Hawaiian Bird Life

A very brief photography of the birds living around our house on Alder Street

Introduced from India. Noisy and aggressively territorial birds, the Myna are a common sight around Honolulu. I spotted this one hanging out by the local tip.

Non-native to Hawaii. The dove is similar to the European pigeon (in size as well as behaviour). I pictured this bird from the comfort of our Lanai.



Non-native to Hawaii. About the size of a European starling. I am particularly impressed with these guys, especially the red-whiskered variety. More timid than the Myna or the dove, the bulbuls watch and wait from the comfort of telegraph wires.


Non-native to Hawaii. I can't help but think of puffins. These are the favourite birds of Ellen.

Hawaiian Aquatic Life

Honu / Green Sea Turtle. Hauled up at the beach on the North Shore. Measured approx 1.1 metre by 0.6 metre. Ostensibly asleep.


Freshwater fish, ten points if you can identify a species. Teaming at the mouth of a valley stream as it joins the Ala Wai Canal, these chaps might be gulping microscopic organisms as they flush from the mouth of the stream.


Marine fish this time, again species unknown. If you look carefully you can see how they are breaching about 6 inches into the air. This is presumably due to predators below, also species unknown.

Surfing at Ala Moana 2

A chronicle of my attempt to learn this most Hawaiian of sports.

Episode 3 - Catching the Wave

It's all about timing, but then again it's all about a lack of timing. It's a truism that some waves are going to take you with them, whether you are ready or not, and some waves are going to leave you alone no matter how hard you paddle. I suppose the skill is to judge which is which, and to take your board to the exact break point of the wave, and I am learning both these skills. Surfing instills patience. You can spend hours trying every single wave and you will certainly catch at least a few, or you can sit on your board and stare at the mountains in the distance and not be upset by any but the most freakish breakers. This is a contrast between being adventurous in the face of uncertainty, and being tolerant of just staying put, and the contrast occurs in every minute of every hour in which you surf.

I have been paddling around in the white water for about a week, learning to stay on the board, building up my strength, and getting used to the feeling of surfing. Today when I went out beyond the reef, there were some very large waves. Paddling out further and further towards the break, you watch the blue build and build and charge you down, and you think to yourself: "This is it". Then you see more and more waves building up behind each other. It's breathtaking. You struggle to get beyond these breakers, and you're surprised at how calm the ocean is when you manage to swim beyond them. Exhiliration reaches a peak when you know that you've passed the breakers, that you're done paddling out, and that it's time to catch a wave!

Where I'm surfing there's both a left and a right break, and the reef is cut by boat channels and storm damage so the breakers are very irregular, there are a number of spots to catch waves. They have names like Old Man's, Panic Point, and Soup Bowl. The most popular spots are obvious. I stick to the less popular ones. I'm not confident catching waves in a crowd.

You have to paddle hard to catch the wave. You have to keep your weight in the right place on the board. If you can manage to do both (at the same time!) then catching waves is no problem at all! I have been carried two hundred feet by a wave, and very quickly, it's like manning a small power boat and you can feel the ocean slap at your 'hull' just like in a speedboat. Standing up is a little trickier, and you need to take it slow at first. However if you have a long board with a width of 22" or more, it really is like standing on your dining room table, and you wonder what the fuss is about.

Episode 4 - A Board of my Own

Taking Kurt's board every day made me want to buy my own board. The thought of people coming to visit, and having a board which they could use, made me determined to get my own board. It turns out that surf boards are quite expensive so I have ended up with a less-than-perfect second-hand board, which is really very old and tired. My board is 6’9” and 21” in width with a really pointy nose, which makes it good for steering in the water. It has a lot of water damage to the foam and many cracks in the fibreglass coat. When I took the board into a store to buy fins and some repair materials I got some funny looks, and lots of people wishing me good luck from behind quirky half-pitying smiles.



Looking after the dents and scratches is fairly simple. I bought some Solarez, a fibreglass filling gel that sets in UV light and is recommended for boards. You fill the hole and stretch cling film over it, to work it and to get it flat, then you expose the repair to sunlight. In three minutes it’s done, a rock hard repair. I enjoyed working on the board and learning how to get a good finish with the Solarez, and I felt better about buying the board once I realised I could fix it.

The first time I took the board out I was glad to see that it floated. I had seriously considered that it mightn’t! Paddling around was harder on the shorter board and it was easier to fall off. However I did manage to catch a wave and the board handled well. When I got home I saw that several breaches in the resin had caused the board to take on water and that it would need to dry out and be repaired again. No more surfing for a few days!! Ellen has bought me some more resin and a paint brush so that the board can be given a whole new coat.

The 2005 Louis Vuitton Hawaii International Film Festival. Celebrating 25 Years.

I have been volunteering for the Hawaii International Film Festival this week and last. The advert for the HIFF was in the local weekly entertainment guide and Ellen suggested I lend a hand. The thought of work didn’t exactly fill me with delight, but it is certainly good to have something to occupy the days, and a film festival is a new experience after all.

Volunteering might be the occupation of a crazy person. How many sane people put their hands up and volunteer for something like this? I mean to say that it’s not part of modern British culture that I know of, except when people work for charitable organisations, so I expected it to be the same in America. I was unsurprised to be one of only two or three able-bodied persons of working age attendant at the volunteers meeting. We were accompanied by pensioners, college students, and the disabled. I found myself wondering if it was really worth it, doing all this for nothing.

If I was doing paid work then I would have an alternative explanation: "I’m doing it for the money", but volunteering asks more rigorous questions of yourself and the worth of the project. I think volunteering demands that you enjoy the work for the sake of it, to make it become interesting and fun, or you very soon decide to give it up. Volunteering also demands that you adopt the goals and aims of the project as your own, that you take it to heart. That must be why it is mostly confined to charities and religious and political organisations, where the impetus for volunteering is spiritual and social, and material reward is rare. This comes close to altruism I think. I wish more of modern life was run by volunteers.

To be fair to HIFF I should mention that I was to receive free tickets to several screenings, however this seems to be an added bonus or privilege rather than actual payment. I also managed to make important new acquaintances and I met film makers from around the world.



Print Traffic - Working for HIFF

My name was picked out to join the print traffic unit; the guys in charge thought I would be helpful, largely because I was available to work everyday and partly because I was under fifty years old . Print traffic is responsible for the logistics of the film screenings. We dealt with shipment and distribution of film reels, DVDs, and videos to and from the distributors, between the islands of Hawaii, and amongst the various film festival venues. This can be summed up by the phrase: "lugging boxes in and out of vans".

My manager at the HIFF was Kevin, an extremely laid-back dude who surprised me with an interest in medieval Welsh. He tells me that if more Americans were like him then the world would be in better shape. I believed him, especially after hearing his views on Bush, Blair, the United States, and French philosophy. Surprisingly, film didn't get talked about! We were also working with Ryan who was hired as Assistant. Ryan is a recovering alcoholic and used to live as a homeless person in Hawaii after leaving the military. He proved to be an inspirational conversationalist and a life affirming-individual. His speech was full of the dialect of the AA meetings, therapeutic dogma regarding pride, trust, and hope:

"They call it the two-foot drop. From here to here", he said, indicating the distance from his head to his heart. "That's gotta happen before you ever give up".

I have agreed to meet Kevin outside of the festival and go hiking, and also to go surfing together.

Extreme Asia and Indigenous Documentary

Ellen and I saw five films together as payment for my volunteering. On the opening night of the festival we saw Shutter, and The Glamorous Life of Suchiko Hanoi. Both films were part of the Extreme Asia Programme. The former was a hideously scary Korean movie about a haunting, homicidal, dead ex-girlfriend, who inhabits photographs. The latter was a semi-surreal bizarre Japanese soft-porn love story about a prostitute catapulted to the heights of intellectual prowess by accidental brain trauma, who by a twist of fate comes to possess George W Bush's cloned finger (for detonating bombs you understand), and is subsequently chased by Korean spies. I can't do it justice by describing it here. We saw these at the Dole Cannery Cinema which is a multiplex, on the site of the pineapple company's headquarters.

The day after at the Honolulu Academy of Arts we saw Te Toa Aniwaniwa and Tuhoe, two documentaries in the Polynesian Power Programme, both by Maori film maker Robert Pouwhare. They indicate the troubles encountered by indigenous people of the Pacific Islands when dealing with the colonialists' bureaucratic legal and political systems. The first film documented the rise of Oscar Manutahi Te Maru, newly elected President of Tahiti, who overcame distinct political elitism to defeat the incumbent French representative. The second film documented the case of the Tuhoe tribe of the north island Aotearoa, New Zealand, at the Waitangi Tribunal. The tribe are aggrieved by the actions of the British settlers and are making claims to the tribunal for the return of lands and compensation for the theft and destruction of their property. This was an altogether informative afternoon and one that reaffirmed to me the disastrous nature of colonial Great Britain, France, and America in recent centuries.

The very last film we saw was shown at the Hawaii Theatre Center, built in 1922, which is a proscenium arch theatre resplendent with stalls and circle seating, a worlitzer, and art-deco facade. The building itself was worth the visit, and the film, River Queen, was a very entertaining Hollywood style chronicle of the Maori wars against the English settlers, highlighting the chaos of the frontier and the shattered family ties of people at war.