Go with the flow
Victoria Lane
‘Prepare to find nature at its most vulgar!’ said a friend who had already been to Hawaii. He warned of garish birds and neon fish and lurid flowers. And he wasn’t even going to mention the shirts and cocktails.
From London to LA, and then we flew through a speeded-up dusk and on for five hours over the black Pacific. When we descended dark mountains loomed into view: Mauna Kea (extinct volcano), Mauna Loa (the world’s biggest volcano) and Kilauea (its most active). We skimmed a complicated shoreline — surf illuminated by an astonishingly bright moon — and came to rest on a strip of asphalt in the middle of the vast lava field that is the west side of Hawaii island, also known as the Big Island. We were as far away as we could be from any continent and there was a strange luminosity in the sky that was not just the moon — sometimes, I was told, it is as though night never completely falls.
I was met by the friends I had come to visit. It was eight in the morning where I came from, but a drink seemed a good idea. So we drove to Kona town, which has a pretty, shacklike seafront and then turns into the usual sprawl. Outside the bar an overgrown Hawaiian boy was greeting customers. He was 6ft 7in and had a good layer of fat and muscle over a barrel chest, but then many Hawaiians are big. A classic lunch is Loco Moco — a hefty pile of rice and beef stew with a scoop of macaroni salad on the side, the whole structure topped with a pair of fried eggs.
My friends live on the east side — the wet side — in the direct path of Mauna Loa’s lava flow if it decides to go off. Hawaii island is the last in a chain formed by volcanoes over a ‘hot spot’ bang in the centre of the Pacific plate. The islands are drifting northwest at a rate of about 7cm a year: it is like a very slow-moving canteen queue, a dollop of mash accumulating every few millennia. There is another submarine islandin-waiting, a volcano beneath the sea southeast of Hawaii island. But for the time being the hot spot was right beneath our feet.
The island is only 4,000 square miles but it is supposed to have 11 of the world’s 13 climate conditions, excepting Saharan and Arctic. North Kona is the most arid part: lava rock as far as the eye can see. Drive down and round to the east, and you pass through the humid tropics, then through a kind of rocky Mediterranean landscape in the south, before finding an alpine world below the Kilauea crater. North Kona is hot and sunny, and at times you can lie in the sea and see snow on the top of Mauna Loa, where the observatory is. Head north and as you wind up higher you get to miles of pasture, where soft green grass flows in the breeze and cattle browse, before hitting the subtropics and ending up in rainforest inland from Hilo, the main town in the east, where there is five times more rain than in Kona.
There is a benign, unthreatening air to the place, or so it seemed to me, and I put it down to the absence of snakes. All the endemic wildlife arrived by air or by sea, and the plants and insects that survived had no competitors or predators, so many defence mechanisms vanished. The nettles don’t sting and the stink bugs, whatever they are, don’t stink. Thorns are only to be found on trees brought over by settlers.
My friends’ house is in a rainforest clear ing near Pahoa. This area is the alternative lifestyle capital of the United States, and it is not everyone’s scene. Kapeha, the blacksand nudist beach (the only beach in that area) is full of people with long grey dreads, hippies who got to northern California and found it wasn’t radical enough. Toothless stoners hitch rides down to the beach on a Sunday afternoon, when it is taken over by people playing bongo drums and letting it all hang out. There are a lot of body modification experiments going on round here, including a topless woman with a distinctive blond goatee beard.
This state is said to have a higher proportion of retired people than anywhere in the world, and many of them are pretty young. So there is a lot of wealth and leisure time, and a carefree holiday atmosphere. Hawaiian officialdom is discreet and scarce. I was told about a man who built himself a shack a little way south. One day a housing inspector came along. ‘If you moved your house over there, behind those trees, I wouldn’t be able to see it,’ he said. And people drive around ‘island-style’, picking up hitchhikers wherever they go and stopping in the middle of the road to chat to another driver if they feel like it. There is a bumper sticker you see a lot: ‘Slow down this ain’t the mainland.’ The best thing — the chief benefit of living on a volcanic island where your house could be engulfed with lava at any moment — are the hot springs. There is an Olympic-size pool, called Pu’ala’a and free to all, dug out of the rock on the east coast where sea water rushes in and mingles with hot fresh water. One side is like a warm bath, the other a bit cooler, and the saline mix means you can keep your eyes open underwater. Tiny fish nibble at your ankles. We floated beneath the stars one night after a trip to the lava fields to see the Kilauea vent pouring out its red streams. Then there were the tide pools formed from lava rock, which look like large, shallow rock pools, but as you wade in with your snorkel and mask the ground drops away and you find yourself in deep warm waters that seethe with the promised colourful fish. Turtles float about lazily. Inland, you can hike around trying to find the steam caves — naturally formed jagged caverns that gently exhale warm steam. These are, apparently, the gay pick-up joint of the Puna district.
One night just before I left I was lying in my cabin listening to the singing frogs, when suddenly they went silent. A split second later everything shook violently, for a long moment. We found out the next day that 44 acres of land beneath the Kilauea vent had dropped into the sea, causing a quake of 4.9 and revealing a huge natural tube that was now pumping lava into the sea at a rate of several tons a second. It was all a bit attention-seeking, I reflected: perhaps there was something to this vulgarity charge after all.
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