HP stands for “Hawaii Problem”, which is what happens when your friends come back from it and insist on showing you their pictures. Except for since this is the Internet, nobody can insist you look at anything. Anyhow, I have a few more I feel the urge to share, starting with sea turtles.
They’re easy to see on the Big Island and my favorite thing that’s not an erupting volcano. This guy was grazing the tidal pools at Pu`uhonua O Hōnaunau National Park, also known as City of Refuge, a really nice spot to visit.
Our next sea-turtle is at the famous Punaluu black-sand beach, where they often swim and rest. I went there last millennium in another life, and wrote in another place:
At Punaluʻu harbor, I saw the giant turtles fly. They graze, moving cowlike, with precise minimal wingstrokes, root piglike among the bottom-stones. They are nervous of being chased — when pressed, beat wings rapid as gulls’ and rocket into green obscurity. Their eyes are not quite snakes’, not quite cows’, not quite wise, not quite sad. I learned to drift with the flow, float up to them, and finally stroked a passing shell. It was thickly coated with dusty outgrowth (a small fish danced attendence on each turtle) and my hand left a track across it.
There are all these strict signs about how you have to give the turtles lots of space, which these days seem genially ignored.
You might want to enlarge that one, it has stories.
I have to say that the turtles seem totally cool with the primates sharing the beach. Millennial primates, raised on a diet of Discovery-channel video, are correspondingly cool with the beasts, neither pestering them nor worrying too much about it.
And I think to myself... what a wonderful world.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Dustin (Apr 11 2013, at 12:20)
FYI: when reading in my RSS reader, there's no link to enlarge the photos.
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