Day 12: Volcano to Pahoa: Journey to a parallel universe.

January 22, 2016

Prelude: The Lilikoi Conumdrum

Chocolate is a flavour everyone loves, and we are not saying there is a lack of chocolate on the Island, but here Lilikoi may be number one. Lilikoi is Passion Fruit. We can say that with a lot of confidence. The issue is whether fruits we are seeing, even fruit directly labelled Lilikoi are Passion, or whether they may be Guava.

When we cycled up from Pahala we took a photo of a bush covered in the very fruits that people call Lilikoi. But, it was a bush. An Lilikoi grows on a vine.

William Shaneyfelt pointed this out in the guestbook. Here is what he wrote:

"Maybe I'm too much of a biology nerd, but here's the scoop far as I know about lilikoi vs guava... Guava grow on bush/tree type plants while lilikoi grow on vines. The fruits are similar in size and color, but guava are more spherical, they have a fairly large flower scar and are smooth but not shiny like lilikoi. And I like the flavor of guava better! :-) If you find one with flowers, lilikoi are quite interesting and delicate looking with lots of colorful filament like petals and are maybe an inch and a half or more across, while guava are white, typical flowers maybe 3/4 inch across.
I really like the lilikoi flowers!"

Ok, what we saw was Guava then. We were good with that,even though we have never seen or hear the word "guava" while we have been here.

We were happy until this morning, that is. Someone gave us some cans of juice. It is called Lilikoi Passion. And on the front is an illustration of what we had just decided to call Guava. A juice can is a pretty authoritative Biology reference work, so now our lives are in turmoil. Any other comments?

What passes for a Biology text in Grampies' world.

From the moment we jumped on our bikes this morning, virtually no pedalling was needed. We just coasted down the mountain, leaning on the brakes to keep the speed in the 30-40 kph range. 40 km down to the Macadamia Nut Factory. Wow!

We did hit the brakes at one of our all time favourite stops - the Akasuka Orchid Nursery. You could take 100 photos here in the first few minutes, of all the gorgeous orchids in bloom. After that, there is a gift shop with reasonable quality Hawaiian tourist stuff. We settled for just one of their 2016 orchid calendars, though if weight and dollars were not an issue, we would have loaded in shea butter hand cream, flower themed ceramic tiles, and a pile of other lovely stuff.

This time Akasuka also had a fun gimmick going. Three laptops were set up, running a questionnaire about your personal preferences for things like vacations and snacks, and collecting your assessment of yourself on dimensions like what animal you are most like. After that in exchange for your email address the program tells you which orchid type is "yours". I am a cattelya and Dodie is a dendrobium. Do you agree?

Horoscope like description of Dendrobium orchids

There are all types of orchids to be seen.

A look at the general layout at Akatsuka.

One other thing was worthy of burning up the brakes. It was a small stand selling Haupia, Kulolo, Haulolo, and Poi. Say what? Well Haupia is coconut pudding and Kulolo is taro with sugar and coconut milk. Haulolo is layered Haupia and Kulolo, while Poi is pretty much plain Taro. It is the Haulolo that is the real blockbuster - a good mixture of flavours and textures. Once you taste this, you might even go off ice cream!

Continuing down from Volcano, we could see Mauna Kea, with its observatories, over to our right.

We had little idea at first what this man was selling, but it was **so good**

A papaya grove on the way to the nut factory. Later we found a grove with lots of ripe ones on the ground, but our legal department determined they were too deep into the private land.

We did not stop again really until the Mauna Loa macadamia nut factory. This is somewhat past our turnoff to head for Pahoa, but it's amazing how far you can get when you are not creeping along at 4 kph. The factory is 5 km down a side road. It begins with large papaya groves, and moves on to the Macadamias. Mauna Loa company has 2,500 acres right here, with a quarter million trees. The factory store is like wonderful factory stores elsewhere - Ritter chocolate in Waldshut, Germany comes to mind, or Hershey chocolate in Hershey, PA. That is, there are stacks and stacks of the company's product, including flavours you may not see so commonly, and tourists indiscriminately snapping up the jumbo packs.

A special treat for us was running into that tour guide from yesterday. He came running over from his bus, and said Ï thought I recognized those bikes!". Today he is driving and narrating both, so our Hawaiian legend teller from yesterday was not around. Still it was great to see our new friend.

Inside the shop, Dodie courageously asked for samples, one by one, of about half the flavours. There were no tour busses at he moment, so the sample lady had time for us to bug her. I wanted to know which flavour was most popular, and whether the Japanese had any different preferences. She said that all were about equal, but that generally the Japanese preferred unsalted flavours. Hmm. I would not have guessed that. The lady also said she had worked there for 15 years, so we guessed she would be sick of Macadamia nuts. No, she said, the staff is allowed to sample all they want, and she still eats them daily. I didn't find out which, after 15 years, is her favourite, but mine - after 5 minutes - is chocolate toffee. Cookies and cream? Not so much. Which would you choose?

Honey Roasted
Dry Roasted
Unsalted
Maui Onion
Maui Onion and Garlic
Kona Coffee Glazed
Milk Chocolate
Dark Chocolate
Cookies and Creme
Milk Chocolate Toffee
Wasabi and Teriyaki

Readers, to get this list I needed to take photos of several shelves, since there was no handout pamphlet on what was available. So then I had to explain to Security what I was up to. They were friendly, but see what potential dangers are involved in bringing you this blog!

At the Mauna Loa factory, tropical gardens boasted ginger of various types. Some had been cut back and were just restarting, but they had beautiful pink and red ones on the go.

Reunited with the tour guide we met yesterday.

Typical tourist laden with macadamia products he snapped up, returns to his tour bus.

Dodie talks to the taster lady. Family packs on sale in the foreground.

We set off now uphill, back to the Pahoa turnoff - from highway 11 to highway 130. Generally the shoulders were ok, but the flow of traffic on both roads was intense. If nothing else, there is the continual din to sap one's strength. Then we arrived at a section of road where some clever traffic engineer had created a "Shoulder Lane". This is a slightly narrower traffic lane that is available for driving on from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.. The "shoulder lane" leaves very little actual shoulder for any hapless cyclist or pedestrian foolish enough to be trying to get to Pahoa.

It was 2:45 p.m., so we pedalled as well as possible to leave this dangerous zone. No such luck. Around 2:50 p.m. drivers began careening down the extra lane. About 5 km later the lane ended and normal shoulder began to resume. This happened with a lot of signs that said shoulder lane ending, merge left. Did the drivers respect this? You know that answer!

By 5:00 p.m. we arrived at Pahoa Village Road, and cycled past the famous Apa'a Street. We know that just up this street we will find the furthest penetration of last year's lava flow. Another km brought us to Pahoa Paradise Inn. This is the place we have reserved for the next four nights. It is not an Inn and not really a motel, but rather several clustered buildings all painted orange and containing perhaps six rental units. There is no office. The instructions are to go 1 1/2 blocks up the road to Boogie Woogie Pizza to check in.

So we did that, but need to add that it had been raining for the past hour and we were wet and fairly cold. At the pizza place they seemed to at least know what we were talking about, and made to phone the "lady" who would come from (somewhere) to attend to us. We bought some pizza (not bad) and sat down. After a while we asked how they were doing. The reply was that the lady did not answer her phone so they had sent someone somewhere to look for her. We sat back down. After a while we asked how they were doing and they said they could not find the lady, but anyway the doors to the units were open (not true). I phoned the lady myself - no answer.

So I pulled out the tablet, checked Hipmunk, and prepared to phone, for example, Hedonisia. Hedonisia is a feminist commune where last year we had planned to stay in a recycled bamboo shack. We cancelled that time, because of the lava threat.

Remember where Arlo Guthrie says in Alice's Restaurant " I wanna tell you 'bout the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where this is happenin'. "? Well I wanna tell you about the town of Pahoa, Hawaii about here in the narrative. Pahoa is one of the last refuges of standard tie dyed hippy dip-ism. This is overlayed with laid back Hawaiian hang loose loosey goose-ism, with a good helping of new age holistic healing, and so forth. I have been listening to Brian Greene's "The Hidden Reality" lately. It's about parallel universes. I thought he was nuts. Until I got here!

Do we sound peevish? Well eventually the lady wandered in. "Reservation, reservation? Am I supposed to know about that?" "Well I booked on Expedia and phoned you twice, once for directions and once to verify the dates - remember?" "Oh", she said, let me look at your papers. She took our Excel printout of our whole trip - with booking confirmations, dates, air flights and times, etc. and pored over it. "And you want to stay here - when?" It went on like that and she finally understood it was four nights, starting - what should have been and hour ago! She said she would meet us down at the place, so we extracted Dodie from the pizza oven, where she was trying to warm up, and headed on down.

After some time, the lady appeared. When I had first asked about which suite we would be in - I kind of wanted to know before I handed over my credit card - she did not seem to know what I was talking about. But now we found we were in the Pikake Suite, chosen either because it has tile floors, good for the bikes, or because it is the only one where the hot water works, not sure.

About wifi, the lady used to have a paper with a password, but was not sure where that had gotten to. She said she would phone me about it. That was a bit doubtful because she also said the reason she had not answered the phone earlier was because she lost the phone. Anyway I found there is no wifi here, so that simplifies matters!

We settled in to the room, which to be fair is pretty good. There is lots of space and a kitchenette. We have Coqui frogs outside. We rather like them, but they drive local people mad with their cries. We only have to listen to them half the time, tonight anyway, because it turns out we are right across the street from the Black Rock Cafe. They have live music - guitar and drums kind of stuff. It drowns out the Coquis, plus also anything we try to say to each other.

Very quickly we realized we no longer had our itinerary printout. Not only is this thing just absolutely critical, but yesterday Dodie had inadvertently mailed it home. I did a lot of scrambling to recover a computer file of it, and then print it at the office of the Chalet Kilauea. So I phoned the Boogie Woogie Pizza and the lady was there. She denied having the papers - said she gave them back to me. I knew we would have to send "somebody" to go retrieve the document from her. So I put on my shoes.

Dodie wisely advised that I take both a headlight and taillight, though I was walking. The road here is no more safe for pedestrians than for cyclists. Off I went.

(Sabrina - spoiler alert - do not read this next bit to Evee).

I had been gone 30 seconds when Dodie heard a big thump in the street. She ran out the door barefoot screaming my name. A pickup truck had smashed into a telephone pole. She watched it back away from the pole and blast off toward the north. With no bodies in sight, clearly it had missed me.

At the pizza shop the lady was seated at one of the tables going over phone bills, or such. She again denied she had our itinerary. So I went behind the till, took our papers from a counter, waved them at her, turned on my tail light, and walked back.

Now don't get the idea we are at all down on Pahoa. Out room is actually great. We like Coqui's. We even like the free live music from the Black Rock. And tomorrow we will head for the coast, on a ride that should be great.

Oh yes, there is a 7-11 next door. They have "our" bread. $4.24. And they are open 24/7!

Dangerous route 130, with its shoulder lane

Today's ride: 67 km (42 miles)
Total: 395 km (245 miles)

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