Hawaii Trip

Since the semester hasn't started again yet, I have some time to make a post. My trip to Hawaii for Globecom 2009 went really well. My presentations went well and I had some people ask me questions during and after my sessions. I'm not sure we got a lot of exposure there, but it's ok, it was Hawaii after all.

Besides the conference, I got to snorkel, hike, and explore some of the island, besides cheering the Badgers on to victory over the University of Hawaii in football. All of these were fun, but I'd have to say the highlight of the sight-seeing part of my trip was going to Pearl Harbor.

I went twice, first on 12/5 and then again on the anniversary on 12/7. I went on the U.S.S. Arizona memorial tour on the first day, which was fortunate since the tour was full on the 7th. It is a heart-wrenching experience, but I

wholeheartedly endorse it. The first picture shows the memorial from across the harbor, and the second the flag over the memorial from inside.

It was amazing to see the wreckage underwater and the oil still bubbling up. I tried to take pictures of the latter, but a photo just doesn't do them justice. Since it was close to the anniversary on the 5th (I assume that was the reason), they were handing out flowers for us to cast into the water. The third picture shows my flower in the oil slick.

On the 7th, I spent more time at the submarine memorial, the submarine museum, and I toured the U.S.S. Bowfin, a WWII-era submarine. It was cramped. Climbing through the bulkheads was challenging while carrying a camera.

The only thing I missed was the U.S.S. Missouri, which was not there because it was being repaired or was having some maintenance done on it. Too bad.

If I had to choose between the big island and Oahu, I'd go to the big island. There's way less people, things seem cheaper, the snorkeling is better, and there's lava. That said, having Chantal and Alethea with would have made either island seem more like paradise. I very much hope that the next time I'm in Hawaii they will be with me.

Fish of the Big Island of Hawaii

Before I get too far into this post, let me just say that the fish of Hawaii and the snorkeling are awesome! I have way more pictures that I wanted to post than I realistically can. I got to make use of my snorkel mask that I got in Curacao last year and rented flippers from Snorkel Bob's (highly recommended). Ma & pa lent me their underwater camera box and camera. Yih-Chun and I had serious fun with this.

	Old Favorites - To start, I harassed the puffer and trunk fish extensively to get nice pictures of them. Ok, I didn't really harass them, but they fled under rocks repeatedly. I never got the puffers to puff though. The top left picture is a spotted pufferfish and the lower left picture is a spotted trunkfish. I really like these guys. They almost seem grumpy.
	There were plenty of sargent majors and parrot fish. I didn't see many eels, just 2 within the first 2 minutes and 5 feet from shore the first day.
	Hawaii Specials - To the left you can see a bit of a larger school of yellow tangs. They were pretty much at every beach. They're kind of a sign of Hawaii I think. These were new for me. There's also a gray parrot fish flying by. They're so skittish.
	Next, I got a shot of a cleaner wrase cleaning an orange-spine unicorn fish. Two-for-one deal. The colors are really vibrant. These two fish were new to me.
	This yellow fish to the left is a racoon butterfly fish. There was a small school of them at one beach that were so tame that they basically swam into the camera. I have some cool videos of this. Again, this was a new fish for me.
	Hawaii Natives - Ok, now for two of my absolute favorite new fish, fish I've never seen before. First and foremost is the humuhumunukunuku apu a'a or Picaso trigger fish. If you've seen my Google away message or picture recently, this is the guy. The long name is the Hawaiian name for it. I have another picute of one that's almost all golden yellow. The colors seem to vary widely from fish to fish. I'm not sure if they're all the same species though. The blue stripes on this one were extremely beautiful when they caught the sunlight.
	Now, this one needs no introduction. There were sea turtles regularly. Yih-Chun took this shot. I only got some of one that was in about 1 foot of water. The Hawaiian for sea turtle is honu.

Snorkeling is such a fun activity and it's really cheap once you get the gear, which all in all isn't so expensive considering the hours of enjoyment you can get out of it. The Big Island is a great place to snorkel I think. It's pretty accessible too. We had a guide book to point out good snorkels for us. It also helped us avoid some of the more dangerous beaches where the current was strong.

I think there were more people at the beaches than in Curacao, but if you get away from the places where people get in, then it isn't quite as crowded. I believe all of these pictures were taken at two beaches, both of which we snorkeled twice. One was right near downtown Kailua-Kona and the other was farther south and was called two-step or A-bay (I think).

Hawaii Recap

Hi everyone. I've wanted to post pictures from my Hawaii trip for quite a while now. Finally, I'm getting to it. It was a really fun trip. You can ask me how the IEEE meetings went. I'm sure you're not surprised that the highlights of my trip were not from the meetings. There were actually some really nice views from the conference hotel, though we didn't stay there. (too expensive) Here's an example to the left. The meeting took place at the Hilton in Waikaloa Village.

We were in Hawaii for approximately a week. We stayed in a resort in Kailua Kona on the Big Island. The weather was absolutely gorgeous. The only time it really interfered was to keep us from going all the way up to the top of Mauna Kea to do some star gazing one night. Overall, it was a great opporunity to make use of our new digital camera, a Nikon D40X. (For you photo bufs, I stuck with my 50mm F/1.8 prime the whole time.)

One day we drove around the island to Hilo. We had dinner at an excellent Thai place there, which you can see to the left. That day, we also went to see the lava flowing into the ocean, which was near Hilo. We couldn't get too close to the lava since the park had set up tape keeping people back, but it was pretty cool to watch too. Jerry and I had fun making fun of the people who were trying to use their on-camera flashes from approximately a mile away as it got dark. Sorry, we're engineers, what do you expect. If you look closely under the rising cloud of steam, just to the left of the flow, you can see a water spout. They would spring up once in a while.


That same day, we visited a black sand beach. If I remember correctly, it's lava rock that has broken down and is only a few hundred or thousand years old, and the minerals haven't yet been removed from the rock, which would turn it to the normal sand color. I tried to take a little bit of a close-up so you can see how course it was and how jet-black it was. We also tried to visit a green sand beach near what's called south-point, but it was quite a walk across some hot and dry areas, so we turned back and didn't actually get to see it. Next time...




One day, we went to a luao in Kona. It was pretty cool. They roasted a pig underground for us, had some other native Hawaiian dishes, including poi. I don't recommend it in general, though, if you have it whole how they prepared some of it, it reminded me of yams. I was interested to see that the poi was purple. They put on a show for us, including dressing up like the royal Hawaiian court of the 1800's, specifically King Kamehameha. There's a picture of them to the left. They also dressed and danced like natives of New Zeeland, Fiji, Tonga, and other islands.



On our final day, Jerry and I went to a coffee plantation and to a farmers' market in downtown Kona. The coffee plantation had avocado and banana trees in addition to the coffee plants. The farmers' market had some interesting fruits, including dragon fruit, rambutan (I'd never seen thsi before and wish I'd gotten some to try it now.) and apple bananas (they're small, red-ish bananas, which Jerry and I tried). We had some dragon fruit when we had gone to a grocery store one day, but it didn't really taste like anything; it just looked nice. We also saw some geckos crawling around on some boxes in one of the stands. He was giving such and odd pose, as you can see to the left.

We enjoyed great pineapples, passion fruit and papayas during our time there. I have a bunch of pictures from the underwater camera from snorkeling, but I'll post them another time. I have to get them organized yet. All in all, it was a really fun trip, but I do wish Chantal would have been there. She just makes everything more fun. :) Next time...