...and here's what I come home to. From tropical fruit and beaches to a raging blizzard. At least it feels like winter!

           Thank you so much to Bobby and Ming Wei and all of the incredible people I encountered on the big island. I couldn't have imagined a more wonderful trip. I don't think I'll be able to stay away for long...

A HUGE banana flower. All the little green things coming out of the sides are baby bananas. It looks like there will be about 100 on this stalk!

Cracking open mac nuts 

Coffee plant!

If you pop the berry in your mouth and chew the skin, you can spit out the beans that are used for roasting. It tastes a bit sweet and is apparently very high in vitamin C. 

           Ming Wei and I took the afternoon off and went to the beach yesterday. It was a really nice little bay with lots of little nooks formed by lava rock. We went snorkeling and saw parrotfish, angelfish and needle fish, but the most exciting thing was the baby octopus! I spotted him hanging out on a rock, changing colors like crazy. As he moved from the sandy bottom to the coral rocks, he would change from a light tan to a dark gray color. The colors seemed to ripple through him, it was insane to watch. We also swam out to a little point to see Neil Young's house! He's livin pretty large. 

           It got a little chilly as the sun started to go down, so we decided to crash a resort's hot tub. Best idea ever. Walked in with our clothes half wet and hair all beachy... maybe a little bit conspicuous. The trick is to try to grab a pool towel as soon as possible, because if you have the resort towel, no one will dare question you. It's ideal if you can snag one off a cleaning lady's cart before you walk out into the open. Thanks to Rapin family vacations, I'm fairly well practiced. 

            All 60 bananas are ripening at the same time! We've been giving them away right and left, and yesterday I made banana bread. This was no ordinary banana bread. I added sweetened shredded coconut and super bitter cacao nibs, so it was very island-esque. I also used the cream off the top of the raw milk Bobby and Ming Wei get from their neighbors. So rich. This morning I had a piece toasted with coconut butter. Oh. My. God. 

          The bananas keep coming so I'm going to keep experimenting!

           

Most Fruitful Yuri (name that movie pun)

             Besides his incredible enthusiasm and energy, the best thing about spending a day with Yuri is the FRUIT. He knows every little spot to get every kind of fruit on the island. To make some extra money, he harvests a bunch of coconuts and takes orders for delivery.  While I was with him, he had to make several stops to drop off coconuts to his customers. He has this little basket in his back seat, full of fruit, and every time we stopped somewhere, the contents of the basket would change. He would drop off a few tangerines and pick up a few star fruits, give someone some cacao and bring back a stalk of sugar cane.  Seriously. Throughout the day, that basket held oranges, tangerines, bananas, cacao, star fruits, papaya, lilicoi (basically like passion fruit), and tree tomato. 

            As we drove out of one guy’s driveway, he spotted a ripe papaya. “Ok, I’m going to back up to the tree and you’re going to stand on the back of the truck and pick it.” I couldn’t reach it so he came around the back and said “I’ll poke it with a stick and you catch it.” I braced myself against a banana tree and waited for the papaya to fall. As it fell towards my face, I totally fumbled it and the over-ripe fruit exploded on my shoulder, rolled off, and was caught by the banana tree.

            We jumped back in the car - off to make the next delivery - Yuri grabbed the carved coconut shell spoon hanging from his review mirror and we scooped out the sticky sweet flesh and slurped the whole way home.  

The bountiful fruit basket. Yellow sugar cane and a pomelo next it. 

The inside of a lilicoi fruit. 

Yuri opening the cacao pod. You can suck on the beans and then they are roasted and ground to make chocolate!

Waipio Valley

            Yuri, one of Bobby and Ming Wei’s first interns, took me with him to do conservation work in Waipio valley. It’s a very sacred place and less than 100 people live there. They view from the look-out is absolutely breathtaking. The ‘road’ down into the valley is treacherous and steep and you must have a four-wheel-drivel vehicle to even attempt the trip.

            Yuri is part of the Agriculture group at the University of Hawaii in Hilo, and once a month or so, they make a trip down to the valley usually to work on removing invasive species, or help in some of the residents’ gardens. Four of his fellow students and I piled into his aquamarine pick-up truck and slowly made our way into the heart of the valley.

“Is your door unlocked?” Yuri asked me as we started the decent. “Yeah…” “Well, if we were to go over the side, just open you door and jump out. Oh, wait. That door is broken…role your window down. Ok, so if we go over, jump out your window and try to grab onto some guavas or something.” I’m not kidding, and neither was he.

When we got into the heart of the valley, we hiked the rest of the way to the ‘garden’ we were going to work in for the day. It was basically a patch of Taro (A Hawaiian staple root you may have eaten in the form of chips) someone had planted in the middle of the jungle, slowly being overtaken by invasive weeds. We started pulling weeds like crazy, but our efforts felt futile because every time you stood up you would see the same weeds carpeting the entire jungle floor. Weeding a jungle is a bit like counting grains of sand on a beach.

Another group of students came and we harvested the Taro, cutting of the root and separating the leaves. The agriculture group is having a big senior dinner and will be preparing the pounds and pounds of the crop; steaming the leaves and boiling the root. A soft-spoken native woman with a new born baby on her hip showed us how to properly pick the root and how to distinguish between the different varieties. Every so often she would pass her baby off on someone so she could get down in the dirt and pull some weeds. How she managed to hike up and down through the narrow trail and over multiple rivers with a new born is a mystery to me.

The reward for this mosquito-infested work was a swim in the fresh water lagoon. So refreshing; like lake Michigan in early June.  

We also hit the black sand beach on the way out. It was incredibly windy and sand was pelting us from all sides, but it was gorgeous. Yuri cut open a few of the coconuts in the back of his truck for us to drink on the way out, and we made our way up, offering rides to several exhausted hikers on the way.