BOXES 220-221: Hawai'i 5: O'ahu.

A hukilau was something I knew about only through an old song ("Oh we're going to a hukilau...") and Elvis' movie Blue Hawaii. But in the summer of 2000 Anne and I got to join a real hukilau (as opposed to a staging for tourists). It's one of my favorite Hawai'i memories: both the catching of the fish and the afternoon of cooking them in novel ways with good company.

The idea of a hukilau is for a group of people to spread a very long net (as they're doing in my photo above) in shallow water, and then walk in toward shore, tightening the circle to trap larger fish while smaller ones slip through the net, which is interwoven with long leaves to drive the fish. This one was organized by some of my brother-in-law Bob's friends on the Honolulu Weekly, the newspaper he worked for. Our location was just off the shore of Kahala, an upscale, mostly residential district of East Honolulu. The next photos show our location, looking west toward seaside mansions and east toward Koko Head.

I took a lot of pictures from shore before wading out myself to join the hukilau:

And here we are coming back on shore with the nets and our catch:

It looks like there must have been at least three net bags of fish--enough for each of us to take a nice quantity home. The fish, caked in sand, may not look appealing in the photos below, but washed off at home they were attractive and ready for cooking. (We didn't have a hukilau in the other sense of the word, a party on the beach where the fish are grilled on an open fire.)

A couple of the participants posed with a net and a very long fish:

Back at Bob and Tripit's place, where Anne and I were staying on our fourth biennial trip to Hawai'i, we were joined by one of Bob's "Weekly" friends and spent the afternoon trying out various ways of cooking the fish. (One local way was slathering a whole fish in mayonnaise and herbs, wrapping it in aluminum foil and baking it--surprisingly tasty!) Here's one of our preparations underway:

And here's a close-up of one of the completed dishes:

But we started out with a shrimp salad that Bob made--here he is posing with his creation and then at table with his friend:

I took a close-up of the salad but it's too out-of-focus to be printable; so here's a zoom-in from the previous pic.

And here we all are around the table later in the afternoon:

You may remember from previous posts that Bob and Tripit were living in a high-rise in Waikiki when Anne and I first visited Hawai'i; but as glimpses from the window above might suggest, they had moved. Their new apartment, the lower part of a house, was on a slope called Wilhelmina Heights, and had a sensational view of Diamond Head, with the ocean and Waikiki in the distance on the right:

One day we went for a hike up to Manoa Falls--at least I'm pretty sure that is what is shown in the next set of slides. The path passes through a bamboo grove on the way to the Falls:

Here's some other vegetation along the way:

There were kids on what must have been a school outing when we got to the Falls:

But here's a pic showing more of the Falls , plus one of Anne and me:

Another day we hiked up to the lighthouse at Makapu'u Point, and then down a winding cliff path to some tidal pools below. The view toward Koko Head from Makapu'u is pretty spectacular:

And here you're looking downward to the sea. If you look very closely you can see people at the tidal pools:

Here's a closer view from partway down the cliff:

And this is the cliff looking up from the pools. It surprises me that we'd been able to wind our way down it to the pools!

But the pools were worth the effort to get to them. You could see tropical fish, like a rainbow wrasse--roughly in the center of each of the photos below, if you look very closely--without having to snorkel.

And the pools were fun to sit in:

Yet another day we went to the Leeward Side of the island. The next photos look like Makua Beach:

I think it was while driving back that I took this photo of one stretch of the Waianae Mountains:

Anne and I took a side trip to other islands during our stay, as we usually did when we were visiting Bob and Tripit. In 2000 we went (for the third time) to Kaua'i and (a first) to Moloka'i, but I'll save pics of those for a separate post.