For the first two weeks we rented a house in the hippie beach town of Paia with 5 friends and travelled around in an increasingly sandy minivan. We managed to get 7 people, 6 windsurfing rigs and one set of kiting gear in/on the van thanks to an engineer's organizational planning.
I bought a new bikini for the trip but wanted a second one to wear under my wetsuit so I sewed one. The top part was a breeze after my bra experience but the bottoms were an experiment. They fit well enough to wear in public but were slightly diaper-like in the bum, especially when they got wet. I had joked with my friend Kelly about making thong bottoms without knowing that in Maui thongs (not quite string thongs but definitely thongs) are in. In style, that is. I was happy with my bikini but on our last day I bent over to pick something up and everything went sproing. Well, some things didn't exactly sproing (see previous post) but the plastic piece fastening the bikini top snapped. Luckily I was in our condo at the time so Randy was the only witness.
We didn't have quite as many windy days as we wanted but happily filled the non-windy days with snorkelling, stand up paddling (SUP), surfing and hiking to waterfalls and a volcano. SUPing in waves (like surfing, but standing and with a paddle) was especially fun - if only we had waves in Vancouver! The water was so warm and it was such a treat to windsurf without a thick wetsuit! And instead of seeing seals we saw sea turtles!The local creatures caused some excitement (besides the girls in thongs). We had some big, nasty cane spiders (aka harvestman) in the house that had left the sugarcane fields looking for a new home. There were a lot of geckos around and one ended up in our van. First it ran up Heather's arm then got flung onto me in the excitement and ran up my arm. His little feet felt pretty neat when he was running. Randy and one of our friends both had a run-in with a sea urchin. Randy's was minor; I picked some spine tips out of his foot with a needle and it was a little bit itchy. Our friend swiped the urchin with his hand and broke off a lot of spines. An antidote for the pain from its poison is vinegar but who has vinegar with them at the beach? His girlfriend was kind enough to supply some nice, warm acidic substance (since he was out) to stop the pain.
Then there are the green sea turtles. We saw so many of them! They really are gentle giants and they let you get quite close to them when you're snorkelling. We had a quite a few close encounters and watched them eating in the water. On our last day, Randy and I were snorkelling and I was looking at a big rock on the bottom that had some shells on it such that it looked like a giant flat fish that was looking right at me. I had been imagining this rock/fish coming to life then had just started to swim on when a giant creature moved into my field of view from down behind me. I screamed. Then I realized it was a turtle right below me and laughed at my jumpiness. Randy heard my snorkel scream then saw the turtle. I gave the poor turtle a fright too - when I screamed it flinched and swam away.
And saving the best for last, we saw wild goats on one of our drives!
We ate lots of fresh fruit, freshly-baked banana bread, and had happy-hour mai tais. The guys harvested some coconuts so we had fresh coconut too. They didn't use the mainstream technique for harvesting but instead developed their own which involved a tree branch as a battering ram, brute force and a windsurfing helmet for safety.
We topped off our holiday with our honeymoon in sunny West Maui at Kahana. We stayed in a condo that was 20 feet from the ocean with a lanai (balcony) overlooking the water where we could watch the turtles and the sunset. We left the lanai door open at night so we could hear the surf. It wasn't windy during those last days so we SUPed, snorkelled, swam, went to a luau, ate gelato and shaved ice, and enjoyed the view from our lanai. And we started plotting our return.
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