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Cramming in Kauai

Cramming in Kauai

“Oh shit!”

I heard the words and so never did see the wave that inspired them. When your raft captain yells an expletive, you know to hang tight to the rope and duck your head. You also know the heightened sense of adventure is what you paid for, so no panic necessary.

The Na Pali coast is the most spectacular feature of Kauai, and that’s saying something considering the Hawaiian island is also the home of “the Grand Canyon of the Pacific,” Waimea Canyon. The Na Pali cliffs, standing up to 4,000 feet (1,200 meters), dwarf even the ocean below. And the ocean sure dwarfed the 14-person inflatable raft we were clinging to.

The bumpiness factor was nothing compared to some trips, we were assured, yet we also knew that if ocean conditions are too rough along the Na Pali coast, the rafts are diverted south, or cancelled. Capt. Andy’s offers more sedate catamaran tours, and they are serious about making you consent over and over again to having no medical issues that would be exacerbated by bouncing on the ocean for four hours, but the little inflatable vessels are closer to the water and therefore to the numerous Spinner dolphins and sea turtles we encountered (I may have squealed every time one broke the surface), and rafts can be maneuvered into the caves carved into the cliffs. I have no regrets. After hours of clenching the rope in a death grip, my hands might disagree.

That was just one of the Kauai adventures I crammed into three days. As a travel junkie with not unlimited funds to indulge the habit, I wonder about the wisdom of subscribing to YVR Deals’ email list. (The man behind the deals, Chris Myden, also runs sites for flights originating from several other Canadian cities). How could I resist a $300 flight – including taxes – to Hawaii, even if limited vacation time and budget for such spontaneity meant only three days on the ground? I’m not a beach person, but I have turned into something of a beach-adjacent person.

I went kayaking on the calm Hanalei river, snorkeled and tiptoed around a sleeping seal in Poipu, hiked near the colourful Waimea Canyon, and took a surfing lesson from the Kauai Surf School – which turned out to be more of a boogie boarding lesson, but maybe next time I’ll actually stand up. And then in accidentally perfect timing, just before getting on the big plane home I took a small plane tour over the island with Wings Over Kauai, seeing from the air what I’d just seen from the ground, a new perspective of those stunning cliffs and canyon, of Hanalei Bay, and of Mount Waialeale, one of the rainiest spots on earth (like, even rainier than Vancouver).

Kauai is a small island — fourth largest of the Hawaiian islands and geologically oldest— but from above it was easy to see I had covered a lot of ground in three days – and a fair bit of bumpy ocean.

BTW:

  • No-fuss kayaking: Unlike some rental places, Kayak Hanalei has a private dock leading to the water, meaning you don’t have to strap a boat to your rental car. Reservations aren’t required for rentals, which are for 24 hours; if you rent later in the day (a discount is available after 1 pm) you can come back the following day for more. Stand-up paddle boards are available, and they offer tours as well.
  • A meal to remember: For the most part we grabbed fish tacos and shaved ice on the run, or threw together our own meals, but dinner at Art Cafe Hemingway in Kapaa was a lovely indulgence. My tongue still dreams about the baked pear with blue castello cheese, pine nuts and thyme honey.
  • Mobile massage: After getting buffeted by the ocean in various ways, a lomi lomi massage was the perfect way to end a day. Aloha Massage Kauai will come to you, or they have studios in some of the major centres. You can even book online.
  • Water water everywhere, but where to shower? What to do if your flight home is in the evening, you checked out of your accommodation in the morning, and in between you’ve coated yourself in layers of sunscreen, sand and salt? One option is to savour the sticky/gritty combination on your flight home. But a free option to get all your crevices clean without shocking bystanders is the showers at the Lydgate campground not far from the airport. They offer more privacy than the ubiquitous open-air beach showers, which are more suitable for a quick rinse than a full shampoo and soap job.

This Was My Year That Was

My online life, like most people’s, is an edited version of reality. Not in a conscious attempt to make myself appear in a certain way, but because some stories aren’t mine to tell and I generally don’t use social media as therapy. I feel like in a world where everything is the BEST and WORST and you WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, people who don’t rend their garments and wail are perceived as not feeling as deeply. In a world where I like to divide people into Elinors and Mariannes — as in the Dashwood sisters in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility — I am an Elinor. In a world … uh oh. I recently saw Lake Bell’s movie In a World and now I can’t stop using that phrase.

The Facebook year is the year I can present publicly, and it hits the highs fairly accurately and blunts the lows fairly consistently. I like to post pictures from my travels, and I love to travel, and I had a good travel year. I didn’t take a lot of pictures of me on a couch trying to anesthetize my brain after a hard day, or trying to write my feelings out … unless the focal point is the inevitable cat curled on my lap. Only my hesitation of appearing like a crazy cat lady prevents me from posting more of those.

But looking back, it was an interesting year, in those highs and lows. I was in Russia for 6 weeks, Chicago to visit a friend and fall in love with Chagall, at 2 NASA Social events to hear from smart people doing cool things. I haven’t posted yet about Galapagos and mainland Ecuador, or the NASA Social for the Orion launch, or Christmas in Maui, because the rapid fire succession of trips have left me scrambling on the reentry to reality. But here’s to a 2015 full of more highs, more adventures, and an abundance of love and kindness for all of us.

 

 

 

Wanderlust and cosmic dust

“It is not so much a matter of traveling as of getting away; which of us has not some pain to dull, or some yoke to cast off?”

– George Sand, Winter in Majorca

That’s the epigraph in the book I just started, The Vacationers by Emma Straub, the book I coincidentally started reading on the plane ride to my mini-vacation. It struck me not for its literal truth, but there is truth in there. (I prefer Pico Iyer’s “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.”) The timing of Iceland wasn’t coincidental — a year after my brother died — and this trip, plus Galapagos in the fall, come as I ramp up Operation What’s Next?

What fills my well is travel, and experiences outside my normal world, so on a whim I applied for social media accreditation for the launch of NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California (what happened to OCO-1? Oops.)

This is what the mission is all about:

I didn’t think about logistics, and didn’t think I had much chance of being accepted, so when I got the word I was one of 50 out of 500 applicants selected I scrambled to make arrangements to get to not-really-close-to-anything Lompoc, California for the Canada Day launch (would I have applied if I’d read carefully enough to realize it was launching at 3am on July 1? Maybe.) A road trip idea fell through and LA is the nearest major airport, at least the nearest with direct flights from Vancouver, and I have friends there and a list of must-sees I haven’t seen in my past trips there. (Most of which I’m likely not to see this time either.)

So after driving from LA to Lompoc today, tomorrow we get treated like media, if most media bothered to cover launches, with access to the mission scientists and engineers and a tour of the base. Then we sleep, briefly, and will watch the launch from a privileged vantage point, and will I come down from the high to sleep again before heading back to LA? Maybe not, but either way I’ll head back there for a day before heading home, dreaming of the memory of rockets’ red glare and the anticipation of giant tortoises and blue-footed boobies, instead of nightmares about needles and death.

I’ve been defensive recently when hit with “must be nice” comments about my travels — Iceland was in the works for 3 years, Russia wasn’t a holiday, and Galapagos has been top of my bucket list for a long time and I finally have the opportunity to go with someone who feels the same. My flippant but true answer to explain the money, time and energy I expend on travel is “I don’t have kids,” and the more complete answer is that travel and interesting experiences are what feed my soul, so I spend my money, time and energy on what feeds my soul. I’m looking forward to the next couple days of feasting.

Oh and you can follow my in-the-moment launch thoughts @deekayw and www.becausegeeks.com.

Cold War and Peace

Cold War and Peace

spilledblood

What might save us, me, and you
Is if the Russians love their children too

— Russians by Sting, 1985

Oh shut up Sting. I know, it was a rhetorical rather than literal “what if,” but even 15 year old me, fearing the prospect of Mutually Assured Destruction, thought it was trite. (To be clear I loved him and still kinda do, though there’s even more I have to ignore now in order to maintain that love.)

I didn’t exactly choose to go to Russia, but I did choose to do a quick trip to Moscow and Saint Petersburg before heading home from the weird bubble that was Sochi in my six-week stint in January and February. That Stingian refrain was my earworm as I battled the cognitive dissonance of the dispairingly ugly news around me and the fascinating beauty in front of me.

StPete2

Saint Petersburg with its canals and architecture eminded me of Venice, though people who have actually been to Venice are likely to vehemently disagree. It felt European — it is, in fact, European — with reminders of the Russian empire everywhere, while Moscow was decidedly Russian with reminders of the Soviet Union everywhere.

We wandered through the vast Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, founded by Catherine the Great and including the empire’s opulent Winter Palace, and I was struck by the thought: “No wonder the working class revolted.”

Hermitage

Our guide was both proud of the history and culture on display, and proud of the fact that it now belonged to the state for all to enjoy. As she said, during Soviet times the tenor of the tour would have been much different. I wouldn’t have been able to write the first part of that sentence. Well, actually, I wouldn’t have been allowed to be there. Now, there seems an odd mix of shame at what the Soviets destroyed and what they tried to suppress, and nostalgia for some of the lost ideals.

We visited the Summer Palace in the countryside and as we heard more and more tales of each subsequent tsar or emporer erecting grand buildings to mark their legacy, I was struck by the thought: “Sochi was Putin’s Winter and Summer Palace.”

Seven of us walked into Red Square in Moscow and burst into a cacophony of wows, oooohs, and look at thats … all pointed in a different direction. “It’s like Disneyland!” one Brit exclaimed of the colourful spectacle.

StBasil

The GUM department store still sells Soviet-era baked goods, ice cream (your choice of vanilla or vanilla) and sodas (your choice of carbonated lemonade or carbonated lemonade). Our guide remembers birthdays as a young girl, her entire class wearing the same uniform, bringing the same mushroom-looking pastry for the class on your birthday.

The way we’d have 50s diners they have Soviet diners, selling the same wares at, we were told, the same prices, with cheeky “vintage” signs.

Soviet

Over the wall peeks the Kremlin, including the palatial yellow building bearing Putin’s office: Disnelyand’s dictator, whose tendency to trample on human rights went largely unnoticed until some of it got Facebook friendly. We were trailed by a special “Kremlin guide” inside the walls, who did no guiding but a lot of peering at us from a distance.

We saw the church where Pussy Riot was arrested — the largest orthodox church which had been literally blown up by Stalin, replaced with a swimming pool, and faithfully ressurected after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without agreeing with the band’s punishment, I wondered how Catholics would have reacted to an anti-Catholic protest in the Vatican, never mind after decades of religion being illegal and a couple of decades of rebuilding the suppressed faith and destroyed buildings. “We can say what we want here,” said our guide, dismissing concerns of censorship. “They went too far.” I neither agree nor disagree, but I note the sentiment, which is widespread.

Church

Later we visited a cold war bunker, now a museum where they show visitors how close we came to mass destruction, and we could sit in the consoles where the launch codes would have been entered, and they showed a film of what the ensuing strikes would have looked like. Another film they showed on the history of the cold war was no more propaganda than anything I saw in school, but from the Russian view: this was a dark period in the world’s history, we hope we’ve learned from it, and without explicit finger-pointing there’s the message that the United States started the nuclear arms race and are the only country to have used a nuclear bomb in war.

At the end of the bunker tour the museum let us have photo opps with some props — Kalashnikov rifles, Soviet army uniforms — but I couldn’t play after the sombre reminder of what could have been.

bunker2

And then the Crimean peninsula situation was in the news just before I l left the country, and the West was outraged and the Muscovites were scared. In the Soviet era, our guide’s teacher parents had been rewarded with family trips to Sochi for the summer, but after the collapse they, like many Russians, went to the Crimean instead, where they had family and friends, and which used to be part of their homeland.

During the week in the two capitals, we heard stories of a history I’d largely forgotten since grade nine, and literary figures I’ve loved without really understanding where they came from, and I sat in awe in the packed Bolshoi and Mariinsky (aka Kirov) theatres watching ballet and opera. with Russians of every age. It was ironic hearing Westerners talk about the barbarism of Russians while hearing Russians speak passionately of history and culture and philosophical ideas to foreigners who couldn’t reciprocate.

Mariinsky

I’ve heard that one of the difficulties the US is facing now as Putin expands his palace is that there are few Russian experts to advise. That career path didn’t seem to have a bright future much after 1991. I can’t pretend to have an understanding of the Russian mind or Putin’s mind, but I know everyone’s the hero of their own story, and Russians do love their children too, and I can only hope there’s enough understanding and wisdom on both sides so the world doesn’t go MAD (as in mutually assured destruction) once again.

Cold War and Peace

Dreaming big and little with Airbnb

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My favourite was the treehouse on Whidbey Island. Not just a tiny house in a tree, it had a giant tree growing through the middle of its one octagon-ish room, a bachelor apartment in the sky.

My wish list on Airbnb is full of unusual micro dwellings, partly for the cute factor and partly for the price: you can rent an entire enchanting home for no more than — and often less than — a nondescript hotel room.

The site makes it easy to browse, with Airbnb Picks lists such as Atypical Places to Stay, Trees & Zzzzs, Snow Domes, Littlest Listings, Artsy Abodes and Private Islands, among others.

I have a close-to-home getaway wish list featuring a caravan hotel in Portland and an itty bitty cabin in the cedars in Washington, a dome house in Sedona and a yurt art farm in Arroyo Grande, a funky jetstream trailer in Austin and a Creole cottage loft in New Orleans.

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There’s my European vacation wish list. A troglodyte house in France (above) and a cave home in Spain. A former pub in Ireland. A gypsy car or former art gallery in France, or a houseboat near the Eiffel Tower. An owl house in England or water tower in London. A garden home in the Netherlands. A tower in Italy. A stone villa in Crete.

I have a practical list, pretty places in planned destinations where I’d otherwise get a hotel, like the 2-bedroom condo booked in Quebec City that will afford some privacy and the ability to cook our meals over Christmas.

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Some are quaint places I may use simply as an excuse to travel, like the rainforest treehouse with hotsprings in Costa Rica or the astronomy-focused geodesic dome hotel in Chile (pictured).

Sometimes I browse the Airbnb app’s featured listings just to dream … and save my favourites to a wish list so maybe one day the dream will become reality.

Cold War and Peace

Iceland: The hills are alive with the sound of … hidden people

Lava2

“It’s not that we believe in ghosts; it’s that we know they’re there.”

So said our Icelandic guide Hlíf after we visited Höfði, the site of the Reykjavík summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that marked the beginning of the end of the cold war, and which is said to be haunted by The White Lady. She repeated the phrase when discussing Icelanders’ belief in elves, a topic she broached with a tone of “here we go…”

Most tourists have heard about roads being diverted so as not to disturb the elves. Icelandic celebrities (that is, Björk) are probed by foreign journalists hoping for a link-bait headline. There’s also genuine curiosity: could anyone today really believe in hidden people? Are they quirking it up for the tourist industry?

Hlíf explained the persistence of elves in various ways. Respect for the old beliefs of their people who attempted to explain the world around them, no different from any religion or folklore, and which is now ingrained in their culture. A fiercely independent, isolated society who adopted Christianity by arbitration in 1000 AD on the condition that old customs would coexist. A way to anthropomorphize and therefore protect nature, in a land where the extreme beauty is so worth preserving and so often demands appeasing.

“If a loved one was depressed and disappeared, why not assume they found peace with the elves? If there’s an interesting rock formation and the road would destroy it, why not assume it’s an elf house and divert the road?” Hlíf asked.

When you see the vastness of space in this country, huge swaths of which are unpopulated, and where the second-biggest city would barely qualify as a town at home, there does seem no good reason not to divert the road. Just in case.

So much land. So few people.

But it was when we stopped at the endless, undulating lava field that caused the catastrophic mist hardships in the late 1700s that I half-expected to see hidden people darting among the shadowy crevices. The quaintness disappeared. They’re right.

Call it hidden people or geothermal activity, this land is alive.

Icelanders are tightly connected to the land in ways spiritual and practical. The ubiquitous sheep roaming freely are tonight’s dinner. Renewable energy provides nearly all of Iceland’s electricity.

Volcanic eruptions are common, some from familiar mountain-like stratovolcanos and some from the ground opening up, swallowing and spitting destruction and new life.

In 1973, inhabitants of Iceland’s Westman Islands were evacuated for months when their little island Heimaey erupted. The volcano threatened to destroy the harbour that was their life. Instead, when the lava flow stopped and cooled, it was sheltered and improved.

Iceland itself is growing by 5 cm per year as the two tectonic plates that meet in Þingvellir drift apart.

Those lava fields so alive with moss and elves blanket large swaths of the country. Some are vivid green where moisture helps the moss thrive, some peppered with waterfalls. Some are cracked black moonscapes where it seems nothing could survive, yet a lone farm occasionally appears in the distance, dwarfed by the hills above.

The Blue Lagoon might be glamming it up for tourists but natural hot springs and pools are the vital centre of Icelandic towns. Steaming sulfur flats bubble with flatulent mud, geysers erupt predictably as though the earth is breathing water.

In Iceland, nature has anthropomorphized herself. Icelanders follow her lead.