Hiking, Waterfalls, and Fresh Fruit

I had an INCREDIBLE day.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me, so I don’t have pictures to show for it… but I’ll be revisiting the places I went and photographing them extensively in the near future!  But for the sake of visual aids, I pulled these pictures off of the internet just to give you all a picture of my interesting day. :)

This morning I ran an errand for my employer in Lihue, and on my way home a friend (I met him randomly while eating Subway at Lookout Point a couple days ago) texted me and asked if I wanted to check out the Kilauea River waterfall.  I was excited to have something to do and someone to do it with, so I said yes and met him at the end of a road just down the street from my gated community.  When I got out of my car, he handed me a spiky-looking green fruit and said it was a Cherimoya.  It was heavy and had the consistency of a football when I squeezed it. 

We (I) carried it with us as we hiked to the waterfall (about a mile and a half) up through the rainforest.  I’ve been obsessed with the television series Lost for the last couple months, and even more so now that I’ve moved to Hawaii and am seeing the same sort of scenery displayed in the series, which was filmed on Oahu.  This path could have been straight out of one of the jungle scenes!  Bamboo trees lining one side, massive banyan trees on the other, jungle vines hanging everywhere—it was so tropical and otherworldly.  We hiked the 1.5 miles and then came to the clearing with the waterfall.  It was more breathtaking than I could have ever expected.  I can’t find a picture of it online, so I’ll try to describe it (and I promise I’ll go back to take pictures soon!)  As we came around into the clearing, we saw the beautiful waterfall running off the side of a cliff.  It wasn’t huge—I’m terrible at estimating heights, but I would say it was about the height of a 2-story house.  The waterfall emptied into a pool—again, I’m a bad guesser, but my friend said it was about the size of an Olympic pool—that was still and clear and ran into the river on the left-hand side.  There were a few people lounging on the bank and swimming in the pool, so we put all our stuff in a pile and dove in! 

Well.  We climbed in.  The bank was laden with slimy rocks, so we had to step carefully to get into the water, but once we were in too deep to touch, it was bliss.  After the long, steep, hot hike, dipping into that freshwater pool was the most refreshing thing I could have asked for.  We swam up under the waterfall and sat on the rocks directly beneath the falling water.  The pressure was powerful and intense in a therapeutically sort of way.  Then we climbed up on the rocks behind the waterfall and sat there for a bit before swimming back to the shore to eat our Cherimoya. 

We cut the Cherimoya into slices, picked out the large seeds, and ate.  People compare the fruit's flavor to that of birthday cake.  The texture was like that of a mango or avocado, but it was sooooo juicy and sugary.  We each ate all the way to the rind of our slices and then shared the rest with some curious tourists.  Here’s what it looked like on the inside:

After finishing our snack, we hiked 1.5 miles down to the Kahili Quarry beach, which is the beach in the sunrise photos I’ve taken from my patio.  The trail down to the beach follows the Kilauea river, which trickles into the ocean.  To get to the beach, we had to cross over the river (very still and only two feet deep and a few yards wide at that point.)  We walked the beach for a few minutes, then headed back up the mile long trail to where I’d parked my car. 

My friend is on the island for a few months working as a farmhand on a fruit farm.  He sleeps in a tent (as do all the other farmhands--though they all have separate "quarters"), rarely wears shoes, and lives mainly on fruit.  There was a long stone wall along where I’d parked my car, and that wall bordered the fruit farm.  To save time (the entrance to the fruit farm was on another road), we scaled the wall and dropped down on the other side, right in the thick of the farm.  I watched in awe as he expertly climbed a palm tree (not easy to do!) and knocked down three coconuts, which we carried back to his camp.  His “quarters” consisted of a tarp strung between trees, beneath which was his tent, a desk, and some boxes for storage.  We dumped the coconuts there and hiked to his friend’s tent to borrow the machete.  (Go ahead, make all kinds of comments about how he could have killed me or whatever… he didn’t, so ha.)  Along the way he gave me an informative lecture about all the different fruit trees and picked fruits for me to sample.

First was the rambutan.  It looked like some sort of red sea urchin, but when torn open, it contained a translucent white fruit that had the shape and texture of a hard-boiled egg.  It was good (people say the flavor is like a pink starburst), but slimy. 

Next was the longan, which was very similar to the rambutan.  The thin shell of the longan had to be cracked open using teeth, but the fruit inside was the texture of a slimy pear and had a large pit in the center. 

Then I ate a starfruit, which you just bite into and eat whole.  This one reminded me of fruit snacks because it was chewy and not as juicy as the others.  It had a “greener” taste, if that makes sense…

By that time, we were back to his quarters and ready for the coconut!  Fresh coconuts are different from the brown, hairy shells that people associate them with.  The hairy brown shell is actually encased inside of a thick green coating.  Inside the hairy brown shell is a layer of coconut meat and the milk.  My friend used the machete to (rather dramatically) chop off the very top of the coconut, managing to just nick the hairy brown shell, which left us a perfect little opening from which to drink the milk.  It functioned just like a canteen.  After we finished the milk, he chopped it up further and we peeled off the meat with our fingers and ate it. 

I came back to my house, washed up in my marble bathroom, lounged on my ocean-front patio during a phone chat, and took a quick nap on my big fluffy bed.  I know that sounds luxurious, and living here does admittedly make me feel like royalty.  But compared to the raw, natural beauty of hiking in the rainforest, swimming in fresh-water rivers, basking under a roaring waterfall, and drinking coconut milk straight from the shell… this “beauty” of fancy living seems contrived and false. 

My friend lives in a tent in the rainforest.  He sees twenty cane spiders every day; they don’t bother him, and he doesn’t bother them.  He eats succulent fruits to survive.  He doesn't wear shoes or bug spray or suntan lotion.  He has a hammock strung between two trees so he can fall asleep looking at the stars, and the farm dog sleeps under his tarp at night. 

I live in a mansion with fancy couches and an in-home theater to watch movies.

But I envy my friend.