I have been remiss in writing for the past 6 weeks. For 3 weeks of those 6, I was on vacation on the Big Island of Hawai’i with the beloved Michael. As I started my new job as soon as I got back and also received a friend visiting from overseas (who is just leaving today) soon after, it’s been a bit hard to find the time to take the flipcam videos and photos from the trip and put them into a nice video.
But soon, I promise.
Here’s the short version: Hawai’i is an amazing, wonderful place – one that I may earnestly seek moving to. In April of 2007, I went to Maui for my cousin Eric’s wedding. Maui has some beautiful and lush spots, but the Big Island takes those few lush spots, magnifies them, and populates an entire island with them. We saw everything from endless landscapes of broken lava as sharp as glass to misty grazing land that suggested we were in the Scottish Isles and not Hawai’i to green cliffs abutting deep blue ocean. There were black sand beaches, white sand beaches, and a green sand beach. The sun was hot, but the breeze was always soothing.
Spending time on the islands, one becomes intimately familiar with the concepts of Aloha and Mana. People in Hawai’i are the nicest you have ever met, embracing aloha – friendliness, warmth, and welcome. Standing inside the Mo’okini Heiau on the northern tip of the island – an ancient religious ritual structure built in the 400s AD and site of human sacrifices, I could not but help feel the gravitas of the place and a sacred feeling derived instrinsically linked to the awesome natural setting around us – Mana.
It’s a really magical place, and I’ll do my best to share that by posting this video soon!
*Many thanks to Nate Kirby-Glatkowski, whose detailed map of the sites of the Big Island (drawn and written on the cocktail napkin pictured) proved to be our vacation bible, second only to our Lonely Planet guide.