Back home-sweet-belowzero-home

Was about 10 below windchill when we took the train and bus home from the airport

Chinatown

Near the port in Honolulu.
Everything seems cheaper here and the lack of tourist schmoozing is kind of refreshing.



Bullfrogs, yum!!
They were very much alive, jumping around and croaking.

Sunset

From the Shorebird restaurant/bar (pretty cheap) in Waikiki beach. (The restaurant has this tradition of applauding when the sun goes down.)

Hanauma Bay

This beauuuutiful bay was once a volcanic crater and is now a nature preserve for fish, frequented by snorklers such as ourselves.

Proof we were there

(Picture taken without benefit of camera self timer.)


Tourist and chained up doggy. Owner is surfing.

View from our less-than-luxe hotel room.

Ecotourist

One day we spent the morning hiking, up in the rain forest above Honolulu.

It was worth it just for the views.
This is overlooking Honolulu.

Pearl Harbor.

The guide (in the white hat) was born and raised in Hawaii, but his grandpa and ma had come there from North Dakota. ("Never went back once!" he boasted). This was in the bamboo part of the forest. Bamboo, like lots of the plants and even more of the animals, is an import to Hawaii from elsewhere.
The forest, being a rain forest, is usually rainy. We were exceptionally lucky to have sun.


The vine-looking things on the left are from a Banyan tree. It sends tenicles ("Aerial roots") to the ground to spread itself (Somewhat like a spiderplant or raspberry does). Once connected to the ground the roots are not vine-like at all, but strong and hard like a trunk.


Note the faint outlines of the mountains behind Pearl Harbor here. Hawaii is not big and congested and has trade winds to keep it breezy, but it does have "vog" -- smog caused by volcanic dust from the volcano on the the Big Island, aka the Island of Hawaii.

Wierd tree

Saw this "Mindanao Gum" at the zoo.


I just liked the cool colors.