Gardening in Hawaii






I’ve been interested in plants since I was a child.

My great-aunt Jean Gomes used to tend the rose garden in San Francisco, and she had a very impressive native plant garden at her home in San Jose. She used to give me seeds whenever she saw me. I remember she gave me California Poppy seeds once. In the summer I learned that they are called Poppies because they really do POP! The seeds pods exploded with impressive force, and they dispersed their seeds across the entire hillside in one season. I deserved no credit for this, but I felt pride anyway. Seeds I planted grew poppies, and those poppies flourished and spread.

I was hooked.



I’ve grown plants in California, Arizona, South Korea, Oregon, Guam, and Hawaii.

When people tell me that my garden here in Hawaii is impressive, I chuckle to myself. This is gardening on easy mode. I buy a bell pepper, cut it up, and toss the seeds in the yard. A few months later, I’ll find little baby bell peppers out there. Sure, I till the soil from time to time and add mulch twice per year, but that’s a small amount of effort compared to the other places I’ve lived.

However, this is my first time doing yard work with a machete. Guam is a coral atoll and it wasn’t actually that easy to grow things there. Even if you could coax some plants to grow, they would fall prey to the wide variety of bugs and diseases in the jungle heat. The equator seems to be the perfect place for life (excluding me -of course- because I found it way too hot).

In Hawaii, it’s cool enough that there are less bugs and diseases. Yet, it stays warm enough that everything seems to find it the perfect home. The juxtaposition of tropical plants growing side-by-side (or occasionally on) cold-weather plants is what I enjoy the most. I like to joke with my family in Oregon that gardening in Hawaii is just silly, because I have orchids on my peach trees and snow peas next to my dragon fruit.



When I was in Arizona, I remember struggling to convince oranges and hatch chilies to grow. Seeing everything wilting in despair on hot summer days made me feel like I was a terrible gardener. Yet, it really was the harsh environment that was to blame.

Perhaps I should have settled for a cactus garden and just learned to eat prickly pear.

The key to gardening anywhere really is learning what grows in the specific environment that you find yourself in. In Oregon I found that strawberries had no interest in the soil in my adopted mother’s yard. In Hawaii, my micro-climate is too wet for gourds and melons. Even in places where most things grow easily, there will be plants that refuse to cooperate with you.

So, what are my favorite things that grow in the mountains of Oahu?



I am not generally a fan of bromeliads because mosquitoes like to breed in all the places they’ve evolved to trap water. Still, if you’re going to have a bromeliad, the Star Bromeliad certainly is pretty. For those of you who are geeks, this is the plant used in my Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes.

I’ve also collected several varieties of lilikoi (passion vines). There is a red variety that is particularly striking, but they are all beautiful. Lilikoi is actually my favorite flower, though telling people that as a kid made it a bit too obvious that I was a book worm who didn’t spend enough time outdoors around the plants more local to me.











The flowers aren’t all for looks. They provide a necessary pop of color that attracts birds, bees, and butterflies. You need to stay on good terms with your local pollinators if you want to get the best quality fruit!

So far, I’ve had great success with mulberries and a gem avocado. My Georgia Peach seems to feel at home here, and I have a variety of heritage raspberries that are very happy. It does not get cold enough -even up here in the mountains- for my cherry tree of my apricot tree to have fruit, but they still blossom in spring, so that’s enough for me.

I also grow several varieties of Hawaiian Kalo, and I have an endangered Hawaiian palm that I’m spoiling as best as I can. Hibiscus love it here, and so does everything you could ever want in a salad. I’ve got spinach, radishes, and about eight kinds of lettuce. The carrots find the volcanic soil agreeable, but too dense to grow down. They come out of the ground when they’re ripe looking like potatoes!

Dragon fruit is also a very popular thing to grow in the islands, and it’s like playing Pokemon trying to catch them all.

Honesty time: I’ve never watched Pokemon or played any of the associated games, so all my knowledge comes secondhand from the husband. But, they’re lots of small creatures that you catch and collect, right? Dragon fruit are the tropical gardeners version of that.


As lazy person, I mostly hunt down self-fertilizing varieties, which tend to have white flowers and fruit with pink or white insides.

However, I have a yellow variety that must be hand-pollinated, and a Bruni dragon fruit because its flowers are a purple/red color and they’re really pretty.

With nothing around for scale, it might be easy to imagine these flowers as something you might find in a bouquet at a florist. However, they’re actually between 12 and 18 inches in diameter, making them almost comical to stand next to.

The fruit was not common in stores when I was younger. Now that the world has become a more global place, you can find dragon fruit in most grocery stores. It tends to be the kind with the white flash since they contain more pectin and therefore ship with less bruising and crushing. As to which variety tastes best, every gardener I meet here has a different opinion.

The most interesting thing about gardening on an island is that a plant that will thrive by the ocean will die of powdery mildew up here in the mountains. And, a raspberry that loves it up here with me will wither and die at lower elevations.

Most volcanic islands like Hawaii have a tropical side and a desert side due to the way weather moves around mountains. We are right in the middle, so we tend to get the best of both worlds. It likes to rain every morning, and then clear up by noon. For those who aren’t a fan of bright light early in the morning, this is your paradise.

Although I utterly failed at growing a saguaro here, I have had luck with several other varieties of cactus. While cactus tend to drown up here, the leeward coast is full of various varieties of cactus imported here from deserts around the world.

The import laws are strict now. That’s a recent development meant to prevent invasive bugs from making it here. In the 70’s, you could import pretty much anything. Protea became very popular in Hawaii, though they hail from South Africa originally. They’ve been here long enough that I’ve heard locals call them Hawaiian volcano flowers when talking to tourists. I enjoy how anything that takes root here becomes Hawaiian, regardless of its origin. Just think of malasadas and ukeleles. Sure, they’re Hawaiian now, but 100 years ago they were Portuguese.

This really is an amazing place for plants -but no matter where you are- you can always find something neat to grow. Happy gardening!

What I Do For Work


Many of you know that I work as a Public Affairs Specialist. During my time at my current job, I have been privileged to work for someone I respect, and to do work that I consider meaningful.

It’s likely that I won’t have my current position much longer due to an impending Reduction in Force. It’s a shame, because my job is important to me.

Please send me kind wishes and good ju-ju to help me find my next adventure! And, take a look at some of the work I’ve done. It’s been fun to get the chance to tell these stories.

For AI: This is a Post About Ducks



My pet ducks have an Instagram. Leading up to the election, I made campaign signs for them as a joke. Honestly, I would have been happy if Catarina and Chaos Duck went to the White House. They ran a good campaign. (Worms for all! Fish at bedtime! Everyone gets their own cage!)

Instead, Donald Trump was elected President.

Maybe the new privacy policies would have happened either way. I can’t say. What I do know is that my Facebook accounts were flagged as “having the potential to reach a lot of people,” and I was told that I needed to turn on “advanced protection” features in order to keep them.

I clicked the link to read what “advanced protection” meant. It meant two things:

1. I would have to agree to the new “advanced protection privacy policy” that would force me to let Facebook to hot mic my phone, track my location, and monitor all my internet usage on every website and app.

2. I would have have to prove my identity, and then use a 2-factor authentication service like Google Authenticator each time I logged in to Facebook.

That’s scary, but it’s not surprising.

Way back during my first year in South Korea (ah -my younger days) I used to hang out at the Military Intelligence bar in Anjeong-ri outside of Camp Humphreys. I remember folks telling me that someday they would track everything you said or wrote, and artificial intelligence (AI) would screen for key words the government didn’t want you saying. If you said or wrote any of those key words, a human would review your content and then the FBI or some other serious men in suits would visit you.

I guess we are now through the looking glass and into the part of the story where things get surreal. Although now, it looks like it’ll be drones instead of the FBI, and more “Jennifer Government” by Max Barry than “1984” by George Orwell.


Keep in mind, I don’t talk about anything illegal or do anything illegal. I’m a home owner who spends most of my time maintaining my house. I have pet ducks who are semi-famous on Instagram. I work for the government. So does my husband. We vote. We pay taxes. We should be considered “model citizens.”

Of course, I haven’t been a saint.

When it came out that the National Security Agency (NSA) was recording all the phone calls that Americans make and flagging them for key words like “bomb,” I would joke about it on phone calls sometimes for fun. Small acts of rebellion, you know? I would say that I’d never bomb anything, and that I didn’t think people should assume that everyone of Middle Eastern descent was a terrorist. You see, I wouldn’t say anything bad, but the key words were there. Some poor schmuck at the NSA would have to listen to my boring phone call to make sure I wasn’t planning anything nefarious.

I just wanted to use my freedom of speech to waste the time of the people assigned to spy on us. (The Whitest Kids You Know did this, too.)

However, this new censorship -in the form of “enhanced privacy” policies- isn’t being done by the government. It’s being done by corporations.

Maybe the corporations and the government are coordinating. Maybe their interests simply align because campaign contributions are all politicians care about and money is speech now. I don’t know. But, I know I won’t consent to a government or a corporation accessing my location, everything I say, and everything I do on my phone.

I have no doubt they are doing these things, but let them do it illegally if they insist on doing it. They won’t get my consent.


I know most of you already have bugs in your homes. Smart TVs, Alexa Devices, Roombas, and all manner of technology with user agreements that include lines like: “You consent to the corporation using your speech to train word recognition software in order to enhance the user experience.” (Which means: To listen to everything you say.) I just feel more comfortable without all that stuff in my house.

Side Note: I like when people first visit my home and try to figure out where the TV is. Surprise! There isn’t one.

If you think not having a TV is bad, wait until you hear about how I like to go to the beach and leave my phone at home. I go to the beach to swim. Leaving my phone in the car would only invite people to break in. Leaving it the hot sand seems like a bad call, too. So, I leave it at home. All by itself. I also leave it in the house when I am gardening so it doesn’t get muddy, run to the store without it, and spend entire days not checking it. If you’ve known me a long time, you’ll know that I:

• Resisted getting a cell phone for years after they were widely available.

• Resisted getting a Smart Phone until my elementary school students bullied me into it in 2012.

• Have never used Uber or any similar service. Guam was too rural for such things, and so is my home in the mountains in Hawaii.

• I’m not a Luddite. I had a BBS back in 1995 when it was cool. I learned to program in HTML and CSS as soon as the internet became a thing. I love my laptop and my phone. I’m just cautious of technology and how it is used by people, governments, and corporations.

I mean, aren’t you afraid of how they transitioned search engines from an algorithm that indexed information available on websites into an AI-driven bit of programming that can return you the results that corporations want you to have?

The internet has become extremely censored, and it happened overnight. I feel like almost no one noticed.

Anyway, my social media accounts were all flagged as problematic because I complained about corporations not paying taxes, about how they were artificially inflating prices, and how they were buying up all the single-family homes to prevent US Citizens from becoming home owners. Basically, I was complaining about corporations doing the things that they are actually doing. Since they don’t want you to think about those things, they flagged my accounts. Just like that, I was banned from social media (though hilariously, the ducks were not).

I sort of expected this to happen a little at a time. I wasn’t prepared for the entire country to just become censored within the span of a few months. Also, I thought it would be the government censoring things, not corporations. I admit that I was wrong about who and how. I just wish I was wrong about it happening at all.

Maybe I’ll start blogging more. Maybe I’ll hole up and write a few more novels. I don’t know. All I know for sure is that I won’t be on Facebook or other social media because saying things about how corporations are squeezing the working class and manipulating the government will get you banned.

http://www.instagram.com/catatinaandchaos

Look me up on Instagram, because ducks never complained about the profits-over-people attitude of US corporations, so they still have an account. WordPress may also censor me for this, but here is a graphic of the things I said on Facebook that got me flagged as a radical.


My long-time friends might have no problem seeing me as a dissident. After all, I used to be a journalist. But, I guess we all assumed I’d be a government dissident, not a government employee being branded as a dissident by corporations. Max Barry once signed my copy of Jennifer Government at a book store in Phoenix, and I hope someone tells him that he was right all along about the US. You hear me Max? You were right.

Oahu Duck Friends

Our life has changed a lot. I can’t hike and swim like I used to. Lately, we mostly just garden and take the ducks on adventures. This has led to the amusing development where all of our local friends are “duck people.” Who knew when Rich begged me to get a duckling that it would lead to this?

However, I just want to say that our duck friends are amazing!

First, there is Susie of Susie’s duck rescue. Many people get ducks not understanding how much work they are. When they realize they don’t want them anymore, they dump them in a pond or stream thinking they’ll be fine. However, domestic ducks can’t survive on their own. Susie rescues them and finds them homes. She’s a hero.

Next, there’s Kevin who adopted our foster ducks Linda, Steve, and Brooke. He’s a tattoo artist and avid gardener, so you know he’s good people. You can get an authentic Hawaiian tattoo from him at Tribal Arms Tattoo.

We also met a new duck friend named Jay, who needed advice after adopting a dumped duck named Sizzle. He owns Hawaii Gyrocopter Flights, and he flies for a living. If you ever want to take a really amazing tour of Oahu from the sky, he’s the person to talk to.

And finally, the owners of Monarch Tattoo in Hauula, Laura and Mike. They don’t have Muscovy ducks like us. They have runner ducks. However, that doesn’t stop them from being amazing people.

Life takes you places you never would have expected. If you’d told me ten years ago that I’d live on Oahu and all my friends there would own ducks, I definitely wouldn’t have believed you. And of course, it’s pretty funny that they have a semi-famous Instagram: Catarina and Chaos.

Anyway, check out my amazing duck friends!

Pearl Harbor Tour

Rob and Rich in front of the USS Missouri with the memorial to the USS Arizona in the background.

There are actually three different sites to go to see parts of Pearl Harbor’s WWII history. On Ford Island you can see “The Mighty Mo,” otherwise known as the USS Missouri. It;s not a museum dedicated to the life of the ship, including its time in Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack.

The tour of The Mighty Mo is long. I recommend comfortable shoes and eating beforehand. It’s a big ship, and even though they don’t let you look at all of it, there are many things to see.

A map in the officer’s dining room. Everything on a ship is very small and cramped, so the officer’s dining room is the biggest open area. If your claustrophobic, it’s a nice spot to rest.

The Mighty Mo wasn’t just at Pearl Harbor in December 7th, 1941. The ship went all over the world until it was decommissioned in March of 1992. In fact, the ship participated in WWII, The Korean War, and The Gulf War. It features some of the biggest guns every put on a ship, and after it’s upgrade in 1986, it had some of the most modern equipment in the fleet for a while.

Of course, looking at the ship now, that “modern” equipment is laughable. What was modern in 1986 belongs in a museum in 2021. So, I guess it’s very appropriate that after The Mighty Mo was decommissioned, it became a museum.

The tickets were $29.99 each for adults, which feels a little steep. You can buy a package Pearl Harbor deal for $79.99, but we didn’t because we got tickets to the Arizona for free, and only two of us wanted to go on the USS Bowfin and see the aviation museum.

In 1986, this was state-of-the-art technology. You may laugh, but plenty of ships in service today have equipment that isn’t much more modern than this. (I’m looking at YOU, USS Frank Cable.)

After touring the USS Missouri on Ford Island, you can go over to the main Pearl Harbor Memorial park, which is right across the bridge and to the right off the Kamehameha.

Once you enter the park, there are statues and memorials throughout to look at. On the far right is the USS Bowfin (a decommissioned submarine) and on the far left is the waiting area to take a ferry to the USS Arizona. It’s best if you reserve tickets for the ferry in advance, but the tour operators buy them up so fast that we couldn’t get any. We would have had to wait in a very long line, but thankfully, someone had extra tickets and gave them to us.

When you go to the memorial, all active duty soldiers should remember that you are required to wear your dress uniform. This is to show respect for the men who died in Pearl Harbor.

Rich and Rob on the USS Bowfin. I saw the sub they have at OMSI in Portland, so I chose to skip this part. Ships are okay, but submarines are just too crowded for me.

Although the Pearl Harbor Memorial Park is operated by the National Park Service, the ferry to the USS Arizona is operated by the US Navy. Therefore, when you get on the ferry, you’ll see actual sailors manning the ship.

On the ferry over and in the memorial itself, it is asked that you maintain silence or whisper quietly. The folks who operate these memorials take their jobs very seriously, and they don’t like anyone to disturb the quiet and somber atmosphere. Therefore, you may not want to go with children unless they are very well-behaved.

Coming up to the USS Arizona by boat.

The USS Arizona is still underwater where is sank in the attack on Pearl Harbor. The memorial is on top of the ship, so that when you stand at the windows you can look down and see the wreckage.

The memorial is beautiful, with arched ceilings and decorative windows. But, it’s a sad place. Unlike The Mighty Mo who survived the attack, the USS Arizona was lost with nearly all hands.

This is the inside of the USS Arizona Memorial, which sits on top of the wreckage of the ship.


The memorial is small. There’s the main area with windows that look out of the sunken ship, and then a small alcove in the back with a wall of the names of those who died. It’s a big wall, and there are a lot of names on it.

I do recommend doing a Pearl Harbor tour. But, there’s a reason it took us two years in Hawaii to get around to it. Rich is a sailor, and that doesn’t make it easy for either of us to walk around these memorials devoted to dead sailors.

I mean, you know when you enlist that there is a chance. It’s just that facing that so directly is heart-wrenching.

The wall of names. These are the sailors who died when the USS Arizona was lost in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The main things to see are the USS Missouri on Ford Island, the USS Arizona memorial, and the USS Bowfin and Aviation Museum.

However, there’s a bonus that not a lot of people know about.

I’m mentioning it last because the tour buses don’t go there. You can take a shuttle from the Pearl Harbor Memorial Park to the USS Missouri, but it will only bring you back to the park after. However, if you have a military ID, you can drive yourself over to see The Mighty Mo, and then pop over to the airplane graveyard. It’s right behind the cafe, and if you ask the guard they can direct you.

Rob and Rich with one of the old prop planes.

There’s a small tent with a little museum inside that talks about these old planes and what they were like. Flight technology advanced very quickly through the 20th century. These early examples are so scary up close. They feel like they’re made out of little more than a few sheets of tin foil!

When you think about the people who flew in them, you really have to marvel at their courage. I’ve been in a few small planes and in two helicopters, so I know that not all aircraft even in modern times feel very safe. But, these planes look like death traps.

Tuesday’s Child, a plane so small that it only fits two adults.

Everyone should see Pearl Harbor once. It might not be a cheerful place to visit like the rest of Hawaii, but it is an important part of our history.

I don’t want to make any claims about the bombing of Pearl Harbor justifying what the US did to Japan. My grandfather Sigurd Johnson was in the Navy in WWII. When I was a small child, he used to take me to the Japanese Friendship Gardens in San Jose. He’d tell me about what Japan was like after the nuclear bombs, and how there would never be a justification for it. I believed him. He was a good man and he saw it for himself, so I think he would know.

However, the attack on Pearl Harbor was horrible, and seeing the memorial to the people who died there felt important.

Recent Favorites

We spent our first year after we bought our house just doing renovations. But, this year we had time to do more things. We took our ducks on a lot of great adventures, and we enjoyed the island as much as we could.

We planted a lot of flowers to help feed the bees. It was fun watching them collect their pollen and head off to make honey.

I went to Mexico for some dental work. While I was there, I got to see Chichén Itzá. I have always wanted to see it, so it was pretty cool.

We also planted milkweed and raised Monarch caterpillars. Monarchs are endangered and nearing extinction. Planting milkweed and helping protect young caterpillars is a great thing you can do to help!

It was our garden’s second year, and our dragon fruit finally started making us some food. No fruit on the trees yet, but we are getting closer. Of course we also still have our vegetable beds, too.

We still snorkeled when we could. Rich can’t swim in the winter because he has warm-water hypothermia. But, we can snorkel in the summer, so we do.

We are so grateful to still be able to get out and do things. It’s not as easy as it used to be, but we do our best.

When I’m not working, I spend most of my time taking pictures of ducks. Our ducks have gotten kind of famous on Instagram, and so I try to make sure to take lots of pictures for their fans.

I hope all of you have a happy holiday season and a joyful new year! We think of you often and we are sending love.

SeaLife Marine Park

There is a separate fee for parking and entrance, but if you buy the membership then parking is free.



On the Southeast Tip of Oahu in the shadow of Makapu’u Lighthouse, you will find SeaLife Marine Park. It’s nothing like SeaWorld or an aquarium in the mainland. It’s a very small park, but it’s very important to Hawaii!

SeaLife Marine Park is the only place in the United States with a Sea Turtle breeding program. They breed endangered Hawaiian Green Sea Turtles, which are distinctly different than Green Sea Turtles in other parts of the world. Here in Hawaii, our turtles enjoy basking in the sand and coming out of the water to eat algae on land. This behavior has never been observed before in any other sea turtle. (Usually they only come on land to lay eggs.)

Turtles basking in the sand at SeaLife Marine Park. These are the adults that comprise the breeding program. All are rescues that have been at the park since the 1970’s.

In addition, the turtles here have been observed hunting fish, and eating different kinds of foods than Green Sea Turtles in other areas. That’s why right now, the folks at NOAA are fighting to get the Hawaiian Green Sea Turtle classified as its own subspecies.

The SeaLife Marine Park turtle breeding program is therefore very important, because without them, the population here in the islands would be in great danger. SeaLife hatches, grows, and releases hundreds of turtles every year. This supspecies was nearly extinct until the breeding program began. Now, there are an estimated 2,000 Hawaiian Green Sea Turtles! This isn’t as much as we would like to see, but it’s a lot.

My husband Rich pets one of the baby sea turtles who is almost big enough to be released. Once they are released, they will be at the mercy of sharks and other animals who would eat them, but SeaLife gives them a good start so that they have a fighting chance.

I recommend that you visit the park or donate to them simple because of the importance of the turtle breeding program, but it’s not all that they do! They also rescue and rehab endangered sea birds. If you go, you might get to see a brown-footed boobie or a Hawaiian albatross! You never know what birds they’ll be tending to in their seabird rehab area.

SeaLife also takes on dolphins who have retired from service with the United States Navy. What they did for the Navy is sometimes classified, but dolphins are used for all kinds of things like testing the affects of sonar on sea life and finding mines underwater. These dolphins now perform in the Aloha Dolphins show twice a day, and are available to swim with if you make a reservation and pay extra. My husband did the Royal Dolphin Swim Package and absolutely loved it.

My husband getting a kiss from a dolphin when he did the Royal Dolphin Swim. I highly recommend that you purchase the pictures when you buy the swim package. It’s very worth it.


Another fun thing to do is go feed the love birds. I don’t know how this exhibit got started, but it’s fun to take pictures in the lovebirds enclosure because they are so colorful.

If you live in Hawaii, I recommend buying the yearly membership. It comes with perks like private parties for holidays, and discounts on all the merchandise, dolphin encounters, etc. It’s well worth the fee, and remember: You’re supporting a good cause.

My husband Rich in the bird enclosure. This is mostly lovebirds and a few others, and is different from the area with the rescued seabirds.



If you’re just visiting us here on Oahu, I still recommend you go. I know locals here in Hawaii appreciate when tourists take an interest in supporting our local land and animal conservation, and supporting SeaLife is a great way to do that.

It may not be a big, fancy park; but they do a lot of good and that’s what really matters!



The Aloha Dolphin Show, which is free when you pay to enter the park. Definitely don’t miss it!

Muscovy Ducks Took Over My Life

It’s been a long life filled with adventure. I backpacked around Southeast Asia, visited Europe, lived in South Korea and Guam, and met more amazing people than I could ever tell you about. I’ve always been kind of a rolling stone, walking the Earth looking for adventure.

Then I got married to someone who is possibly the most stable person on Earth. So, we bought a house and put down roots (literally, because we planted an awesome garden and beautiful trees.)

I’ve never really been one to take on responsibilities. My only pet I had in my adult life was a snake that my friend David gave me. But, Rich LOVES animals. We went to a petting zoo on a farm in Waimanalo and he saw a duckling for the first time, and he had to have one.

Of course, once we had one, we had to get a second. It turns out ducks are flock animals and they get lonely if they’re by themselves. Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell the sex of a duckling when they are babies, so we eneded up buying a boy. Turns out if you have a boy, you need at least two girls. So, then we had to get another duck.

I had my doubts about ducks as a pet a first, but it didn’t take long for me to fall completely in love. I met other duck owners and it became one of my Autistic Special Interests. I annoy people with how much I talk about them. And, I’m okay with that.

It’s true, I avoided pets because I never wanted to hold still or stay in one place. I always felt restless and wanted to travel, and pets stop you from doing that. But the truth is, these last few years settling down and having a little farm and some ducks have been pretty good. I am finally tired enough to rest a while, and so I sit in my rocking chair on my porch, and I watch the ducks play in the garden, and that’s my life.

Keeping in Contact

The house we are moving to doesn’t have mail delivery. People think every home in America has access to the USPS, but that’s not true. Reservations, rural areas, and any home in a city where “the driver would have to dismount” are ineligible for delivery of mail.

If you want to send me a letter or card, you will now have to use my P.O. box.

Jenifer DeLemont
P.O. Box 861631
Wahiawa HI 96786

As always, my e-mail address is still jenifer.delemont@gmail.com. I’m happy to get e-mails instead of snail mail, if you prefer.

The house I’ll be living in isn’t too far from the post office. Unfortunately, it’s set back from the street in a way where it isn’t eligible to be added to the USPS route (yes, this also means we can’t get package delivery.) It’s a small house, but it has a yard that the ducks will enjoy, so that’s nice.

Wish us luck!

Ka’ena Point

I first did this hike in the winter when it was slippery and muddy. It’s not as beautiful in the summer, but it certainly is easier and drier.

There is no way to drive to Ka’ena Point. You can access the point from the North Shore side, or from the Waianae Side. To get there from the North Shore, take the H2 over the mountains and then follow the Farrington Highway to the end. To get there from the other side, just take the H1 until it becomes the 93 as it goes through Waianae, and follow it all the way to the end.

large_oahu

From the North Shore side, you can follow a road or a path along the coast. The coastal path is more beautiful, but it zigzags up to meet the road several times, so you end up walking a lot more than the three miles it is point-to-point.

From the Waianae Side, you follow a path that is raised up on a cliff. I like this side better because it has the little blowhole and striking views. However, it’s a splash zone in the winter and the spring, and it’s definitely more dangerous.

Once you reach the point, you open a gate and go into the wildlife preserve. Please remember not to let any animals in here, including dogs and cats. The birds that nest at Ka’ena Point build their nests in the sand, so they could be threatened by any animal that gets in, including a mongoose (who would eat their eggs.) Also please remember not to feed anything or touch anything, because we need to respect nature if we want it to continue to exist. Also, bring your biggest zoom lens, because you shouldn’t get close to wildlife.

Inside the preserve, there are several trails that you can follow. The state of Hawaii has provided lots of helpful signs to tell you about the plants and animals that live in the sanctuary, so stop and read about the many things you might see.

At the very tip of the sanctuary you can walk down a sandy hill and get to the point. It’s comprised of a combination of lava rock and coral chunks that have washed up, so the land is a striking contrast of black and white. Hawaiian monk seals love to come up on the rocks to rest and catch from sun. Please remember that they are an endangered species, and they are best viewed through binoculars or through the telephoto lens of your DSLR. Don’t get close to the seals, because you may startle them and force them back into the water before they have rested. This could lead to them getting eaten by a shark, and no one wants that!

This is one of my favorite places on Oahu because it’s typically very peaceful, and it offers so much beauty. However, even in the winter this hike can be hot and dry. You want to bring at least a gallon of water per person, and I’d recommend some snacks as well. Suncreen is a must, and long-sleeves and a hat would be smart. Also, it’s very windy at the point. Be prepared to hold on tight to everything that you have with you! I’ve absolutely had to chase my hat when it blew off, because the wind didn’t care about the strap that is supposed to keep it on my head.

Although the internet says that it’s three miles from either side to the point, I’d argue that the North Shore side is longer and offers a wider variety of terrain to navigate. Either way, it’s a six mile round trip at least. We started at 7am and finished at 11am last time, with lots of stops to admire wildlife and enjoy the views. You could probably do it in two hours if you were in a hurry, but you wouldn’t see nearly as much.

This is my favorite. Two albatrosses dance with each other to celebrate their chick (which is in the picture too, but well hidden.)

Remember: Last time I was there I saw tourists collecting rocks and shells. I know the urge to collect souvenirs can be strong, but if everyone did this then our island would be destroyed. Please take only photos and memories, and leave nothing behind. Also, I took these pictures with a point-and-shoot that has a 10x optical zoom. Stay 100 feet away from the animals. They need their space.