Heavy Winds

Yesterday we went on a tour of the National Tropical Botanical Garden’s facilities and gardens – including locations where Jurassic Park was filmed! The trees here are even more crazy than the ones I was raving about in Long Beach. I particularly like the skeletal fig trees that grow all over the place here. The beach at the outlet of the stream running through the gardens is picturesque and has a few annual green turtle nesting sites. We went to a place on the coast called Spouting Horn – where a lava tube on the rocky coast blasts water out of it into the air with each wave that hits the shore, and we spotted two green sea turtles playing in the surf!

We went to Makauwahi to check out the native plant grid, cave, sinkhole and surrounding areas. This experience included meeting some particularly friendly giant African land tortoises and a duck, as well as a few dust storms. We then climbed up to a quarry area to practice flying the kite but it was too windy to attach the camera to it. Then we went to a seed corn field by an old sugarcane factory to fly a fixed-wing aircraft and take some aerial images.

We cooked a tasty dinner and crashed out early again – being out in the sun all day really takes it out of you.