Saturday, 19 July 2008

Aloha!

The sun is setting on me in our third floor guest house, dipping below the pacific and bringing some welcome coolth to the end of another warm day here on the North Shore of Oahu, most populous of the Hawaiian islands. Today we dove (yep, that's what they say over here) with Hawaiian Green Turtles at a a point called 'Turtle Car Wash' where these graceful ocean dwellers come in to get cleaned up. They hang around in the shallow water while little hungry reef fish nibble the algae off their shells that accumulates at sea. One large lady (you can tell by the small tail) looked me right in the eyes from a foot away. You could see the age in them; being a reasonable size she was probably thirty or forty years old. Turtles never stop growing their whole lives, so the bigger they are, the longer it took them to get that way. Whether that look held any kind of wisdom I couldn't say, but it was certainly a deeper look than you normally get from the local critters when you're under water.
We saw more turtles yesterday before we went surfing. Two of them were just basking on the beach, getting warm and letting the sun's heat help them digest their diet of seaweed. Surfing was hard. It felt like I'd mastered the basics in Cannon Beach, Oregon. We were comfortably standing up and riding waves 'inside' the break on our first day so getting on the bigger blue waves outside should only be a simple step, right? Not so much, it seems. So far surfing has been both exhilarating and frustrating, but we'll keep trying.
Tomorrow we've got to be up at 5 to get a ride down to Waikiki on the South Shore to go wreck diving, something I've always wanted to try. While we're down there we hope to tour Pearl Harbour and get another surf lesson. Then in three days we're travelling back to the mainland on our anniversary. 4 years is apparently silk or linen. That reminds me, I must get a card...

Since last I blogged the highlights have included tasting some lovely 'Champagne' in Napa, Alcatraz (you HAVE to see it if you can) and driving over the Golden Gate Bridge. The experience that wowed me the most was definitely walking though the massive Coast Redwood sof Humboldt-Redwood Park in the North of California. Walking though these mighty giants, many of whom are one or two thousand years old, is a humbling and eerie thing to do; just imagine the world events that have passed them by while they grew, relentless and unknowing. You can see their tall straight trunks scarred by fire, some hollowed out into 'Goose Pens', so called because early settlers really did keep keep their geese in them. These colossal Sequoias, the world's tallest tree, shoot straight up out of the ground, their massive cylindrical trunks uninterrupted by branches often for over 150 feet. It leaves you walking through a forest that doesn't resemble any other, unless perhaps you work in a telephone pole storage facility. We missed church that weekend, but somehow just sitting under those impressive trees reading my bible was like being in a much older church, one whose architect was as alive and present in the towering life around me as he was in the book I read.

The world's biggest tree is another Sequoia, the Giant Redwood we hope to see further inland at Yosemite.

Well, bedtime now. Being close to the equator the sun goes down a lot sooner here. It'll be dark by half past seven and we've got a lot of sleeping to do before tomorrow's dive.

1 comment:

Papa said...

yes Yosemite is awesome. fond memories of San Fracisco.Turtles are not like us then as we appear to shrivel slowly. EXCEPT for our EARS AND NOSES, mine are a particularly fine specimen at the moment.4th wedding anniversary is either a book of flowers according to my information.Regretably i've been a bit hasty with my delete finger on the works computer and many email address's including yours has disappeared into the ether.So Happy Anniversary to you both.lots of love Papa x x x