Hello all! This special edition of the Giraffe comes from Hawaii! I'm here for the ACM SAC'09 conference. I wrote a paper, which you're welcome to read if you're having trouble falling asleep. That got me a free ticket to Honolulu so I could inflict my brand of academic drivel on willing victims. Here's what's been going on.
First, sorry this post is so long. Internet access is $13/day in my hotel, and it doesn't get much better elsewhere, so I've been writing offline until I could post. I finally found a place with free WiFi for customers, and if I sit in the Starbucks across the street I can just barely pick up their signal. This wad of web rubbish comes to you on pirated air waves.
Anyhoo.....
I met another CS grad student named Conley in Roanoke, and after arriving in Honolulu we went down to Chinatown for dinner. We couldn't read any of the signs so we just picked the busiest restaurant. Conley got Duck-Foot-Sea-Cucumber-Hot-Pot which was brimming with boney duck feet. We had to ask the waitress how to eat them! You just gnaw the skin off. It's like a really skinny chicken wing. I got the sea food.
Next morning I caught a 5am flight to Big Island and Volcano National Park. Few people live there and you have to rent a car to get anywhere. Conley came along and we decided to climb Mauna Loa, Hawaii's 14,000 ft active volcano, that afternoon. We had breakfast at Lava Cafe (Loco Moco = delicious!) and visited the 450m lava tunnel.
After the lava tunnel we ran down a pig path we found in the jungle (we did a lot of that over the next few days). We found a gigantic fern plant with strange curled sprouts about 1-foot long, very springy, and covered in a soft brown fur. We broke one off, looked at it, and then at the same time said "Can you eat it?" It tasted like a dry apple and the syrup was very light and sweet.
The hike up Mauna Loa was fantastic and wet. It was drizzling when we started and at about 7,000 ft it began to pour like a garden hose. The landscape was stunning, blasted and barren. Coal-black volcanic rock surrounded around us for miles. Nothing grew there; no trees, no ferns, not even lichen. Huge cracks and crevasses opened on the sides of the trail. One of them was spewing stinking sulfur and steam which made our heads spin. It would have been insane to leave the trail. The volcanic rock was as sharp as broken glass and the flows were thin and weak. It was the most desolate and hostile place I've ever been. (Excluding my brother's bedroom.)
At 9,000 feet a thick freezing fog settled on us and soaked us to the bone. Visibility was less than 50ft and we started to worry about finding shelter. At 10,036 ft we found a cozy cabin complete with bunk-beds and a butane stove! The cabin had two blankets and a woman's jacket. We stripped off all our sopping clothes to dry and Conley claimed the jacket. If anyone and walked in, they would have found two men with nothing but a woman's fur-lined jacket between them! A 3rd party would have questioned the existence of our girlfriends.
We made canned-ham-blueberry-bagel and peanut-butter-jelly sandwiches and decided to wait-out the pounding rain. It kept raining long into the freezing night and we wound up camping until the next morning. At about 8:00am it was clear that we would never be able to reach the summit in this weather so we had to get dressed in our wet clothes and trudge back down the rainy mountain. The worst part was putting on those cold, wet pants. It was like putting on a bloated frozen frog.
About 2-hrs down the mountain the rain finally cleared. The sulfur vent wasn't blowing so we got as close as we dared. The black rock walls inside the vent were painted with fantastic yellows, oranges, reds and greens. It was like Pollock gone cave-man. We got back down the mountain around noon, soaking and smelly. It was some of the best fun I'd had in ages.
After we got down Mauna Loa we tried to see the rest of Volcano National Park, but sulfur plumes had shut down most of the park. We visited the volcano observatory and could see the main crater in the caldera, but all trails down to the crater were closed. Some jerk hit my rental car in the parking lot and ran off without leaving his info, so I had to call the rental agency and report the damage. Fortunately, I bought the $11/day insurance so everything was covered.
Back in Hilo, we visited Boiling Pots park where gigantic waterfalls, 150ft and higher, fall roaring into a natural rock bowl. With the rain and the waterfalls we were once again soaked to the bone, so why not run down this muddy path into the jungle? After a passing thought for leaches, we splashed along a stream and scrambled up a mud bank to the top of one of the falls. We found a nut tree with strange white walnuts which we cracked on the rocks and ate with fat blue berries and water gathered in banana leaves. It was wonderfully primal to crouch on the top of the falls in the rain, dripping wet, few clothes, cracking nuts and drinking rainwater. I tossed a small tree in the bowl and it was shattered to matchsticks in seconds.
After Boiling Pots we went to the airport, sopping and smelling of jungle. Security gave me no end of grief for the tent poles in my backpack and confiscated Conley's peanut butter as a security hazard.
That was the end of the weekend. Monday - Thursday I'd be in and out of presentations, but most days I'd slip away to see something interesting. Here's a few of the highlights:
Wednesday I visited Perl Harbor with Haiyan, a Chinese student from my lab, and her 8-year-old daughter Catherine. There's all kinds of museums around there, but they're all kinda expensive and only the Arizona Memorial is free. We went on the USS Bowfin, a retired WW2 submarine, and I whacked my head on the bulkheads until I realized I would never fit in as a submariner. The monument was very somber. You take the ferry out to it and you can see the outlines of old battleships beneath the surface. There's a viewing well in the floor of the monument where you can see the rusted deck of the Arizona. Hundreds are entombed there.
Every afternoon I've been swimming in the Pacific. The sea water here is crystal clear and a lovely 75 degrees. And so salty! Monday I went for a swim just off the beach and I was amazed to find beautiful fish of all colors and fantastic patterns swimming over the rocks! Most were about the size of a tea saucer, but some were as large as house cats. They're completely unafraid of people so I could swim right up to them! I spent a few hours just swimming around the reef near the shore.
Wednesday afternoon I decided to follow the reef out to where it gets deep. I swam out from the island for about 20 minutes, held my breath, and dove. It's really hard to sink in the sea water, so I actually had to swim downward! About 20-ft down there was a gorgeous coral reef, all pink, green, brown, and yellow. It was swarming with angel fish, sea urchins, and dozens others I couldn't recognize. There were large fish with a strange horn-like thing on their forehead, skinny semi-transparent fish about 1ft long, and a big fat fish I called the "quilt fish" because it was a patchwork of colors. Even at that depth the water is clear as glass. The reef was a maze of caverns, arches and ledges. I'd stay down as long as I could hold my breath and then shoot up gasping to the surface. Best of all, it was completely free! Nobody organizes this kind of thing. It's just the Hawaiian equivalent of watching pidgins in the park.
I wasn't on the reef long before I had a scare. A long white sea-snake with black spots and rings was writhing on the coral only a few feet away from me. I wasn't too worried because the animals clearly weren't threatened by me, but I did swim over to a different part of the reef. That's where I saw the moray eel. I swam down into a bowl in the coral, turned around, and found it's wicked grin just 2-ft away! It's head was about the size of a small dog's I could just barely see its jagged teeth. My friend Michael nearly lost a finger to a moray, and I doubted my arsenal of basketball shorts and swim goggles would be sufficient protection. I also remembered that I was 20-minutes from shore and nobody knew where I was! I decided I'd seen enough of the reef for one day.
Last night I went to the conference awards banquet at the Polynesian Culture Center. Everyone got a traditional flower lei on the way into the center. It was the first time most these geeks got leid (har har). The banquet featured delicious Hawaiian food and fresh pineapple, and was accompanied by Polynesian dances from Tahiti, Samoa, Tonga, and Hawaii of course. The show started by digging dinner out of the ground. An entire pig had been roasting all day in a pit covered by a heap of banana leaves behind the stage. An extra tasty pig! The Tahitian women were incredible! They could isolate the motion of just their hips, calves, or anything really. It was quite a show. The climax was a spectacular fire knife dance given by the 3-time world champion of fire knife dancing. I'd love to have "fire knife" on my business card somewhere.
Whew! That about catches everything up. If anything else happens I'll stick it here. Cheers!
