Summer Rolls and Mochi! Hooray!

After my 9:00am dentist appointment, I thought I'd reward myself with a trip to the asian supermarket. Ever since I tasted mochi ice cream treats - little bonbons of ice cream covered in mochi - in Hawaii, I've been craving them. (Ha, now that I looked on wikipedia for mochi, I see it's available at Trader Joe's - so maybe it's not that exotic anymore...) Nevertheless, I hit the jackpot at the asian store. They had green tea, red bean, and mango flavors. I decided to get the green tea and the mango:

I also bought a bunch of other stuff for making sushi and for summer rolls. I decided since I had to get rid of some lettuce and green onions, I'd make some summer rolls when I got home. It was my first time, so I was kind of nervous working with rice paper! But I think I figured it out pretty well:

Thanks to some cooking tips from Miss K, I was pretty sure I could come up with something tasty. They're stuffed with romaine lettuce, tofu (fried in sesame oil, ginger, soy sauce, lime), mint leaves, green onion, and rice vermicelli. Yum! Dipping sauce is soy sauce, rice vinegar, sugar, ginger, & a splash orange-mango juice.

The Submarine Ride in Kailua-Kona

Who knew? In Kona you can get on a submarine that seats about 20 people, and dive a hundred feet below the surface! Coral reef, pretty fishies, shipwrecks... so cool!

More airplane photos

The other highlight of the plane ride was seeing the Hamakua coast from the air. The view of these huge gorges, lush vegetation, and beautiful waterfalls was spectacular.

At one point the pilot said, "watch this!" and did a turn that revealed these beauties:

This is the only road that leads down into the Waipio Valley:

Two days earlier, Kirsten and I made a valiant attempt at walking down it. It was so steep, and so hard just to walk down, we decided to stop (we think) about 1/3 of the way. Going back up was a workout!

On the way back up, we ran into a Japanese family walking down, that included an old lady with a walker! I don't know how they got her back up! We didn't take her picture, but here's Miss K. illustrating just how steep hit is...

Madame Pele puts on a show

I have a lot of catching up to do, regarding activities on Friday and Saturday, but Sunday was pretty amazing, so I'd better just start with that. We took an air tour of the island, and as luck would have it, Kilauea was especially active. Our pilot told us that Volcano National Park was closed, and was being evacuated, because some roads could potentially be blocked. They had been having various earthquakes since 2am, around 3.5 in magnitude... So we went straight to the craters where the action was:

Very cool. There was red hot lava inside these craters, and chunks of the crater walls were falling in! Further on down the slope there were actual rivers of hot lava that were visible:

Then, down at the shoreline you can see new land being created as the lava spills into the ocean. The ocean water turns all kinds of weird colors from the extreme heat, and gives off nasty toxic fumes. YAY!


Coming soon... more airplane pictures, submarine pictures, pretty Place of Refuge pictures, black sand beaches, and waterfalls galore. I'll be back in Philly in about 24 hours, where I can do all my catching up. (I'll be hiding upstairs on the computer - away from the GIGANTIC MESS my landlord apparently made in not exactly fixing my kitchen floor...)

a day in Puna

What'd you call me?

Today Kirsten and I drove down the east coast of Hawai'i to the area known as Puna - it's the most recently formed part of the island. We walked on beds of lava that were the result of a flow from around 1990. Most of it is Pahoehoe, lava that is smooth and often has these cool ropy patterns:

We stopped along the way for three yummy varieties of Poke (cubes of raw ahi tuna with various seasonings). Also on the way we stopped at Lili'uokalani Park in Hilo. Very pretty. It's been raining off and on (mostly on) like crazy, but we get occasional breaks of sunlight, so we took full advantage of those moments. It was high tide, so the tidepools (where one often finds pretty tropical fishies, or heat from underground vents) were overwhelmed with cold ocean water flushing in.

Still, we got to stick our feet in the water a little. Also saw the Lava Tree state monument, which is very cool. Lots of carcasses of former trees that got burnt up by lava flows.

Tonight we're back in Hilo, getting ready for a nice Thai dinner and preparing for our road trip to the Kona coast tomorrow.

In Hawaii!

Susan Miller was right again - she said Mercury was retrograde, and technical glitches & communication problems were to be expected... My flight from Newark to Honolulu ended up arriving late, due to two patches of weather we had to circumnavigate. However the 10+ hour ride wasn't bad, all in all. I did get fantastic views of the Great Lakes, then the Great Salt Lake, and also Lake Tahoe. I missed my connection, though, and ended up having to spend the night in Honolulu, delaying my arrival in Hilo until this morning.

Once I got here, Miss K greeted me at the airport with a beautiful fresh Lei, and took me immediately to Ken's pancake house for a yummy breakfast. We poked around downtown Hilo, and I went to a little show called "Hawai'iana" at the Palace Theater. They are a historic movie house from the 1920's that showed silent films accompanied by a theater organ. I got to hear the organ and some traditional Hawaiian music & stuff.

We went to the farmer's market after that and got summer rolls, pumpkin & tofu curry, & cold coconuts to drink from. Yum!

It's been raining like the dickens this afternoon, which provided the perfect backdrop for a much needed nap. Jetlag (plus the need to get on a plane super early) got me up at about 4:30am today...

Looks like sushi tonight and a trip to Puna tomorrow.