Two Weeks In

Well, we've been on the island for about two weeks. Things are going pretty well, and we're getting settled in and I'm finding out where everything is.

First the marginal: Commuting is not great. It isn't horrible but it certainly leaves something to be desired. Most roads that go anywhere useful are 5+ lane and heavy traffic, although the cars aren't traveling at particularly high speeds. There are a lot of roads here that compare with University Avenue, just a bit less ugly. I don't know if there is a three foot law here, but if there is nobody follows it. Not even the police. Luckily, the traffic is so bad that when someone passes you they're generally not going that much faster than you. On the bright side, neither Maria or I have had anyone yell out a window yet. The people seem to be more ambivalent about commuters than they are malicious toward them.

Car culture is huge here. Everything is built for cars, and there are cars everywhere. The first week we were here I rode to the mall to take care of a few things. The mall was like a hornets nest of cars driving every which way. Even the architecture is noticeably car centric. It is nearly impossible to find a pedestrian entrance to most large buildings. For example, the only entrances to the supermarket closest to our house, and to the mall are inside the parking garages.

Since I don't have a mountainbike here yet I haven't gone looking for any trails, but I have been doing a lot of hiking. There is really good hiking just barely out of town, and there is good bus service within a half a mile or so of a bunch of trailheads. I coupled doing some walking errands with a slighlty lengthened version of the Manoa Falls hike last week:

I didn't have the GPS on the whole time, but I estimate that this ended up being about 8 miles of walking.

The next day Maria and I rode back up to the Manoa Falls trailhead to see if we could catch a glimpse of the HURT 100, that we heard about by chance on the Up In Alaska Blog. We saw a few runners at about the 50-60 mile mark. So Tim, when you come out you can run the course if you would like, it's about 2 miles from our faculty housing!

Yesterday we decided to hike up to the top of Mt. Olympus, one of the larger peaks on the range that separates the two sides of the island:



It was a pretty tough hike, tougher than either of us were planning on I would say. We didn't run out of water or food, but we were both pretty beat by the time we got off the bus and I'm awfully sore today. The views from the peak were pretty awesome:

The "other side" of the island

Looking into the Diamond Head Crater

Looking down the ridge we climbed up, onto the city of Honolulu and the beach. Manoa Valley, where we will be living, is on the right