Visiting Hawaii and Moving to Cambria

Kind of halfway between New Zealand and California is Hawaii, and on my way back I stopped there for a week to visit my friend Sofie, who had just transferred to the University of Hawaii at Mānoa to study marine biology. Sofie and I met in band in high school and have stayed in contact since then.

I landed in Honolulu after sleeping through most of my flight from Auckland, emotionally exhausted from the day before. Sofie was in class when I landed, and so I had the challenge of getting to her dorm on my own with all my stuff – I was now paying dearly for the extra bag I came back with, seeing as I could barely carry all my bags on my own. I was in a bit of a pickle as I had a $20 bill for US money, the buses did not give change, and I couldn’t carry all of my stuff very far to go buy something from a store to get change. At the bus stop I decided to ask people if they had change for $20 – no one did, but one man was kind enough to give me $5, which I then used to take the bus most of the way towards the university before calling an uber.

On the bus ride it was immediately obvious that this was a very different country than the one I had just come from. New Zealand hardly has homeless people living on the streets, and is generally a pretty clean country. In Honolulu, on the other hand, I saw more homeless people than I could count on my 45 minute bus ride, many of them living in self-constructed shanties surrounded by trash. However, the bus also passed through areas that were obviously occupied or frequented by very wealthy people. The glaring wealth disparity was not necessarily the warm welcome back to the States that I was hoping for.

Sofie, however, was very happy to see me, and was kind enough to let me shove my stuff under her bed – a disorganized mess amidst her tidy and aesthetic space. I did my best to contain the mess there that week and was mostly successful, although you’d have to ask her about how bad it actually was.

That afternoon, Sofie and I hiked to Mānoa falls – it wasn’t too long of a hike but it was WARM in Hawaii, which made hiking a very different experience from the end of winter I’d just come from in New Zealand. There were also mosquitoes – I don’t really react to mosquito bites, but poor Sofie got eaten alive.

The next morning I got breakfast with Sofie, then we sat at a picnic table and she studied until her next class while I kept her company (I took a nap). When Sofie went to class I took the bus to Chinatown with a single goal in mind: buy as many interesting fruits as I could, ideally ones I’d never tried before. When I was in 8th grade, my class took a 10 day trip to Hawaii and I remember being most excited about all the different fruits you couldn’t even imagine buying in stores on the mainland. I was very successful with my trip to Chinatown, and spent the rest of my time there slowly working my way through the different fruits, some of which I loved, and some I had to throw away after the first bite.

Later, Sofie showed me around her campus, and then we took the bus to Waikiki Beach. Waikiki is where all the rich people are – the feeling of wealth permeates the air and unlike many other parts of the city, there are no homeless people to be seen. There’s a reason this area is so popular though – the water is a beautiful blue and the sand is fine and white.

The next day Sofie had a busy class schedule, so I decided to go on a long hike by myself. I picked out a loop on AllTrails that looked long but doable, packed a lunch, and took the bus to the trailhead. To be quite honest, New Zealand had me a bit spoiled with the trails – unless you are far off the beaten track the trails are all well-described online and on maps, they are well-labeled at the trailheads, and are (mostly) well-maintained and marked with orange triangles along the length of the trail. This trail started off well – easy to walk and with good signage. However, it soon became clear that most people did not go all that far on the trail, and soon it became steep, with muddy sections where ropes allowed you to climb up the worst sections. As the trail got more difficult, the views got better – great motivation to continue to the summit.

I ate lunch at the summit of one of the mountains and was able to look over onto the town of Kailua on the other side of the mountains. Instead of going down the way I came, I decided to do a loop, however, it took me a good 10 minutes to find where the trail split off for the loop. This should have been my first sign that this was not the best idea, but I found the trail and started my way across the ridge. This trail was even less maintained than the one I had just come from, and I found myself wondering when the last time someone had even been down it was. It was almost completely overgrown, and within minutes my pants were soaked from wading through the ferns and other vegetation reaching onto the path. I made my way along a ridge and then down into the valley, losing the trail a few times but always able to find my way back pretty quick.

Once I reached the river, staying on the trail became much more difficult. At points, the trail completely disappeared, and I ended up fighting my way through dense underbrush. By this point, I had run out of water, and I was sweating and a little panicky. Eventually, I managed to get back to the stream near a little pool of water. I hadn’t seen anyone for several hours, so I stripped naked and jumped into the almost lukewarm water.

From there, I decided I would just walk in the river until I reached the part of the city I knew the river eventually would. After a while of walking in the river, a trail eventually appeared, and I was able to follow it out relatively quickly. Interestingly, I emerged onto a road near a government facility that was marked with “GOVERNMENT PROPERTY – NO TRESPASSING” signs. Later I could find no trace of this facility on google maps – I have no idea what it was or what purpose it served.

Now that I was out of the forest my goal was to find something to drink, and I walked 20 minutes to the nearest shop, where I bought some juice and a popsicle – I drank the juice almost too fast to taste it, but the popsicle I enjoyed like no other. All in all, it was a great hike, but there could have been some better planning on my part, especially in terms of bringing more water.

One of the special things I did was to watch Sofie in her marching band. I had done one year of marching band when I was in 9th grade, and originally wanted nothing more than to be in marching band in college. Academics and location superseded the marching band as priorities when choosing a university, however, and UCSB does not have a marching band. I loved watching Sofie’s band during a rehearsal and then at the football game on Friday night and seeing how a college-level marching band learns and performs.

On Saturday, Sofie and I took the bus to Hanauma Bay, which is a popular tourist destination because it is stunning – a beautiful beach in a bay where you can snorkel and look at the coral reef. At the visitor center, they gave us an extensive presentation on guidelines for how to act around the coral in order to preserve their longevity.

We had bought goggles and a boogie board that morning and then headed down to the bay where we slathered ourselves in sunscreen prepared to head into the water. The water was not too cold, and although the snorkeling took some figuring out (we didn’t actually have snorkels, just had to take a breath every once in a while), we saw some pretty cool fish. It was pretty sad though, much of the coral looked brown and pretty lifeless – occasionally there was a brilliantly neon individual but they were few and far between. There were a good amount of other people snorkeling, and even though everyone had been instructed not to stand on the coral, it was not uncommon to see people doing just that. It was rather frustrating to observe, and Sofie bravely reprimanded several people.

On Monday, September 11th, I was catching the red-eye flight back to San Francisco. There was one more thing I was intent on doing before I got back, and that was having my hair cut really short again. I tried many different salons but could not get a last-minute appointment, and finally walked into a men’s barbershop, where I was told to come back in 1.5 hours. I went to a free art museum nearby while waiting which had many interesting exhibits. Once I went back to the barbershop, I was assigned to an Asian woman who was pretty rough while cutting my hair but nevertheless did a great job. That afternoon Sofie and I took an Uber to the airport together – she insisted on coming with me, and although I said she didn’t have to, it was really nice that we could say goodbye there.

I landed in San Francisco early the next morning, and my mom picked me up. We had a whole day to spend in San Francisco before my sister flew in from Indonesia that evening. Of course the first thing we did was go on a hike – it was good to spend some time with her, since it had been so long. I had very complicated feelings about seeing the vegetation there – on the one hand, seeing the plants there felt like seeing old friends, but on the other hand, I already missed all the New Zealand natives. That day in the city though, I noticed Harakeke – New Zealand Flax – planted in several different places. I never would have recognized this plant before going to New Zealand, but now I could tell you all kinds of things about it; that the Māori weave beautiful baskets with it, that it’s called a flax but is actually in the lily family, and that you have to be very careful with the juice from the leaves because it is a strong laxative. Although I knew that in this context it was an introduced ornamental plant, seeing the plant still felt like a little bit of a greeting from New Zealand.

After our hike, we went to Chinatown, where we bought mooncakes and looked for tea shops. That evening we had a yummy dinner at an Eritrean restaurant, and around 9, picked up Tovia from the airport. We made it back to the house around 11, where my dad and dogs greeted us. Keesha had almost forgotten who I was, and it took her a day or two to warm back up to me.

Back in July, Annika and Brian had bought a house in Cambria, a small town about 30 minutes north of San Luis Obispo. It is a 1-bedroom house on .4 acres of land in the most beautiful place you could imagine. In the weeks after, they had refurbished the house a bit and built two sheds – one as a workshop for my dad, and one as a home-office for my mom. This represented a significant downsizing effort, and they had been working on getting rid of stuff in the house for months. All that was left was Tovia and my rooms – we had 3 days to do so after we got back before we moved.

The process of packing up my room meant sorting through all kinds of things I hadn’t laid eyes on in 8 months. On the one hand, I hadn’t needed these things in the last 8 months so I likely wouldn’t desperately need them in the future and could get rid of them… on the other hand, they represented much of the accumulated belongings from my childhood and adolescence, and there was much nostalgia involved in sorting through them. Ultimately, I managed to sort it into things I needed in Santa Barbara, things for long-term storage, and things I could get rid of.

Soon enough the house was empty and everything was packed into the giant moving van. Although we had planned to leave that Saturday, by the time we were done it was 4pm, and we were all too tired for a 6 hour drive. After going out for dinner, we all slept in our sleeping bags on the floor of our empty living room. The next day we left early around 7am. I drove the RAV4 with Keesha as copilot. I had been a bit worried about driving on the right side of the road after months of driving on the left, but switching back really wasn’t a big deal. Every now and then it still sneaks up on me and I’ll look the wrong way when crossing the road, but otherwise it’s fairly intuitive.

Once we reached Cambria, we began the process of moving into the house. Much of the stuff was stored outside, because the house is much smaller – one bedroom, small living room, dining room, and kitchen. Annika and Brian did build two sheds outside though, one for my dad’s workshop and one for my mom’s office since she works from home. This shed also doubles as a very nice guest bedroom. I stayed there for almost another week before moving back to Isla Vista.

One cool thing about Cambria is that there are a lot of animals there – my parents put up a wildlife camera in the yard and have already seen deer, skunks, raccoons, possums, squirrels, and a wood rat in the yard. Also, a beach with elephant seals is a 20 minute drive from their house. There is also an open space area called the Fiscalini Preserve which you can walk to from their house – it is an ideal area to watch the sunset from as well.

A couple days before the start of my last fall quarter, I moved back to Isla Vista. I had decided to stay in the co-op system, but move to a different house called Newman. It is apartment style, so there are 4 people total in my apartment (2 per room), and 9 apartments totaling 25 people in the whole house. My roommate was a girl named Katelyn I hadn’t met before – we ended up getting along pretty well but not talking too much.

Brian drove down with me and helped me disassemble and reassemble the bed I had built at Manley and left there while I studied abroad – I am very glad to have that bed back. As is visible in the pictures below the walls of my new room are atrocious – the person before me had repainted them but what possessed them to decide to do it like that I will never understand. Maybe I will get around to repainting them, but until then my strategy has been to hang as many silks and other pictures up on the walls to cover as much as I can.

And with that, I am back in Isla Vista, ready to start my 4th and final year – although I had planned at one point to take at least part of a 5th year, now I just want to be done as soon as possible. Luckily I left myself that option as well, and although I won’t be able to finish my music minor, I will still graduate in June.

Now, one last thing for this post: almost a year ago I remade the webpage for my blog, because my old one ran out of storage. I decided to use a different webpage builder and have an actual website name (ronjasblog.com). As it turns out, having a website is actually quite expensive – they give you the first year (nearly) for free but later you have to pay a yearly subscription fee, and mine is ~$180. If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to and are able to support me in continuing to write it on this website, I would ask you to consider donating $10-$20 to the cause. If you are not in a position to do this do not worry! Thank you for reading!