It's All Downhill From Here

After a beautiful Maui sunrise, it was time for our 27-mile bike ride. That may sound like a long trip (to some of you, anyway), but all but perhaps a quarter of a mile was downhill. All you really had to do was hang on and gently pump the brakes. And stay balanced, of course.

That last part could have wound up being a bit tricky. The truth is, I hadn't been on a (non-stationary) bicycle in more than 20 years, since back in early high school when I had a paper route. (I don't even think kids can do that anymore unless they're old enough to drive.) Of course, the example that's always used for something you never forget how to do is, "it's just like riding a bicycle." I was going to put that to test.

We suited up in all the gear from the shop, and we were ready to hit the road.

It turns out that riding a bike really is "like riding a bike," but things were just a little bit uncertain at first. Racing downhill, it didn't take much for me to feel out of control, but fortunately I never wiped out.

It's not like we were really in a hurry anyway. This is one of the reasons we'd chosen this particular bike shop from the dozens on Maui offering a sunrise tour -- this tour was self-guided. During the drive up the mountain, the driver (who, by the way, was shocked to hear I've lived most of my life in Colorado without ever going skiing) pointed out the three turns we'd need to make, and a number of places we might want to stop. But we were free to do whatever we wanted, taking up to eight hours to get the bikes back, if we chose. So we took our time.

Our first stop was at a lavender farm near the top of the mountain. The soothing smell was in the air, most intense of all in the tiny shop where we stopped for a hot drink, a few souvenirs, and a look at one of the gadgets used to distill the flowers' essence.

Right next door to the lavender farm was a place offering a zipline tour through the area. This was not the first time we'd considered ziplining, but the TV show South Park has seriously soured the prospect for us. In a particularly memorable episode from a couple years ago, Trey Parker and Matt Stone used their podium to declare how numbingly lame ziplining is, and painted such a compelling picture that we've been reluctant to try it ever since. That doubt, coupled with the quite high price tag, kept us from trying it on this occasion.

(In the last few weeks, a few people have told me that the quality/fun of ziplining depends greatly on where you do it. So perhaps some day we'll give it a try. But this chance slipped by.)

We hopped back on the bikes and continued downhill until we reached the small town of Makawao. On the drive up, our guide had told us of a number of good places to eat in the town. We didn't quite feel like sitting down somewhere, but we did try the donuts at the T Komoda Store and Bakery. Every bit as delicious as promised. I always thought that those people who waited three hours in line for the opening of a new Krispy Kreme donut store were pretty stupid; that feeling was only underscored by these amazing treats.

As we were standing in the bakery's short line, we suddenly heard the crash of cymbals as a local school's marching band started down the main street through town. We stepped outside to find a small Christmas parade, complete with an usual Santa.

Convertible Santa really tells you everything about Christmas in Hawaii. They seem to love Christmas there. All throughout our vacation, we saw decorations everywhere -- far more I think than back home in Denver. But the visual of it never stopped feeling unusual: blinking lights in 70 degree weather, parking lot stands selling trees you know had been shipped in from thousands of miles away, and Santa in the back of a convertible.

(As a side note: everybody in Hawaii can spot a tourist. Many of them will ask you where you're from. Whenever we'd answer "Denver," the response would inevitably be, "Do you have snow?" At first, I thought this was just locals being as uninformed about Denver as we were about Hawaii before our trip began. Hell, there are plenty of people back here on the mainland that think of Denver as some snow-covered hamlet resting on the edge of a mile-high mountain cliff. But as our vacation carried on, I came to suspect that all these Hawaiian locals were asking "do you have snow?" out of some quiet wish to actually see some in person. As they say, "the grass is always greener...")

After the parade wound down, we spent a while walking up and down the street, checking in shops for souvenirs. An hour or so later, we were back on the bikes to finish the last leg of our ride. We were the last people from our van to return our bikes to the shop in Paia, though the woman at the shop said that in this case, it made us the "winners" -- the people who had stopped to enjoy the most on the ride down.

We kept on taking it slow for the rest of the day. We had lunch in the area, stopped and bought ourselves some authentic Hawaiian shirts from a local shop, and stopped to watch the waves at a nearby beach.

We allowed ourselves a short nap to make up for the day's early start, before dinner at an Italian restaurant called Fabiani's. I mention the meal because I was able to get ravioli in an amazing crema rosa vodka sauce -- the same kind of sauce that used to be served at a formerly loved lunch spot near my work. It was good.

After dinner, we were again early to bed, in anticipation of another fun morning.

Good Morning, Maui

Our first morning waking up on Maui was our earliest morning of the entire trip -- we were up before 2:45am. The reason for this insane wake-up call? Apparently, sunrises are becoming "our thing." Two years ago, we'd been able to be inside Stonehenge for the 2012 summer solstice. It's not that we were looking to top that experience (I'm not sure you could), but we'd heard about another cool sunrise opportunity.

Mount Haleakala is the tallest point on Maui. (In fact, the massive shield volcano is actually about three-quarters of the island's land mass.) A number of bike shops on the island arrange tours that let you bicycle down the mountain, traveling from 10,000 feet above sea level basically to the shore line in a matter of hours. We'd picked one tour that put you atop the mountain to watch the sunrise from within Haleakala National Park.

After days in a tropical paradise, the biting wind on top of the mountain was a chilly reminder of what we'd left behind in Denver.

We stood in the cold and shivered for about an hour. But as the light came up minute by minute, it quickly became clear that it was going to be worth it. There was a lot more to the see than the rising sun. For one thing, there was the spectacular view of the crater right there in front of us, low clouds slowly rolling into the valley.

The tour guide who'd driven us up there told us that there were all kinds of hiking trails you could take throughout this amazing landscape -- probably well worth doing, had we not been there for something else.

As the dawn glow increased, a park ranger stepped up to address the crowd with an unusual presentation. She pointed out the full moon setting behind us, in what she unfittingly referred to as "double jeopardy."

And when the sun finally poked above the clouds on the eastern horizon, she launched into a full-throated Hawaiian chant to welcome the new day. Call me a bad person, but I quietly had to stifle a chuckle -- between the odd "double jeopardy" comment and the fact that The Lion King has pretty well ruined for my Hollywood-saturated brain any sort of sunrise chant, my giggle pump had been primed. Still, the urge to laugh quickly subsided as we took in a truly spectacular sunrise.

A few minutes later, we hopped back in the tour van to be driven back to the park entrance, the point from which our downhill ride would begin.

Needle Point

We could have easily spent more time on the Big Island during our Hawaii vacation. Our three days there were enough to hit the highlights we'd planned for, but we'd left the north and east sides unexplored. But ready or not, it was time to move on to Maui.

We took a small commuter plane with room for only 10 passengers. Assuming you don't have anxiety about air travel, I'd say this is definitely the better way to island hop. We were basically able to walk right up to the runway and board, without any of the hassle of the TSA's feckless "security theater." And illogical as it may sound, even the view seems more impressive out of the windows of the tinier plane.

50 minutes later, we were in Maui... but with several hours before we could check into our hotel. So we stopped for lunch, then headed to the nearby Iao Valley State Park. I'd seen some photos online, and the place looked like the sort of serene island paradise you expect to find in Hawaii. Indeed, there were some picturesque spots.

There were also some unusual and beautiful flowers.

But at the same time, because this place was located only 15 minutes outside of Kahului (where we'd landed), the park didn't quite feel like it offered the "seclusion" to go with the "serene."

One particular feature in the park, the "Iao Needle," was something I'd read about before we left Denver. I was expecting a short hike to get there, something that might fill up the afternoon. Instead, less than 200 steps up a few staggered flights of stairs, we came to the end of the line. The view from the observation point was as impressive as promised...

...but it hadn't taken any real time to get there. The drive up to the park and the walk had filled maybe 45 minutes of our afternoon. So on we went to our hotel, hoping we'd be able to check in early. No such luck. But we were able to lounge around on the beach behind our hotel while we were waiting for our room to be ready. After a few busy days full of activity, a lazy afternoon reading on the beach was a welcome change of pace. And the view was stunning.

Once we did get settled in our room, we decided not to do much more with our evening. Someone had told us to check out a place called Coconut's Fish Tacos, so that was our dinner. Not bad, and surprisingly filling for what didn't seem like a ton of food up front.

I think we might have taken a short dip in the hotel pool after dinner. What I know for sure is that we called it an early night, because we had a very early morning ahead of us the next day.

Battle Unending

The Hobbit trilogy has come to a close with the last and least of the three films, The Battle of the Five Armies. I say "least" in terms of entertainment value; it's certainly not least in terms of the sheer volume of visual spectacle presented on the movie screen.

The first two Hobbit movies were uneven in comparison to the emotionally powerful Lord of the Rings trilogy from a decade before, but each of them still had a handful of strong character scenes that presented the important personal stakes amid the sweeping setting of Middle-earth. The Battle of the Five Armies feels like the Transformers of the six Tolkien-adapted films. If you like loud, mindless action (and the box office says that plenty of you do), it's a feast for the eyes and ears. But there's very little there for the mind or heart, and that's a disappointing place to end a series of movies that started out with Oscar nominations (and a Best Picture win, for The Return of the King).

It all starts out with a rather awkward 10-minute opening that should have just been the final 10 minutes of the last film. Peter Jackson's desire to end The Desolation of Smaug on a cliffhanger may have been the most expedient way to let audience members (unfamiliar with decades-old spoilers) know there was still more story to come, but it critically compromised the narrative flow. Because this new film starts immediately with action -- Smaug attacking Laketown -- there's no time to reestablish who these characters are. Consequently, everyone comes of generic. Smaug is an angry villain for vague reasons. The mayor of Laketown deserves to be punished, though it's hard to recall exactly why that is. Bard is a generically heroic archer, the new Legolas (who even looks a bit like him), whose backstory about family failure from movie two isn't even mentioned again here.

The next 30 minutes or so contain some of the only quiet scenes of the entire film (though even these are cut with the whiz-bang rescue of Gandalf). The problem with this material, to couch it in legal terms, is that it relies on "facts not in evidence." Dwarven leader Thorin suddenly gives into a vaguely magical greed that seems to affect no one else. Bilbo (and one or two other Dwarves whose names we can't remember) prevail on friendship to try to talk sense into Thorin, but any demonstration of those friendships are one or two movies (and years) ago. The unfortunate result is that a lot of characters seem to behave inexplicably poorly, just to facilitate the titular battle.

That battle does soon arrive -- and it's bigger and bolder than Helm's Deep (from The Two Towers) and Pelennor (from The Return of the King) put together and doubled. It goes on for an hour, and it's full of Hollywood-style set pieces. Taken individually, any one of the gimmicky situations within the battle might be rather fun. But played out in a relentless chain, they start to get silly. The strained credibility snaps entirely when you're asked to believe that a handful of people could turn the tide of a battle this big. From there, you'll laugh openly at Legolas' acrobatics, roll your eyes at hand-to-hand fights that feel drawn from the sillier James Bond movies, and throw your hands up at the deus ex machina that resolves it all. (Even if you know that that last part, at least, is exactly how Tolkien wrote it.)

The volume (audio and visual) is so maxed out for so long that you simply become numb to it, then you start checking your watch regularly as this shortest of the three Hobbit films suddenly starts feeling like the longest. But now having fairly well trashed the movie, the fair thing to do would be to point out that it's really no worse than any other loud, dumb Hollywood action flick. In that company, in fact, it's probably better. The visual effects look generally better in this final chapter than in the preceding two. The geography of all the battles -- both army v. army and one-on-one -- is almost always clear, rarely getting visually confused as so many "handheld camera" action sequences in other films do.

And through it all, you have some solid actors doing the heavy lifting to inject more into the film than is on the page. Martin Freeman is a freaking rock star at it, but solid work is also done by Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage, and Luke Evans. They are the edge this movie has over common action fare. Vin Diesel or The Rock are never going to draw you in and make you care the way the cast of The Hobbit does.

Ultimately, if you've come this far with The Hobbit films, you might as well finish the trilogy. But I would seriously suggest The Battle of the Five Armies as one to skip in theaters and catch months later at home. I grade it a C.

...Ye Who Enter Here / What They Become

Before I move on to tales from Maui, I'm going to pause in my vacation tales to catch up on something I missed back home while we were gone -- the last two episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. before its mid-season break.

First up was "...Ye Who Enter Here." Although I know this opinion won't be shared among most fans (especially the Marvel Comics readers), I actually thought this episode was the stronger of the two. It was full of strong moments both for characters and the actors playing them.

Bringing back Agent 33 now permanently stuck with the half-torn-off face of May was a very inspired decision by the writers. I like that they weren't trying to continue the "which May is which" gag from 33's previous appearance, but rather taking advantage of the chance to use another main cast member as a recurring villain on the show. It has worked wonders for actor Brett Dalton as Grant Ward, and it seems like it will lead to good scenes for Ming-Na Wen as well.

The rescue of Raina from Hydra forces was fun for several reasons, none more so than seeing twin Keonigs out in the field. Patton Oswalt seems to be having a ball with these multiple roles, and the writers are also having a ball writing them. The Keonigs' banter with each other (and to other characters at each others' expense) is wonderful. So is the way they play with the other characters (and the audience) -- are they brothers? Robots? Because the stakes aren't as high as last season's "how is Coulson still alive?" mystery, I can enjoy not knowing and being toyed with.

I liked the subplot involving Fitz and Simmons even more, and how Morse and Mack were drawn into their relationship issues. Any other show would play a "love rhombus" here, but instead, this show is using Mack as a confidant for Fitz and Morse as a confidant for Simmons. I also think other shows would feel strained in their machinations to keep two characters romantically separated; here, Fitz and Simmons efforts to avoid each other feel as authentic as they are heartbreaking. (And it's not like Mack and Morse are pure accessories here in FitzSimmons' story here. Their cryptic dialogue about "the other thing" they have going on should prove interesting down the road.)

In all, this episode built up a lot of momentum toward the mid-season finale. I thought it merited an A-, and I couldn't wait to see what happened next. Indeed I did not, leaving me to now cover two episodes in one review.

"What They Become" was still a good episode, but suffered a little bit for trying to cram so much more story into the same amount of space. The nicer character moments of the previous hour got crowded out a bit.

Even more, I thought the episode suffered a bit for moving the ongoing story a bit too fast. This is an odd complaint to voice, since the glacial pace of early season one was one of the series' biggest problems, one well-corrected since. But I was just starting to get into Whitehall as a villain, only to now have him unceremoniously killed. Sure, we still have other villains in play, but Whitehall's behavior and motivations just seemed to be coming into focus. I'm left to hope that perhaps he'll show up in the Agent Carter series.

Of course, the big story advancement was Skye's transformation at the end of it, and her true identity as "Daisy." This meant nothing to me; I'd later find out online that fans were excited that this was all Inhumans material. And while I do like the idea that the TV series will now be introducing information to be covered in later Marvel movies (rather than being forced to follow after them), I feel like purely human Skye hadn't yet been played out. Season 2's new badass-trained-by-May was a compelling leap over season 1's Skye. It was a stand up and cheer moment when Skye simply shot Ward (multiple times) the moment she got free, rather than allow herself to be played by him. But was this stage of her Jedi training truly complete enough that it was time to move on to giving her superpowers? I suppose the back half of the season will show us, but as of right now, I'm a bit skeptical.

Kyle McLachlan was certainly fun in this episode. Now we know his character is based on a comic character too -- one that to my uninformed mind seems like a retread of the Hulk. But McLachlan seems to be giving a very different performance that keeps that sense of similarity at bay. It certainly isn't boring, and I can console myself about the too-soon loss of Whitehall to know that we still have his character as a villain on the show. (Along with May-faced 33, now teamed up with Ward -- who has been waaaaay better as a villain than he ever was as one of the good guys.)

I'd give "What They Become" a B+. It didn't have as many good character moments (except for Skye) as the previous episode, though it certainly appeared to be a springboard to all-new storylines when the show returns in March.

Until then, we'll see how Agent Carter is.

An Unscheduled Stop / Hawaii By Night

We had spent the entire afternoon at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, but we weren't quite done with it. Having missed out on seeing lava up close, we were not going to miss the next best thing: returning to the Kilauea Crater after sunset. By night, the glow from deep inside the crater was said to be visible from the observation point we'd visited earlier. But we had a couple of hours to wait before the sun would go down.

We found out about a short hike that seemed like it would be good to pass the time, on a trail through an area called Kipuka Puaulu. It was back out past the Visitor Center, on the other side of the main road. It was also one more street beyond the one we accidentally turned on. We realized the mistake fairly quickly, but by then we'd noticed a sign on the side of the road promising a winery up ahead. Here, in kind of the middle of nowhere? We were fairly curious.

Sure enough, one mile down the road, we arrived at Volcano Winery.

As Hawaii is south of even Florida back on the mainland, this place touted itself as the southernmost winery in the U.S. It seemed to have two unofficial mascots hanging around in the parking lot. The Big Island has a number of feral cats roaming around. (There were several near our bed and breakfast, in fact, which one of the home owners -- a veterinarian -- was tending to. We were expressly warned not to attempt to pet them.) One such cat was patrolling the winery, while the other was lounging in one of the parking spaces, glaring at us with lazy disdain for even thinking about parking there.

Once we did get inside the winery, we enjoyed a flight of eight different wines, most of which we liked enough to arrange for a few bottles to be sent to us back home. They'll make for nice future memories of this great and unexpected stop in the middle of a wonderful vacation.

There seemed to be enough sunlight after our wine that we still decided to look for the Kipuka Puaulu trail head afterward. Yet even though it only took us perhaps 5 minutes to get there, things weren't looking quite so inviting by then. Still, it seemed like we had about another half hour before sunset -- and flashlights to take with us if we'd judged the length of the trail wrong.

It turned out we were right about it being maybe a 30 minute hike. We were wrong about how much sunlight was left. In a matter of 10 minutes, the flashlights were definitely appreciated. In 10 more, they were necessary. We couldn't clearly see any of the sights that the trail pamphlet and signs were pointing out, but the gist was that transported vegetation from off the island is very damaging to the things that grow locally, and that a substantial conservation effort has now begun to reverse that damage.

Whatever the vegetation, we were hiking along a trail through it in what felt basically like the dead of night. We had the place completely to ourselves, which I suppose was a tiny bit spooky. But on a rather tourist filled day on a very tourist filled island, having a place entirely to ourselves was also pretty neat.

Needless to say, we did make it back to our car safe and sound, and having now killed enough time to return to the Kilauea Crater. It was very much worth our wait.

The inside of the volcano seethed steam and glowed orange, a completely different spectacle than we'd seen by day. It was not quite lava up close and personal, but it may well have been just as hypnotic.

This long day in the national park hadn't really afforded us an opportunity for meals. While we'd brought plenty of snacks bought at the grocery, we were really wanting something more substantial, especially with a two hour drive back to the bed and breakfast still ahead of us. But the trouble is, on the Big Island, many things start closing very soon after sunset. Our one real option was the "Shaka Restaurant," a place billing itself as the "southernmost bar in the U.S." (Southernness is apparently a big thing for this slice of Hawaii.) The food was not the best, but it beat another granola bar and round of jerky to cap the day.

The end of that long day also basically brought an end to the first leg of our trip, on the Big Island. The next morning, we'd be moving on to Maui.

Chain of Craters

In my tales thus far of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, I've talked about the places you can see on the rather small loop road that runs near the Visitor Center. But you can also set off down a 19-mile winding road called Chain of Craters Road. It takes you down to the coast, with plenty of sights to see along the way.

There was the view at a spot overlooking Mauna Ulu, an almost lunar surface lacking only the pitch black sky.

There was the drive through several labeled lava flows...

...a neat reminder that while most rock you encounter has been there for untold thousands (upon thousands) of years, this rock is about the same age as you.

These same lava flows that felt like a curiosity up close took on an entirely different character when viewed from a distance later on down the hill...

...as you could clearly see the paths where they'd wiped out all life in their unstoppable march to the ocean.

Neither of us was enough of an anthropologist to appreciate the petroglyph field near the end of the road. Touted as the largest of its kind in all the Hawaiian islands, we made the short but scorching one-and-a-half mile hike across open rock to see this area where hundreds of symbols, centuries old, had been carved into the lava rock. I think we'd been expecting to see a large variety of symbols, somehow akin to Egyptian hieroglyphs or what my Hollywood-infected brain conjures when thinking of "cave paintings." Instead, we saw lots of circles and dots.

And actually, the petroglyphs show up better in our pictures than they did to actually see them in person. So unless you have some background in Hawaiian history that renders you better able to appreciate this area, I'll give you the same advice we gave a pair of skeptical tourists who questioned us at the trailhead as we returned to our car: you can skip this bit of the park.

Instead, continue on down to what is (as of this writing) the end of Chain of Craters Road, and view the "sea arch." The road ends along the coast at an impressive rocky cliff, miles long in each direction.

Those intense waves battering the shore have eroded the rocks in an especially picturesque way:

In pictures (including ours here), I think this feature looks larger than it actually is. Still, the spot was beautiful -- even inspiring.

We then turned around and headed back up Chain of Craters Road. But the day still wasn't over... which I'll get into next time.

Vistas of Beauty and Devastation

The third day of our Hawaii trip was a "road trip" day. We put the top down on the convertible we'd rented and headed south around the island toward Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. But we had one particular stop in mind along the way: Punalu'u Beach.

This spot along the southern coast of the island is better known as Black Sand Beach, and is one of several interesting colored sand beaches to be found throughout Hawaii. (We were curious about another green sand beach on the Big Island, but were told a four-wheel drive vehicle was necessary to get there.) The black sand there is not oversold or metaphorical:

I know that photo makes the place look more like Black Rock Beach, and parts of it certainly are -- like the area where lots of guys like this were hiding out:

But there were big patches of sand too, and it was indeed black, ground down lava rock.

We walked around for a while, taking in the gorgeous scenery...

...and then were back on our way.

Despite being no more than 75 miles away, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park took around two hours to get to, a phenomenon we came to refer to as "Hawaii miles." It's not just that the roads wind around more than they do in the typical city, and it doesn't seem like it's just that the speed limits everywhere are lower than back in the continental U.S. No, I swear that every "Hawaii mile" feels longer when you're driving it. Just when you get to thinking, "I must have missed the last mile marker a while back," there it comes.

So, several Hawaii miles later, we arrived at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. It was the intended main attraction of our days on the Big Island, because we wanted to see lava (aka "liquid hot magma") as up close and personal as possible. We were quickly disappointed by the park ranger at the Visitor Center, who told us there was no lava accessible anywhere in the park limits at the moment. A real comedian, he pulled out a bar of Lava hand soap and showed us that. I assure you he wasn't as sick of telling that joke for the thousandth time as we were of hearing it the once.

We knew from news reports (and from daily lava alerts issued in Hawaii) that there was indeed flowing lava elsewhere on the island -- it had been destroying people's homes in recent weeks. We briefly discussed trying to seek out such an area. I'd like to claim that we weren't ghoulish enough to go gawk at someone's ruined home, but it's probably more fair to say that we simply weren't willing to do more driving in search of something that might have access to it blocked anyway.

But there was plenty more to see in the park. The steam vents were a bit unimpressive after our recent trip to Yellowstone National Park, but the Kilauea Caldera was a breathtaking sight, along with the desolate land around it:

Also just a few minutes from the Visitor Center was a lava tube you could walk through. The short trail to get there was through a small, lush rainforest...

... a stark contrast to the bleak landscape just minutes away at the caldera, and full of interesting enclaves, nooks, and crannies.

The lava tube itself was fairly neat. Or at least, we thought so at the time.

You walked for a couple minutes and a few hundred feet through this tunnel once carved by magma, then emerged back in the rainforest. As interesting as the contrast was, we'd have another experience later on in the trip that retroactively rendered this place little more than a "Black Bart's Cave" for adults. (Denver area readers, or people who have seen the "Casa Bonita episode" of South Park, should understand the reference.)

But that will be a story for later, as will be the rest of our time in the park.

Manta Heaven

We had a big evening ahead after our tour of the coffee plantation: a night time scuba dive. Not just any night dive, but a well-known one with a long history.

The story goes that in the early 1970s, a resort on the Big Island decided to illuminate the ocean behind the hotel with floodlights so that guests could watch the waves come in at night. The bright lights had the unintended effect of drawing in lots of plankton, which in turn had the unintended effect of drawing in giant manta rays for an easy meal. A dive shop began hosting weekly dives to observe the mantas, which soon blossomed into a nightly event with numerous shops joining the action.

The hotel closed in 2000, but the action only relocated to nearby Garden Eel Cove, a deeper location already naturally attractive to mantas, made more so by the hundreds of nightly divers and snorkelers shining their X-Files-strength flashlights into the water. Now, by night, the location is known as Manta Heaven.

We chartered with Kona Honu Divers to go to the site. I was a bit nervous about my first night dive, but everyone was assured by the team that this was "the Las Vegas of night dives," lit up brighter than the Strip. I relaxed even more when over a dozen boats gathered in the cove -- you'd stand a far greater chance of accidentally trying to surface under a boat than becoming disoriented in the dark.

We were given a nice briefing before the dive, informing us about the creatures we were soon to see. Many would have a 10 or 12 foot "wing span"; the largest, Big Bertha, was 16 feet wide. Yes, mantas have names, because the spotted patterns on their bellies are a sort of fingerprint by which divers have identified over 200 unique mantas. (And if you photographed a new one, you'd get to name it!) The females are larger than the males. Toothless and there just to suck in plankton, they wouldn't threaten the divers in any way... but they would be passing very close to you, and please don't touch them, thankyouverymuch.

We were each given a bright light, and had a glow stick attached to our tanks. (Ours would be red, to distinguish our group from the dozens of different colors used by different dive groups on site.) The program was simple: dive to the bottom, a mere 35 feet down, swim over to the "campfire" where everyone was gathered, then just kneel or sit in a line on the bottom and enjoy the show for 30 or 40 minutes.

The "campfire" was like an alien landscape.

There were spotlights everywhere, each illuminating a vortex of fish swirling toward the surface. Clusters of snorkelers hovered above, dangling from floating PVC racks like light banks in a space age kitchen.

We were wearing fairly thick wetsuits, and were thus more buoyant than expected. Sitting on the ocean floor was easier said than done, as frequent swells would start to pick us up and carry us. Our dive master Nico had the answer for this; he scooped up a few large rocks nearby and gave us each enough to rest on our laps and anchor us in place.

Finally comfortable, it was time to point the lights up.

We didn't have to wait long. Indeed, I'm not sure we had to wait at all; there were mantas all over the place, had we not been too busy fumbling with the rocks to focus our attention in the right place.

For a while, the mantas stayed at a comfortable distance. But when Nico saw that we'd become more comfortable in this truly unusual situation, he arranged a more close encounter. He had with him a few high-powered lights to position on the ocean floor, and knew just where to place them and how to angle them. Within seconds of him putting them a few feet in front of us, mantas started drifting our way.

The mantas would swim right at us, their alien maws open wide to afford a weird view all the way down their throats. But they'd always pull up to glide just inches above our heads.

Often, they'd loop around in "Top Gun" style rolls above us, or sweep in unexpected from behind.

35 minutes flew by, and soon it was time to go. We'd captured lots of clear images of those telltale manta "fingerprints"...

...but no brand new one for us to name "Ray-Cray" (our leading contender). The team we were with had identified all eight of the unique mantas we'd seen: males Blain, Doug, Cpt Mike, and Sugar; and females Shirley, Mango, Koie, and Lisa. (Now that we're back home, I've found the library where the rays are all catalogued. Perhaps at some point, I'll go through our video to see if I can pick them all out.)

After that rare and exciting adventure, it seems rather weak to mention this postscript, but after the dive, we went to Kona Brewing Company for a rather tasty dinner and a few flights of the local beers. We found several beers we liked, and probably would have gone back again to sample more if we'd had the time. Fortunately, Kona Brewing Company ships at least some of their beers here to Denver, so we can check back in at some point. In any case, it was a nice cap on a memorable day. But still more memorable days were ahead.

Water and Coffee

Day two of our trip -- and our first full day on Hawaii -- began with a trip to the nearby Kealakekua Bay. It's said to have the best snorkeling on the Big Island (and could be a contender for best snorkeling anywhere), and our bed and breakfast hosts had equipment you could borrow. We'd brought our own masks and snorkels (and my boyfriend, his own fins), which just meant I needed to take some fins. I grabbed the biggest ones they had (still a bit tight) and off we went.

Kealakekua Bay is quite picturesque even above the surface.

My boyfriend and I each have scuba experience. (You may recall my blogs about that from last summer.) We can both swim (him quite well, from his high school years on the swim team). But neither of us had been snorkeling before, and so we were a bit timid about the whole thing. There had been life jackets with the bed and breakfast gear, which we'd forgotten to grab. And both of us had a healthy respect for how hard it is to tread water for a long time under normal circumstances. So we just didn't want go very far out -- I'm guessing never more than 75 feet from the coast, if that.

Consequently, we didn't see much. There were a few colorful fish. But ringing in our minds were those forgotten life jackets, and the guy at the shore trying to talk us into renting his kayaks by telling us all the good snorkeling was on the north side of the bay. So rather than push farther in the hopes of seeing better stuff, we gave up the enterprise fairly early.

When we got back to shore though, we realized how very not tired we really were, how easy it had been to keep afloat with minimal effort using the fins and simply relaxing. So it turned out that this first snorkel attempt, though a bit dull, was a real confidence booster for us to try more later in the trip. (A story I'll get to in a future post.) We might have even tried again right then, but there was more on the day's itinerary. So back to the car it was, and on to the next stop.

That stop was Mountain Thunder, a coffee plantation. Even a non-coffee drinking philistine like me is aware of the reputation of Kona coffee. Lacking the bitter, acidic finish of most coffees, it's grown only by a few plantations in a small strip of land on western Hawaii. My boyfriend was eager to go straight to the source, and I was certainly interested enough in the coffee-making process to go along.

The plantation tour was both better and worse than I was expecting. What I think I was expecting was something like the Sterling Vineyard tour we'd done in Napa Valley, substituting coffee for wine. And I think Mountain Thunder actually had a special VIP tour that offered exactly that -- at an exorbitant price tag. So instead we did their free tour, which was a bit disappointing in how little of the plantation we actually got to see.

On the other hand, what we did get to see in the one-hour tour was quite interesting, and super informative as well. After seeing everything that goes into making coffee, I now understand why good coffee costs as much as it does. From picking the cherries from their trees...

...to extracting their seeds...

...to getting the roast just right...

...I learned that there's a lot that goes into making coffee, and a lot that could go wrong at each step. I also now understand exactly what the differences in roasts mean, and know that most "Kona coffee" is actually just a 10% blend, along with plenty of other little factoids that were quite interesting even without a love for coffee.

And here's the big shock. If you can get the pure, 100% Kona coffee? It's actually not bad. It still needed about twice as much sugar as I'll put in my tea, but the samples we got to try? I actually had seconds. (Gasp!) As advertised, no acidic aftertaste. Far less bitterness. We brought a limited (and pricey) stash of "the good shit" back with us. And though I'm not yet sure I want to cultivate a coffee habit, I could imagine doing so with this stuff. (And access to milk and sugar.)

Seriously, what is happening to me?

Island Sunset

This week, I returned from an eight-day trip to Hawaii. It was the first time either I or my boyfriend had been to the state, and we'd piled up a good list of things we wanted to see.

But the trip actually got off to a bit of a slow start. Our connecting flight in San Francisco was delayed an hour for lack of pilots for the plane. I'm sure that's because of a delay in their previous flight, but at the time, I was definitely thinking, "Come on, guys. We got up before 4:00 in the morning for this. You can't make it to work on time?"

We finally did arrive in Kona on the Big Island, and were immediately struck by an oddity that's actually the norm for Hawaii airports. None of them are really "indoor." Kona in particular feels almost like a bunch of huts just built right on the runway.

Since we were an hour behind schedule, we didn't quite have enough time for our original afternoon plans. But that did let us be a bit more relaxed after the long flight. We grabbed a tasty lunch at Jackie Rey's Ohana Grill, and then spent a half hour or so at a random beach (Kahalu'u Beach) we happened across. We also stumbled around a bit looking for "souvenir towels" (aka, the beach towels we felt we should have packed).

In all, this was basically killing hours until the time we'd originally told our hosts we were arriving to check in. We'd decided to try something a bit different on this first leg of the trip; instead of staying in a hotel, we'd found a bed and breakfast, the South Kona Hideaway. On the up side: it was actually cheaper than a hotel, and with a few more comforts (such as a king-size Sleep Number bed). On the down side: this was a self-contained unit within someone's home, so you'd feel bad showing up at a time other than you'd specified.

But right away, our hosts made it clear we'd made a good choice picking them over a hotel. Besides the ridiculous view of their amazing backyard...

...they had fresh fruit from said backyard already sliced for us. This is when and how my boyfriend discovered that passion fruit is his new favorite fruit on the planet. But it doesn't present the most appealing visual:

You just spoon everything right out of this Alien chest-burster egg thing. It has the consistency of snot, with the seeds ever-so-faintly crunching in a way that suggests you shouldn't be eating them. But it is fairly tasty -- a sort of tart, tangy twist on maybe a grapefruit-mango-lemon hybrid? Maybe? Very hard to describe. But if you can ever get a fresh one, you should try it.

For me, though, that wasn't the highlight of the evening. The highlight was that we had arrived just in time for sunset. The sunset view from the "Lookout Suite" (our room) at this bed and breakfast had been proudly trumpeted online. And it did not disappoint.

I carry strong memories of two particular Colorado sunsets (two in a whole lifetime spent living mostly here), sunsets that were freakishly red-orange and breathtakingly beautiful. They might be in a league with this first night's Hawaiian sunset. But given how far we'd come to see this one, and how it indeed lived up to the hype? Nah, those two Colorado sunsets probably can't compete. Even our hosts sat on their balcony to watch it.

We did go grab dinner after that, but watching that sunset was really the one major activity of day one, and strangely felt like more than enough. Our trip had begun.

Dicing With Death

Hello, readers! I have returned from my Hawaiian getaway. In the days ahead, as I sort through hundreds of vacation photos, I'll regale you with tales of island fun. (That is: I'll have several days of travel log largely for my own future reference and enjoyment. For those of you uninterested, it'll be like the blog is on hiatus for another stretch, I suppose.)

But I'm too exhausted to start that now. So for the moment, I'll fire a bullet I already had loaded in the blogging chamber -- a board game review!

Pandemic is one of the better cooperative board games I've played -- it has a fun theme in preventing global viral outbreaks, and good gameplay that usually allows every individual player moments in the spotlight as events unfold. Now, designer Matt Leacock has gone back and reimagined his hit game in a new form, Pandemic: The Cure. Unlike the expansions that have been released over the years, The Cure is an entirely new game. Once again, it's a cooperative board game where players unite to battle global disease. But this time, it's a dice game.

A giant bag of six-sided dice represent the infections, with dice in four different colors. Character roles each have their own unique set of five dice, each with their own special abilities. The essence of the original Pandemic board game is preserved intact -- players still hop around the globe, still try to treat diseases before they get out of control, and still collect samples in the hopes of discovering a cure. You're just rolling dice to do these things now.

There's an interesting "Press Your Luck" vibe to the gameplay. On your turn, you're allowed to keep rolling any and all of your dice as often as you like, in search of the perfect roll. But 1 face out of 6 is a "viral" symbol, which locks that die from re-rolling and advances the spread of disease in the world. The fact that you can re-roll does make this dice game rather less fickle than you might expect. You feel like you have some measure of control here, even with dice involved. The virus dice have special faces as well. Each of the four diseases have distinctly configure dice, which means the players know some outcomes to be more likely than others -- another area where the players don't feel at the mercy of total randomness.

Still, the game is reasonably chaotic. And it's not likely that any fan of Pandemic was thinking, "You know what this game really needs? More randomness!" So what edge does The Cure provide? The fact that it's playable in roughly 30 minutes -- and rather easier to explain than the original Pandemic as well.

With these qualities, The Cure manages to carve out a rather distinct niche for itself. Most cooperative games are rather lengthy endeavors. Pandemic was actually on the lighter side of things, taking only 60-90 minutes when there are plenty of cooperative games that can take two to four hours. At the same time, while there are plenty of quick games that pack a reasonable amount of strategy into 30 minutes, I hadn't come across any of those that were cooperative. So Pandemic: The Cure might be a welcome addition to your game library. If you're in the mood for a game like this, there really aren't other games like this that I've encountered.

Put another way, Pandemic: The Cure takes one-third to half the time of the mothership game. And while it is less sophisticated and strategic overall, I wouldn't say it's one-third to a half less so. You could thus see it as gaining more than it's giving up. It's pretty solid for what it is, earning a B grade. It's not the main course in a game night, but a worthy appetizer or dessert.

Aloha

The blog is going on hiatus for a bit here, as I head out on vacation. I'm off to Hawaii. I'm cutting a serious chunk of time out of my Christmas shopping window, but that's a "sacrifice" I'm willing to make.

So until I return... aloha!

Coda

Last night's mid-season finale of The Walking Dead had a few good moments sprinkled throughout, but overall I think it missed the mark a bit. Unfortunately, it seems as though every time the writers come up with a few new tricks to make things interesting, they inevitably go back to the one trick that is their bread and butter: the "shocking death." But they use this trick so frequently, and with such predictable timing (it's the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead) that all the shock value has been stripped away from it. So what we're left with each time a character meets his or her demise is whether the death severed any other narrative purpose besides "shocking" (not shocking) the audience. And here, the answer is, "sort of." You can see what the writers were trying for, but their execution (pun intended) was flawed in several ways.

One aim was clearly to gut-punch Maggie. After having been separated from her sister since the prison, she receives news that Beth has been found at last, only to have that hope cruelly ripped away from her. The problem is, Maggie hasn't exactly been broken up about her missing sister. It's probably true that she wrote off Beth as dead a long time ago, but we never got to see any of the moments associated with that. There wasn't really any "we left Beth" angst last season during the flight from the prison. They didn't really play any "sense of hope" scenes when the group reunited and Daryl told Maggie that Beth was still alive. Maggie never wanted to make even half the effort Daryl did at finding Beth, even deciding to traipse off to DC and leave her sister in the wind. So yes, while I ultimately understand that this is her sister, and learning of her confirmed death will deal Maggie an emotional blow, it has long since taken on the dimension of a sister who moved across the country years ago, rather than a sister you've lived with in one house all your life. In short, if this was about dealing Maggie a blow, then the writers needed to earn that by showing us at any point before now that Maggie actually cared. They failed utterly in that regard.

The other narrative aim seemed to be the maturing of Beth. She had learned what a terrible place the hospital was, a nest of vipers doing greater evil than the zombies, in the name of doing good. And she decided in the final moment that putting a stop to it was worth sacrificing her own life -- which, given her last line of dialogue, she surely knew she was doing in her final moment.

The trouble with trying to give Beth this heroic end is that she didn't really accomplish a damn thing. In just the few episodes we've seen in the hospital, we've seen a procession of bad cops who rape women and bully the elderly. Some of these villains have been killed, but there's always a new one to fill the gap. Take this week, for instance, and the showdown at the elevator shaft. I don't even remember whether the cop who confronted Dawn is a guy we've seen before or not -- that's how numerous and generally anonymous the evil cop characters are at the hospital. And so there are two problems with killing Dawn to somehow make this all right. First, I have no faith that the end of Dawn brings any kind of end to this regime. Tomorrow, I'm sure another Evil Rapey Cop will pop up somewhere. And second, it's implying that Dawn as the figurehead-enabler is somehow worse than any of the perpetrators. Guilty, sure. Worse? I question that. Beth's big sacrifice thus felt misplaced, which cheats it out of being heroic. I think the writers figured it would be tragic, at least... but that takes us back to the problem that death is so common on The Walking Dead that the audience can't even say to itself, "what a sad waste."

Unless, that is, I'm thinking about wasted plot opportunities. It is a sad waste that the show will now not be able to explore the emotional aftermath of the hospital for Beth. She killed people, and had to make a number of moral compromises. That would have left a mark that fundamentally changed her, probably straining her relationship with people, Maggie most of all. But we won't get to see any of that.

So, what was good in the episode? For one, the return of Abraham's crew to the church, crashing in with their fire engine. (We'll overlook the infuriating artificial jeopardy of that situation caused by the insufferable Gabriel.) For another, the continued dark descent of Rick, who clearly saw nothing wrong in how he handled "New Bob" during the teaser. There's one character, at least, that the writers are keenly interested in tracking as he rappels at breakneck speed down into an amoral chasm.

But generally, I feel I'll have no trouble waiting until February waiting for the series to return. After a burst of quality that spanned that back half of season four and the start of season five, I feel like The Walking Dead is now rapidly sliding back down the hill into the predictable doldrums that marked the years before that. I give this episode a B-.