September 2023

Hawaii was never on my bucket list. I associated it with lounging poolside at a resort, Mai Tai in hand, working on a tan. Which, to me, sounds like the worst vacation ever. I know. Odd duck.

But Chris loves the Big Island so much that he even convinced me to have our wedding there, primarily so our marriage license would say “Volcano, Hawaii” as the location. And then COVID came along and disrupted those plans.

Three years later, we finally went. A belated honeymoon, of sorts. And mostly it was amazing, but also bittersweet. We ate dinner at the quirky 1940s hotel where our rehearsal dinner was supposed to be, on the rim of a volcano. We saw all the things our friends and family were supposed to be there to share with us, we visited a botanical garden and photographed the flowers and foliage that were supposed to be in my bouquet. It seems a small thing to mourn, when others lost loved ones and health to the pandemic, but still. It would’ve been great.

And mostly it was amazing. I tackled a mild fear of the ocean and saw hundreds of beautiful fish and swam alongside sea turtles. I took a thousand pictures of a thousand different strange plants and flowers. We watched geckos skitter up and down the long leaves of red and yellow bromeliads. We heard a language fighting to thrive under the rule of a country that has a long history of paving culture flat, and saw everywhere the evidence of small shops and restaurants and musicians coming together to support the community in Maui.

We hiked down a precarious cliff to the ocean, trekked across the centre of a dormant volcano through an alien world of wavy black igneous rock with lichens and ferns struggling to poke through and retake the devastated landscape. We paused in a rainforest to listen to the birds sing their evening chorus while steam poured upwards into the sky from the rocky crags surrounding Kilauea (which had the gall to start erupting after a three-month dormancy, just four hours after we left the island). We watched the sun go down over the wide, empty ocean and paint the sky in the brightest oranges and pinks I’ve ever seen.

So call me convinced.

(additional photos)