2015/03 Hawaii trip - Hawaiian Tropical Botanical Garden |
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Friday February 27th
It was a very pleasant sunny morning and we were going to take the Māmalahoa Highway north from Hilo, up the Hamakua coast to a garden. Yes, we were having trouble with the place names too! The Hawaiian language has a limited number of sounds, and the alphabet has only twelve letters, so a lot of the words appear similar to us “haoles”. Announcements and signs may be bilingual. Everyone greets you with “aloha” and uses “mahalo” for thank you. Toilets are labeled “kane” or “wahine”. “Mauka” means towards the mountain and “makai” towards the sea. “Kapu” means forbidden, but sometimes only to us “haoles”. “Iki” means small and “keiki” are children. The glottal stops, like in the name Hawai’i, tell you when one vowel syllable ends and another begins. Some of the language is similar to Maori; for example, in both languages “wai” means water, and “nui” is big, but Hawaiian doesn’t have Maori’s “ng” sound.
When communicating at a distance, there’s also the shaka sign, thumb and pinkie extended and the rest folded, which I think means “Hi” or “Thank you”, something friendly anyway.
Having been fried on Puna’s beaches and refried on Kilauea’s slopes, Sandie was going to use her umbrella as a parasol from now on. It got used as an umbrella a lot too! We were stalled for nearly an hour in road works on our road into Hilo. They were converting the shoulders into rush hour lanes, and these delays would plague us for the whole trip, though we’d been lucky to find out on a day when we had no appointments to keep. This was only a few miles from where the current lava flow was expected to sever the road, so we could see how severe the impact of a road closure was likely to be.
The Hawaiian Tropical Botanical Garden is on a section of the “old” Māmalahoa, twisty and narrow with one-lane bridges. Our guidebook said that the garden was worth an hour, but we stayed all day, until it closed. The garden houses a weird and beautiful collection of the world’s tropical plants. An American couple built it in the 1970s in what was then a garbage-choked ravine, stretching from the road to the seashore. They then donated it to the nation with an endowment to keep it funded.
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Botanical Gardens (6.23) |
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Botanical Gardens beach (5.09) |
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As well as every tropical houseplant we’d ever seen, the garden has massive collections of heliconia (lobster claws), anthuriums (tailflowers), and palms. Sandie was happy to eat her sandwiches surrounded by around a hundred varieties of orchid. A stream cascades through the garden, emerging onto a rocky beach. The staff who were mostly busy driving visitors up and down the very steep paths seemed to really know their stuff, reeling off common and Latin names. I haven’t named many of the plants shown in this letter; there are just so many that were new to us. Hawaii originally had an odd mix of plants, but they have been overwhelmed by species brought in from around the world. Just about anything which doesn’t require a hard freeze can grow here.
After spending all day inching down and up the paths we were happy to drop into the nearby What’s Shaking smoothie house and sit for a while. I think this was one of the few days when we made it back to the cottage in daylight.
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Cottage interior (0.32) |
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