended a Chinese New Year’s celebration complete with dancing dragons, fire crackers, drummers, etc. and I was all ready to go.

Then, my Mac crashed. Last night it was working and this morning I struggled even to get it to turn on. I started to have flashbacks to our last trip here in 2018 when I had a similar problem with this same machine. It would not start and then it would start on its own in the middle of the night. Very strange. That problem ended up costing us about a thousand for a new motherboard. I finally figured out how to start the machine consistently this morning, but the startup routine could not find a drive. It seemed to know some things about the drive, but the drive and its contents were not visible. I eventually gave up and we took it to the Mac Made Easy. This is not an actual Apple store, but at least there were Apple certified repair folks who told me what I had self-diagnosed was indeed the case. Either the SSD (the drive) is shot or some connection was not working AND because my Mac was old they did not have or could not get parts. Evidently, to be certified you are not allowed to fix old Macs. Others can do this if they can find the parts. I will have to wait until I get back to the Midwest and go back to our Apple store to see if there is any saving this machine.

Yes, that is me in the reflection on my screen taking the photo of the screen. The folder with the question mark is not a good

Anyway, unless there is a way to fix this machine for a low price, it is not worth the money to invest more in a machine I cannot cover on a warranty. We ended up purchasing a new Mac through Costco for $1200 that will arrive Thursday. It will not be the equal of my existing machine which cost more than twice that when new, but I mostly just write now and the high end machines with large storage, fast CPU, etc. make little sense. I do at least like to be able to move content back and forth between my iPad, iPhone and computers, so a less expensive machine seems a reasonable investment.

This thing about my computer and Kauai is strange. The machine was fine all last year on the Big Island. Perhaps it is just a Midwest Mac.Cindy does almost everything she does on her phone. I can’t stand to work within a small window without a real keyboard. I will get by for about a week seeing what I can do with my iPad. The one challenging problem is to get photos off my camera. My camera will work as a WiFi hotspot, but working with a large number of images is not ideal. We expect kids to do real work with Chromebooks so this should be good experience for me.

Photos should be coming up tomorrow.

Acclimation

So, I thought I would do my best to locate where we are. Google maps works great for this and the app running on my camera does a very precise job.

Kauai is nearly the northern most island of the Hawaiian Islands chain. Last year we were on the southern most island (Hawaii or the Big Island).

We stay on the northern edge of this island by the town of Princeville. When we say there is pretty much just one road here, you can kind of see it encircling most, but not all of the island.

We are staying in a condo that is part of a development called Pali Ke Kua. We are surrounded by a golf course on one side and a cliff over the ocean on the other. Our condo is situated maybe 30 yards back from the cliff and this differs from last year on Hawaii when we were close to the beach and on nearly the same level as the ocean. Each was spectacular in a different way. Last year it was the sound of the waves crashing and even the mist from the waves. This year is a much more expansive view.

This is our view to the right if we walk to the edge of the cliff. You get a sense of the height from this image.

This is our view to the left again from the edge of the cliff. You can see rain falling in the higher elevation. It does rain here a lot with the place on earth receiving the most annual average rainfall in the center of the Island (about 400 inches). It has yet to rain on us so there are a lot of microclimates generating the weather. 

Kauai 2020 #1

We have fled the cold North and settled in Kauai. I will have to practice my Hawaiian spelling again - a limited number of letters used in strange and what most English teachers would say were illegal combinations. I guess that is because the words are not English. It is also Kaua'i, but diacritical marks are a bit much to expect from me.

We have returned to Kauai after spending our break in Hawaii (Big Island) last year. They wanted $70 more a night. While the stock market has been good, this is just gouging and Cindy would have none of it. For pure nature, you can't beat Kauai.

We arrived last night after a 9 hour flight to Honolulu from MN and then a short hop to Lahui. Nine hours may seem like a very long time to sit an airplane and I suppose it is. However, after the 25 hours we spent in a plane (not counting time between flights) getting home from South Africa it was fine. Cindy says it is all about mindset. I didn't even have not recharge any of my reading devices or watch a move. With the price of theater tickets and say 3 or so free movies on a plane, it almost seems like a bargain. Cindy is a movie buff and on a plane everyone their own screen so it does block access to ESPN like at home.

Here are a couple of pictures. I actually planned to take something like the first picture last year, but the airport in Hawaii disappointed me. One thing I remembered from previous visits to Kauai were the scary video presentations you saw while you were waiting for your bags. Instead of ads for jeep rides and helicopter rides and fancy golf outings, they played public service announcements about the dangers of swimming. Rip tides are a serious danger under appreciated by many tourists. I am so fearful, I have yet to enter the ocean. Every trip so far we have had someone perish by getting swept away while swimming or snorkeling. When you hear the helicopters patrolling the beaches, you can guess something bad has happened.

When in doubt, don't go out. Me? I am always in doubt.

We stopped for a few groceries when driving to the condo from the airport. We go to Costco for serious shopping, but some bread, peanut butter, and eggs were necessary to get us started. As I walked into the store, I saw this sign that took me back to my last visit here. Reminding of me of my battle with shingles when I was just getting in a good mood was not necessary. They have some weird ways of thinking about locating signs here. I suppose there was a small dispensary in the store, but the one big sign in front of the store warned of the need for a shingles shot. You actually need two spaced apart and I am ready this year. I suppose there are a lot of over 50s here so maybe the logic makes more some sense than what you might encounter in your stateside grocery.