Be a good visitor
Along the waterfront in Kailua on the Kona Coast (often called “Kailua-Kona”), the rental cars creep along bumper to bumper. Horns honk. Tourist drivers scream at tourist pedestrians. What the hell kind of tropical paradise is this?! you may think if you’re caught in Kailua-Kona traffic. Where’s that aloha spirit? Fortunately, there are plenty of less crowded, less frantic places on the Big Island.
Still, Hawaii is not Paradise. Paradise is infinite and self-renewing. Hawaii is a real place of finite space and resources, where real people live real lives with jobs, families, budgets, and bills. Hawaii needs loving care from its visitors as well as from its natives. As the number of tourists increases, I think it becomes important that we visitors actively contribute to the aloha spirit instead of just passively expecting to receive it. Bring your best manners and your patience with you to the Big Island. Be the first to smile and wave. Be the first to pull your car over so that someone else can pass. Be scrupulous in observing the rules of the trail in order to help preserve what’s left of Hawaii’s vanishing wild places. NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT, or KAPU (“forbidden”) signs mean, “You stay out.” Please respect those signs.
Terms
When I refer to the Hawaiian archipelago in general, and particularly to the inhabited islands, I’ll say “Hawaii.” When I refer to the island of Hawaii itself, I’ll say “the island of Hawaii” or “the Big Island.”
Getting Information About the Big Island of Hawaii
The search for the perfect trail guide
I wish I could be certain this was a flawless book. However, some things limit an author’s ability to produce a perfect, error-free, always up-to-date book. Here are some of the factors, and what you can do to help yourself (and me).
Nature makes constant revisions; so do agencies
Nature constantly reshapes the landscape across which we plan to trek. That’s usually a gradual process, but once in a while she makes drastic changes overnight. A landslide or a volcanic eruption can erase a trail in seconds. Erosion can undercut a cliff edge and make last year’s safe hike an extremely dangerous one, so that the local authorities close a trail you’d hoped to ramble on. And Hawaii’s fragile volcanic terrain erodes quite rapidly.
Agencies in charge of hiking areas may close an area because they’ve realized it’s environmentally too sensitive to withstand more human visits. An area once open to overnight camping may become a day-use-only area. Trails become impassable from lack of maintenance. Happily, agencies may open new areas because they’ve been able to acquire new acreage or complete a trail-building project.
Change is the only thing that’s constant in this world, so that guidebook authors and publishers always play “catch up” with Nature and with agencies. We want to keep the guidebooks up to date, but we are always at least one step behind the latest changes. The day when you’ll have constantly revised books on-line at your wristwatch/computer terminal isn’t here yet. So it’s possible that a few trail descriptions are becoming obsolete even as this book goes to press.
Write for the latest information
It’s a good idea to use this book in conjunction with the latest information from the agency in charge of the areas you plan to hike in. Unfortunately, the recreation map of Hawaii published by the Hawaii District of the divisions of Forestry and Wildlife and of State Parks lacks trail information for hikers. The information it does have is quite out of date. There isn’t a better map available from those agencies. This book gives you a far more complete and detailed picture of Hawaii’s principal hiking and backcountry camping opportunities than the current recreation map does. And it describes those opportunities from a hiker’s perspective.
Still, it’s a good idea to write to these agencies as soon as you’ve read this book and decided where you want to hike and camp on Hawaii. Ask them for their latest trail and camping maps, regulations, and permit-issuing procedures. Except for Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope for your convenience in getting the information you need as soon as possible. (National parks almost always use the franking privilege of Federal agencies, so you’d be wasting a stamp.) Their addresses and telephone numbers are in “Getting Permits or Permission.”
Prepare yourself with general information, too. A generous source of a wide variety of useful information about Hawaii is the Hawaii Visitors Bureau at www.gohawaii.com; 2270 Kalakaua Avenue, Suite 801, Honolulu, HI 96815; [email protected]; or 1-800-GOHAWAII (1-800-464-2924; U.S. and Canada only).
Spoken Hawaiian: An Incomplete and Unauthoritative Guide
What, only 12 letters?!
Nineteenth-century American missionaries used only 12 letters to create a written version of the spoken Hawaiian language. Superficially, that might make Hawaiian seem simple. But Hawaiian is a much more complex and subtle language than 12 letters can do justice to. However, we’re stuck with those 12 letters—the five English vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and seven of the consonants (h, k, l, m, n, p, w).
Consonants
The consonants have the same sound in Hawaiian as they do in your everyday English except for “w.” “W” is sometimes pronounced as “v” when it follows “a,” always pronounced as “v” when it follows “e” or “i.”
Vowels
The vowels are generally pronounced as they are in Italian, with each vowel sounded separately. Authentic Hawaiian makes further distinctions, but those are of more interest to scholars than to hikers. The following is a simplified system. Vowel sounds in general are:
a like “ah” in “Ah!”
e like “ay” in “day.”
i like “ee” as in “whee!”
o like “o” in “go.”
u like “oo” in “food” (or “u” in “rude”).
Notice that that means that when you see two or more of the same letter in a row, you pronounce each of them separately:
“Honokaa” is Ho-no-ka-a.
“Pepeekeo” is Pe-pe-e-ke-o.
“Milolii” is Mi-lo-li-i.
“Ookala” is O-o-ka-la.
“Puu” is Pu-u.
That seems too simple, and it is. If you tried to pronounce every vowel, speaking Hawaiian would turn into a nightmare. You wouldn’t live long enough to pronounce some words. Fortunately, several pairs of vowels often—but not always—form merged sounds.
Vowel Pairs Whose Sounds Merge
Like every other language, Hawaiian has vowel pairs whose sounds naturally “smooth” into each other. They’re similar to Italian or English diphthongs. The degree to which the two sounds are merged in Hawaiian is officially less than occurs in English, but most Hawaiian people I’ve talked with merge them fully. Vowel-pair pronunciation is approximately:
ae often smoothed to “eye” as in “eyeful” or “i” in “ice.” It’s the English long-i sound.
ai often smoothed as for “ae,” above.
ao often smoothed to sound like “ow” in “cow.”
au often smoothed to “ow” in “cow”, too.
ei sometimes smoothed to “ay” as in “day.” It’s the English long-a