North Shore Kauai Limahuli Garden

On a misty Kauai Saturday night (photo taken out living room window toward the mountain) we prop up tired legs stretched out on a five-mile hike to Limahuli Garden, a 17-acre terraced jewel that's part of the 985-acre Limahuli Preserve.

Situated just before the road ends at Ke'e Beach (the famed Kalalau Trail begins at the western end of the beach), the gardens are overseen by the majestic Mount Makana, aka Bali Hai for its role in the 1958 film South Pacific.

Ke'e Beach

But first we walked there along a road--the only road on the north side of the island--that was fairly quiet at 9 am, but loaded with Saturday traffic on the return.

GMOs are a contentious issue here on Kauai

Dry cave across from Ke'e Beach

A food vendor was setting up shop at the beach. On our return trip we shared one of their yummy barbecued Kauai pig sandwiches.

A dollar buys a bright red Mountain Apple,

one of the original canoe plants brought by Polynesians to Hawaii

A little like a pear, the fruit was most refreshing. Also on our walk we passed this old and artful water diverter. See the water channel running down the drive on the left above the diverter?

Here's the outflow...

 

...and the inflow.

These gardens are a sacred space, beautifully presented and tended.

In Hawaiian, the name Limahuli means “turning hands,” which recognizes the ancient Hawaiians who built agricultural terraces out of lava rock and planted cultivars of kalo (taro), an important cultural food crop.

The terraces

Take a walk with us.

Remarkable discovery in 1992...

Perfectly quiet, except for birdsong. Any guesses here, Birder Sev?

 

We walked and walked, consulting the well-written guidebook as we wandered.

 

Stunning, the loss.

Flowering Uhiuhi, with burrowing honeybee

The scale of the place is difficult to capture.

Look at this tiny beauty...only discovered in the 70s.

Wayne used to do this when we worked together...

Breathtaking vistas...

This icon for the conservation movement in Hawaii is now extinct in the wild. Its fragrant flowers are used in lei.

Originally discovered in 1913, the white hibiscus was considered extinct until it was rediscovered in Limahuli Preserve by staff in 1976. Imagine!

Walking back was a challenge with all the traffic, an enormous issue on Kauai. I can understand not wanting to widen the road, but would a small walking path hurt?

Not to worry, someone's putting steaks on the grill. 

Aloha...

ps: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently shelled out a cool $100 million for 707 acres on the North Shore of Kauai.

Enough Said

Sign seen on the road to the Limahuli botanic gardens, near Ke'e Beach. My favorite part:
or follow them with your GoPro.

Aloha, Kauai

Aloha in the Hawaiian language means affection, peace, compassion and mercy.^[1] Since the middle of the 19th century, it also has come to be used as an English greeting to say goodbye and hello.

Aloha is like the Swiss Army knife of words, utilitarian yes, but with a optimistic melody all its own.

The Girl On The Train, Er Plane

Someone's been marketing the dickens out of this thriller, and I succumbed. Nothing like pondering 13 hours of flying time to convince you to reduce the Costco stack by one. Mini review? Meh. But it held my attention through a brutal (even in first class--miles) hop from Chi to Phoenix Wed night, followed by an early call Thursday morning bound for Honolulu and then a puddle jumper to Kauai.

Let's be honest. I am not complaining about this.

But air travel is grueling, period. Add to our late-night Phoenix landing an insane taxi driver who didn't know how to drive to the closest hotel to the Phoenix Airport (weaving across three interstate lanes as he pecked addresses into his GPS) and got so rattled he jumped a curb going 30 mph as we approached the hotel and right there's an inauspicious start to a big adventure.

Pause to glance out the lanai doors at something green

Far too early the Thursday morning, bolstered by half a cup of bad coffee, we and eight others head back to the airport in the hotel shuttle, the driver tosses out our luggage, and we head to security. Still groggy, I shuffle along to the TSA conveyor belt, hoist up my new rolling bag and stop mid-air.

"This isn't my bag" I say. "This isn't my bag!" I say, louder.

Remember See Something, Say Something? Well I was saying something and the TSA agents were less than mildly interested.

"This has never happened before," one opined (really?). Art was already on the other side of the TSA fence. My under-caffeinated brain struggled to figure out how I ended up with not-my rolly bag. Was it switched out (John Le Carre style) when we got boarding passes?

And then it hit me: the shuttle.

 This egret outside our Kauai deck 

will never know the stress of a lost suitcase

Yes I know it's my responsibility and I just got back from the pool and Art is making cocktails, but please hold the snark. The TSA agents had absolutely no interest in the fact that I was about to load a bag that wasn't mine, which still seems bizarre.  I fled. Back downstairs to the US Airways check-in, where I got no love, and then swiftly unzipping the bag to find a clue and yes! there it was. A check-out receipt from our mutual hotel. On the phone fast (how much time did I have? I attempt to breathe through the mounting adrenaline) to the hotel, "Hi, I'm at the airport..." "Is this Heidi?" someone interrupts. "The driver's outside with your bag."

Running...handing off...apologies...back through TSA...Art with a questioning look...board plane for Honolulu. Even in First, it feels like some sort of Medieval torture, shorter on legroom than I remember from the old days. We do not sit easily for eight hours.

Maybe meditating on orchids would have helped

 

An in-flight moment: A woman who looked and was built like a Lake Street club bouncer (air marshal?) blocking the passageway to the toilet while the pilot and then co-pilot took turns using it. Germanwings disaster writ large.

Honolulu arrival smooth, transfer to Island Air for the flight to Kauai, an earlier one--good--and weigh bags because only 16 pounds allowed for carry on. Lovely agent Rocky suggests repacking to save some $, so we do, head for TSA, where inspector paws through my now-carryon (formerly checked) bag, reaches in, and pulls out...a knife. Oh that, I say. That was in my checked bag but because of weight restrictions it's now in my carry-on (as if that explains it). 

Eyebrow arch while he goes through every item (flight boarding in 6 minutes), adding to his stack a jar of ghee and a large bottle of contact lens solution, with each item giving me the evil eyebrow. Can these items be returned to checked baggage? Sure, just go back to check-in and have them locate your already checked bag and give them these things...go back through security and etc.

Sweet mural in Hanalei Town

Fun to fly on small planes, land at Lahui, taxi to Hanalei 50 minutes away. Wait, what time did I get up today (5:30) and when did we eat that omelet? Blood sugar plunging, we check in and discover the only resto on site burned in a fire a few weeks back. Hanalei Colony Resort is a tiny enclave of beautifully sited, remote living spaces whose staff couldn't have been nicer as I gripped the check-in desk and croaked "is there any food here?"

No, but since the fire (and to cut back on car usage) the accommodating management has a van to take us back to Hanalei, where we could eat, grocery shop, and be picked up. So we did. All of that.

Marlin sammy, shrimp, and clam chowder

offset the shakes

 

That's better. But why am I exhausted?

 Aloha because it's midnight in Chi

Shuttling back to this breezy paradise, we got talking with driver Joe and learned he'd spent three months camping in New Zealand and then married a NZ national. Much discussion ensued. Maps will be marked with insider locations, secret places learned.

 Travel is brutal, true. But given a chance it reliably delivers on its promise.

Special thanks to Dr Gary, who pointed us toward perfect decompression.

Of Earthships, Friends, and the Pecos Vibe

This house may at first glance seem typical for New Mexico, but much more lies beneath. That planter at right, for example, hosts a banana tree and is fed by household greywater. Take a pictorial tour of the construction of our friends' earthship here:

The journey to put together a passive solar, self-sustaining green house. Totally off-grid, solar electric, solar heat, solar hot water, catchwater roof and water re-cycling system, planter greenhouse all in a green house.  

There's much more at earthship.com.

And a beautiful home it is, made all the more inviting by the longtime Chi friends who moved here nearly 20 years ago. They picked us up at the tiny Lamy, NM, Amtrak station, fed and watered us within an inch of our lives, and showed us their New Mexico: Pecos, just outside Santa Fe.

Look at this sky.

Here's Nikki describing the living space she and Graham share:

Our house is independent of "civilized" inputs. Our power and heat come from the sun, 360+ days a year. The brick-laid-on-bedrock floor and the rock wall we are dug into at the back are solid mass that absorbs the solar gain and moderates the temperature to a base that never falls below 55 degrees, even in the depth of winter, when we use a small wood stove for a few hours in the evening as supplementary heat.

The tanks at either end of the house are 1500 gallons each, and are bedded into the berm so they never freeze, even after a week of 15-degree nights, and because the pipes from the tank into the house are also embedded, our pipes never freeze. Our tanks are filled with rainwater, and we live carefully but comfortably with 15 to 20 inches of rain a year.

We cook with propane, about a BBQ size tank a month in the winter, less in the summer. Our fridge, dishwasher, and washing machine are all powered by our solar panels. The most privation we experience is that during a five-day snowstorm (we get 3 or 4 each winter) when I don't vacuum or do laundry, and we light the woodstove a little earlier.

Also, no street lights, so we equip guests with flashlights to get to their cars, and no snow plows until the blacktop 4 miles away, but anything less than 9 inches we can drive through anyway. So we live simply, comfortably and well.

And beautifully.

H2 again: New Mexico itself is a study in blessed quiet. Fewer than 2 million people live in a land mass equivalent to that of the UK, with its 68 million souls. NM law is also welcoming to experimental homes like earthships, formed from discarded automobile tires rammed with earth. Here's a peek at how that works, at one corner of G&N's home intentionally left exposed. 

 

We hiked the extraordinary property with Graham and Nik's dog friends. More particulars from Nikki:

We are made acutely aware that we are not "out enjoying nature," a romantic and hubristic separation, but instead are a part of a complicated mesh we'd better make our first consideration in any plans we make. This is why our house is sited 15 degrees seat of south, to avoid the blistering summer sun, and make the most of the low-lying winter sun for solar power and passive solar heat; why we always have emergency rations and blankets in the car in winter, and try to keep the tank at least half full at all times; and why we are at peace each morning watching the sunrise over the east ridges of the Sangre de Christos, and watching the sun set over the Jemez each evening.

We never take a landscape for granted, it will change and demand different reactions from us that make, for instance, gardening a challenge, impossible without acquiring a deep knowledge of place. We have blisteringly hot days followed by cool nights, heavy snowfalls followed by swift melts that wash out a road in an afternoon.

Where we live makes us acutely aware of the phases of the moon, the full moon extinguishes the stars, the dark moon brings an atavistic awe that is both routine and startling each month.

3000-gallon water storage

 Two friendly donkeys live here too,
one a rescue

For overnight, a welcoming neighbor opened her home to us (the earthship enjoying the return of one of the family boys). Our host Anna's warmly comfortable place sits on Break Axle Road, suitably named I assure you.

 

Zora was good company

And Anna too. 

We awoke the first morning to a pine-scented breeze wafting over our heads. Magical.

Roads in this stunning backcountry make Chicago potholes look tame.
This one is in better condition than many.

On our second day we were faced with the choice of visiting the plaza in Santa Fe or going up-canyon for a hike in the Pecos Wilderness area. And here's your answer.

Pecos Canyon is fed by a rushing river, deciduous trees flourishing all around. Nikki notes:

New Mexico, like all of America west of the Rockies, is arid. Landscape is dependent on water and elevation. In fact, water and elevation are usually intertwined, with the east slopes of a range being wetter than the west, the west being more susceptible to fire. This is a state of microclimates, and a drive of 50 miles can take you from the desiccated moonscapes west of Santa Fe to high desert sage brush to lush bosque woodlands, open meadows, pine forests and wilderness trout streams.

Nature red in tooth and claw

Too soon it was time to catch our 1 pm train out of Lamy heading east to Chicago. Via Wikipedia:

The station was built in 1909 by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and appears in the Bollywood film Kites.

The Pecos vibe: curl up and stay a while

A glorious visit with old friends and new. Gracias por todo!