To Hawaii and Back

I’ve recently returned from a week on the Big Island of Hawaii where I visited my Mother as she recovered from a cosmetic surgery, she got a loose skin treatment to improve the looks of her skin at her age. There I was able to train a little following a fitness program to build strength online. It’s impossible for a photographer to go to Hawaii and leave his camera at home so my mom had to suffer a bit and put up with my running around town looking for things to shoot while running errands to pick up my dad or to get take out so she wouldn’t die from eating hospital food.

Click here to see a slide show, or read to the bottom and click on the image.

My days pretty much went like this. Get up early, and work my day job; thank you Linium for letting me work remotely, then I’d pick up lunch and stop at Rainbow Falls (it’s within a block of the hospital) and shoot some images before going to help mom with her physical therapy. Note in the slide show there are several images of Rainbow Falls each with a different feel. It’s amazing how it can change from one day to another. After her therapy was done each day I’d head out to pick up my dad from work. Here’s where the timeline gets muddy. Mom wanted take-out each night. Dad gets off work at 3:30. It didn’t make a great deal of sense to go back to the hospital and then leave again to get food. It also didn’t make good sense to take her food at 3:30 just to have it be cold at dinner. So… Dad and I went looking for subjects to photograph in that short time between picking him up and when mom would be hungry.

While on vacation there in June of 2007 I had the pleasure of taking a helicopter tour of several waterfalls and the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. On this flight we saw many waterfalls that aren’t on any local maps and aren’t generally visited by the public. Dad and I set out to find them.

A Google search revealed that OK Farms, in association with two tour companies, offers views of several falls along the Wailuku river. Mr. Keolanui and Mr. Olson, proprietors of OK Farms, graciously offered to let us come out independent of the tour companies and photograph whatever we wished. We went out to the farm on two different days and experienced kindness and generosity on each occasion. The first day Troy Keolanui drove us around the farm in his 4×4 and showed us the lay of the land before letting us loose to enjoy it at our own pace. The second trip Mr. Olson gave us samples of OK Farms produce and coffee. The produce we ate on the spot and wow was it delicious. The coffee, I brought home and have been enjoying it brewed in my French Press. As they say in the Islands Mahalo! I’m very grateful to have met these two men and for the chance to roam their property.

Nearby to OK Farms is The Inn at Kulaniapia Falls. We had a little extra time on our Saturday visit so we drove on up hoping to see the falls and to meet the inn keepers. When we arrived we encountered guests that directed us to the back of the main lodge where we met Jane Sutton. Jane and her husband Len have been the inn keepers since 1998. Based on their kindness and location I don’t expect they will have any problems extending that run as long as they desire.

After chatting with Jane about the property we secured permission to photograph the falls from their back deck and enjoy the walking trail to it’s base. The day of our visit coincided with a week of very heavy rain which produced a huge volume of water thundering over the falls. The inn does offer swimming in the pond or in the pool with the best heaters look at this now to find more about this.

On Sunday I took a break from both visiting mom and from church so I could wander through the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The day was very uneventful from a photographers perspective as it rained sideways rain all day long. At about 3:30 I’d nearly given up when the clouds to the South started to break creating a large rainbow. Naturally I started shooting. I was in a section of the park that was mostly Ohia trees and scrubby bushes. After a few minutes there it hit me! The sun is from the South. If I fly like the wind to the Southwest Rift Zone, the rainbow, if it was still there, would be hanging directly above the Kilauea Caldera and the Halema’uma’u crater which consumes it’s Southern end. Like a crazy man I drove there in hopes that I wasn’t too late. I was blessed upon my arrival with about 2 minutes of rainbow before the clouds closed in once again. Those two minutes made the entire dreary day worthwhile.

I hope you enjoy the handful of images from the week that I’ve assembled into a slide show. The trip’s focus wasn’t on photography but in what little free time I had, or stole, these images were snapped. Click on the image below to start the show.