Day 1 and 2
I arrived at the permaculture community, outside of Pahoa, Hawaii, where I will be spending the first bit of winter, possibly longer. On day 1, my arrival was greeted by a lush green landscape, with foggy bits of atmosphere moving around in the leaves. There are palms, ferns, and fruit trees, fruit trees, and fruit trees. My hut is actually quite large, built as an indoor/outdoor sleeping quarters, it has no walls in some parts, so nature comes in as it pleases. Im surrounded by citrus trees, and surrounding the citrus trees, are avocado trees, and surrounding the avocado trees are bananas, coconuts, starfruit, lillikoi, mamey sapote, jackfruit, noni, macadamia nut, cacao etc etc etc. There are so many bananas that not all of the picked ones can be eaten in time before they go bad…same with avocados, and basically every other fruit on this land. This is fine though, as everything is composted, and thrown back to the land so that more trees can grow. I ate more than my share of fruit the first day, and retreated to my mosquito net-covered bed around 9 pm or so. The sound of tropical frogs lulled me to sleep, until I was in a deep deep dream state, and then at midnight the sound of a pack of 200-300 pound wild boars squealing, and crunching on raw unshelled macadamia nuts woke me up. I quickly fell back asleep though, as the frogs overpowered the macadamia boar crunch party!
Today (day 2), started at 5:30 am for Han (another work trader) and I. We rode our bikes a few miles out to “the warm ponds” which is basically a big tide pool with natural hot water vents, right on the ocean, which is blocked off by a barrier of lava rocks. The waves crash over the rocks and into the tide pool, giving it warm spots, and slightly colder spots. It was a really nice way to start the morning, especially being able to sit in the warm tide pool and watch the sunrise over the ocean….very surreal. After sunrise, we hopped back on our bikes and rode back to cut some coconuts, and we made two huge, simple smoothies.
First Smoothie (all ingredients picked fresh and organic):
-Coconut (water and meat)
-Bananas
-Celery
Second Smoothie:
-Marble Lillikoi
-Banana
-Avocado
-Celery
Both really hit the spot, and soon after we set off to a town called Volcano for a Potluck, and the sun was shining alllll day.
Aloha
-j
