Antipodes

Wednesday, Jul 8th, 2009 by Andy | Leave a Comment
Filed under: Maps, Neighbor Islands

One of the things I like to do on this blog is mention whenever I find a cool website that has some content about Kauai. And one of the things that I find cool are maps. Being a cartographile (this could be me), I love this elegant map of antipodes (rhymes with serendipities):

PeakbaggerAntipodesMap
Source: original at Peakbagger.com, I changed the colors and highlighted Kaua’i in red

After all, everywhere is the opposite of somewhere else on this blue marble of ours. You can sort of see that Kaua’i (and Hawaii in general) is one of the few places that is opposite another landmass, and one of the rare parts of the United States that is. You can see more maps like this here, here, here, and an animated globe one here.

So Kaua’i is opposite Africa, somewhere between Namibia and Botswana. While searching for more about the exact antipode of Kaua’i, I stumbled on the Degree Confluence project. Their goal is to document every whole degree intersection of latitude and longitude on the globe; anyone can contribute and many have.

People go out with a GPS, find the “zeros” (where there are whole degrees, with no decimals) take pictures, then report back on the whole adventure. It sounds a bit like geocaching, except you know exactly where to go, and there is no cache—and I confess I have done neither of these hunts. As with many things, it’s the journey that counts, and it’s fun to read people’s random adventures.

The problem is, all the whole degrees of latitude and longitude near Hawaii intersect in the ocean:

ConfluenceHawaiiMap
Source: original (and clickable) at confluence.org

But that actually makes for a more challenging adventure, and the two confluence points near Kaua’i have interesting stories attached to them. The first one to the east of Kaua’i at 22N 159W (the white square to the right of Kaua’i on the map above) is 24 miles (38.0 km) due east of Hanama’ulu and is only documented by plane. The other at 22N 160W (red square to the left of Kaua’i) is 14 miles due east of PMRF, the military base on the western tip of Kaua’i, and 3 miles east of Ni’ihau. The confluence hunters chartered a fishing boat, and floated above the spot. They also stopped to climb on Lehua, the little crescent-shaped island north of Ni’ihau and have the only photo I know of on that summit.

And surprisingly, both antipodes of these points have been documented on the website as well. It turns out that both are part of the international border between Namibia and Botswana, right where it runs east-west exactly between these two points. The area appears to be scrub trees and dry grass on either side of the border fences, and I think we can assume it doesn’t look much different in between. What a contrast to Kaua’i.


Confluence22S20E
Source: 22S 20E at confluence.org 		Confluence22S21E
Source: 22S 21E at confluence.org

So to conclude, everything north of Hanama’ulu is opposite Botswana, and everything south of it is opposite Namibia. In general, you can say that Kaua’i (and most of Hawaii) is opposite the Kalahari desert. Specifically, the antipodesmap.com shows a village called Karakubis in Botswana that is opposite Kapaa, or more exactly the most inland part of Kapa’a at the end of Kawaihau road—I have some friends building a house there, I’ll have to tell them. Wikipedia, which is really starting to amaze me, lists it as Karakobis, in the Ghanzi district of Botswana, population 785 in 2001, so it is not an insignificant town. Google found a local church and the grades of children in the local school in 2005 (!) but no photos; no luck on flickr.com and panoramio.com either.

Here are some more tidbits I picked up while writing this article:

  • NOAAGardnerPinnaclesMapThe degree confluence closest to land in Hawaii is far from the accessible islands. It occurs a few dozen feet from shore, right between the emergent rocks of the Gardner Pinnacles, the northernmost (and oldest) of the rocky Hawaiian islands. All of the Northwest Hawaiian islands further away are sandy atolls. These islets are only the size of a football field (what a sad analogy), but the submerged island is larger than Maui Nei (Maui, Molokai, Lanai, and Kahoolawe, which were likely all connected before). What I wonder is whether the confluence might actually be on one of the rocks, given all the inaccuracies in maps and GPS readings.
  • Hawaii is not the only part of the US across from land. A tiny bit of Montana and a patch of Colorado are both opposite France, or at least its Terres Australes et Antarctiques Francaises (French Southern and Antarctic Lands). A small piece of Kergulen Island (that I’ve mentioned before) is opposite Montana, and Ile Amsterdam and Ile Saint Paul is opposite a deserted part of Colorado. Kergulen islands is one of my favorite exotic island location, one I would love to visit someday but know the chances are almost nil that I could. Here are some great maps of the continental US antipodes, but the comments conveniently omit the Hawaiian antipodes.
  • On the StrangeMaps blog comments, I learned this: One of the more unusual antipodes must be “Maui” Island and its antipode in North Central Botswana, a town with almost the same name “Maun”. The Herero people in Maun actually look somwewhat similar to the Hawaiians. And in both societies, the missionairies clothed the women in “mumus”! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero.
  • The US-Canada border is supposed to be on the 49th parallel, and it sure looks like a straight line. But when compared to actual positions on the GPS, the border is a bit of zig-zag. I’m not sure if that’s an artifact of the GPS accuracy, the GPS data model (WGS 84), or the border surveyors. I bet the border is set where it is, and the points of the data model move around since the earth is not a perfect sphere.
  • There are two corners of the Pacific ocean that are antipodal points of each other, meaning the Pacific ocean stretches halfway around the globe at its largest point.
  • The town of Formosa in Argentina is nearly antipodal to Taiwan, formerly known as the island of Formosa. Rather than being intentional, my reading of the Wikipedia articles suggests it was a coincidence, a testament to the extent of the Portuguese and Spanish explorations.
  • As if finding regular geographic points on the globe wasn’t enough, there are also people who find the man-made survey marks that have been created over the years. This is called benchmark hunting, and even though this is getting close to train-spotting in terms of compulsiveness, I still like the idea.

Happy Father’s Day

Thursday, Jun 18th, 2009 by Andy | 7 Comments
Filed under: History, Kalalau

Prompted by a story on Hawaii Insider and in honor of Father’s day, here is the image of Hawaii that my father gave me as I was growing up.

My parents visited Hawaii in 1971, the year before I was born. Even though I got to travel a lot as a child (when we lived in France and toured Europe), I was always secretly disappointed that my older brother got to see these far-flung islands. A case of sibling jealousy more than rivalry, it meant that he had travelled significantly further west than I, nevermind that he was just a toddler and didn’t even remember it.

My parents lived near Washington DC at the time, and so it was a big trip for them. I don’t know if this was common at the time, but they spent nearly a month in Hawaii and toured all the islands. Of all the things they saw, here is the story that my Dad always told about Hawaii:

On one of the islands, I’m not sure he told us the name of it or perhaps didn’t even remember it himself, there is a beautiful beach at the end of the road. Behind the beach are towering walls of black volcanic mountains, covered in lush green forest, and full of wild orchids. Dad has always loved flowers of all sort, and what could be more exotic to a native of Ohio than orchids blooming in the wild. He had heard or read that there is another beach over the cliffs, but the only way to get there is a steep trail. So my mother stayed at the end of the road with my infant brother, and my father tackled the trail in search of orchids and the other beach.

After some time on the difficult trail, my dad finally reached the other beach. His story didn’t say whether he saw any orchids, chances are slim right along the trail. But, probably even better, what he saw at the beach were naked women. He called it a nudist beach, but I’m sure they were hippies that he saw there, on their peregrinations between Taylor Camp and Kalalau. He clearly remembers the sea cave to the right of the stream, because that’s where they were hanging out.

Then he learned that the trail continued, up over the ridge to another beach, then another, and another, and every one of them a “nudist beach,” like paradise on earth. But he had to turn around and go back to the beach at the end of the road. I’m not sure what my Mom’s reaction to this story was, or whether he even told her at first, but when he told the story later, he often said he wanted to go back and see all those other beaches.

It would be another 20 years until I saw Honolulu for myself, and another 10 more until I saw Kaua’i, where I hiked the entire Kalalau trail on my first visit. I can’t really say I was following my Dad’s vision, because I was following my girlfriend, now wife, who knew the trail and its inhabitants—and we were part of the naked crowd in Kalalau. A year later, we moved there, my parents came to visit, and my Dad finally got his wish: my Mom dropped us off at Ke’e trailhead, and we hiked the trail together, all the way to Kalalau. And you know what? He was half right. The trail between Hanakapi’ai and Kalalau has absolutely no beach access for 9 miles, but the naked hippie-chicks are still there. Not so much in Hanakapi’ai anymore, but definitely in Kalalau and sometimes along the trail, walking around like Eve in the Garden of Eden.

So Dad, thanks for the stories about far-off places, thanks for sparking my imagination about Kaua’i, and thanks for sharing your love of hiking and beautiful scenery. And now I realize why I’m always driven to see what’s just over the next ridge.

… And no, I wasn’t conceived in Hawaii, as it later occured to me to ask my mother. Which is too bad because not only would it give me a native connection to the islands, it would’ve given me bragging rights over my globe-trotting brother.

Hylocereus monacanthus

Sunday, May 24th, 2009 by Andy | Leave a Comment
Filed under: Flora, Photography

A while ago, a contributor to Wikipedia asked me to release a photo of a plant I took at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Lawai. In an post about visiting there after hours, I posted a picture of a night-blooming cereus, which it turns out is somewhat rare, both the particular species of that plant and picutres of them. I learned that it’s actual name is Hylocereus monacanthus.


CereusRelative.jpg

In the email exchange, I also got some more information about the species:

Hylocereus monacanthus (H. lemairei) is quite easy to recognize by the more or less pink flowers, bifid stigma lobes and relatively small scales on the floral tube. the other species commonsly gron in hawaii is H. undatus, with no pink, entire stigma lobes and large scales. It also have the areoles (where the spines are) on the lowest point of the margin. H. monacanthus has the areoles on the highest point.

But for some reason or another, the Wikipedia article for Hylocereus monacanthus wasn’t written, and image hasn’t even been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons yet (here’s the link). However, there is a lot of info and pictures of other Hylocereus and other genera of nightblooming cereus.

Blog Upgrade

Sunday, May 24th, 2009 by Andy | Leave a Comment
Filed under: Blogging, Photography

Sorry for the messy looking blog right now and the lack of content, I’m going through a blog upgrade.

There have been some vulnerabilities in the WordPress blog software I use, so I had to do an upgrade to the latest version. Of course, that led to a lot of formatting issues, as you can probably see. I’m not quite sure why the articles I wrote before are messed up now, it should all just be HTML. All the content is still there, I just need to go back and reformat every post, which may take a little time. I also need to redo the colors and decorations, which may not happen right away either.

But in the process of going through every post and reformatting it, I’m going to remove all the high-res images from the blog. They were taking up a lot of space on my hosting provider, and I’m not sure anyone clicked on them. I stopped posting them a while ago, and no one mentioned it—so I’ll remove the old ones. For me, it is just simpler to post a blog with the small image that do not link to big ones.

One exception will be the maps, those just loose too much detail in the small format. I’ll put a border and a link whenever a map is clickable.

If you would like a large, high-res version of any picture, please email me with a reason, and I’m usually happy to share them.

As a reminder, all photos and text that appear on this blog are copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. That means you are free to use any materials here, as long as you attribute it and redistribute it freely as well. Please credit Andy Kass and link to http://great-hikes.com/blog if possible.

Blue Hole

Thursday, May 7th, 2009 by Andy | 6 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Hiking, Photography, Tourism, Waterfalls

I’ve been meaning to post this image from the headwall of the Wailua gorge, also known as the Blue Hole. This photo is not a montage or faked in any way, just taken with a 15mm fisheye lens.

As you can see, it’s not usually blue, and only if you carry a fisheye lens does it look like a hole. Did I mention that I don’t like the name “Blue Hole?” It just seems so corny and obviously contrived. But I recently heard that it was so huge, you couldn’t capture it in one image, so I wanted to put that myth to rest.

BlueHoleFisheye.jpg
Source: Paul J. Neiman

On this topic, I just received a very interesting comment on my post about the Wailua Headwaters hike. Essentially, the comment says that increased exposure of this route in the Ultimate Guide and on this blog specifically has led to more hikers, caused side trails to be worn in the wrong directions, and allegedly prompted unhappy local hikers to remove the flagging that did exist.

This marks a turning point of sorts for this blog, one I knew would happen sooner or later, and one that I’ve been dreading somewhat. It’s the point at which it seems like the information I share has a negative impact on the Kaua’i I love.

It’s all fine and dandy to post pictures of rainbows and waterfalls for people to enjoy from afar, but then people see a beautiful place on this blog and want to go there—it’s called tourism and it’s Kaua’i's largest industry. And it’s not just visitors, there are a fair number of residents who want to go exploring too—mainland transplants like myself who might be considered long term visitors. So they start asking around, then they start tromping around, and before you know it, it isn’t the way it was before. Except here it’s not the Hanalei full of illegal vacation rentals, or the Kapa’a strip malls full of mainland chain stores, it’s the wilderness areas I care about full of people and their tracks.

As to what effect can be directly attributed to this blog, I’m probably exaggerating. Especially when the Ultimate Guide is also involved, and it has a bad reputation for transforming places it mentions. After all, that’s where everyone learns about the Blue Hole, even myself way back when. But the commenter says the hikers mentioned to this blog, and so I can’t say I didn’t contribute.

I have many conflicting thoughts on this matter:

  • Foremost in many people’s minds is the hypocrisy of hikers such as myself. We want to go to the remote places, we want to boast about it a bit, and then we don’t want others to go because it won’t be wild or remote anymore. I do admit that I wanted to blog about those places for the novelty factor. After all, any tourist can go on the established trails and flickr is full of trail photos from all over Kaua’i. But I would genuinely love for people to discover the beautiful places I’ve seen, if they have the ability to go.
  • But I suppose I’m also blind to the sheer numbers. I might go twice in a year to the same wilderness area, and even if I do some route-finding and trample a little bit, it’ll hardly be noticed. But even if 5% of Kaua’i's one million annual visitors go hiking, and 1% of those try to go to the Wailua headwaters, that’s 500 people more than before. More significantly, with a group of hikers almost every day, the vegetation probably can’t recover and erosion will begin.
  • I have no real way of guessing who puts up the trail blazers in the first place. Hunters or local hikers could be marking their routes, or visitors wishing not to get lost could be doing it too. Personally, I’ve never put up or taken down a trail blazer. So, why did someone take down the flagging? To keep people from going? It seems too late for that, but I suppose if more people fail, and word gets out that it’s extremely difficult again, that might happen. Of course, it just takes one person to decide they don’t want the flagging, at least until someone decides to put it back.
  • With trailblazers marking the most direct route away from dangers, I think the damage to the vegetation would be minimized and hikers would be the most safe. Then again, more people on the same track will cause more serious erosion in one place. I do know that some places would turn into mud-bogs, which is annoying for the hikers but also becomes a permanant scar on the land.
  • And what do the locals really think? Significantly, I believe all the guidebooks and blogs are written by people who weren’t raised on Kaua’i. How would my perception of backcountry information be different if I had been raised on Kaua’i as opposed to having moved there as an adult? Exploring the backcountry is not an outsider thing, local hunters and explorers have certainly been all over. But it seems to be a mainland thing to want to share it all with the world. I’m not profiting from sharing this information, except perhaps with some fleeting internet recognition, but the Ultimate Guidebook writers certainly are. Would a local try to profit from it?
  • I like to think I have been careful with access information on this blog. In anticipation of this turning point, I have tried to give hints but not directions. People who read about an adventure here have to take the initiative into the unknown themselves. I like to think that this provides the information that experienced hikers need to go, and not enough for others to get started. But perhaps it just leads the foolish astray. In the end, it’s just a matter of degree.
  • In my defense, I always include a warning about the dangers in red at the beginning of my adventure posts. And in the case of the Wailua headwaters post, I explicitly mention at the end that the information I give will not help you find the actual route. Half-jokingly, I called it the “fine print,” but now I realize I should make that information just as visible—the post has now been updated. Will this stop people? I suppose not all who should be stopped, but I hope those that do go will be better prepared.
  • I certainly dread the next turning point where a hiker on this route is injured or needs to be rescued, or both. I suppose it will happen whether I write about the route or not, but I sure hope it can be avoided.
  • Ultimately, I think it would be good for Kaua’i if some more of the backcountry were opened up. Certain visitors want this experience, as do residents that are like me. If Kaua’i can provide it and benefit from the tourism, isn’t that good for everyone? Would it ruffle the feathers of the local hunters? Probably. Would it really impact them? I’m not so sure.
  • The problem is how to open it up safely for people and the environment. As I’ve mentioned, areas like this are fragile, and even a well-established trail leads to erosion. Can the erosion be controlled, can the trail be improved with logs, will it then become less of an adventure? I think the answer is yes to all three, but having more trails spreads out the impact.
  • But won’t there will be a little less wilderness then, and still there will be people who want to hike to the remaining untrampled places in search of “true” wilderness. The backcountry of Kaua’i is certainly finite, and so I have trouble balancing out this resource against those who enjoy it and hopefully care for it. It can be seen as self-serving, but I like to think that hiking and, by extension, eco-tourism are worthwhile persuits.
  • But what I’m becoming aware of is that I, as a hiker, wish there were more and better maintained trails. Yes, there is the need for adventure, but getting away from civilization even on a good trail can feel like an adventure too. This is exactly the case of the Kalalau trail. Places like Waimea Canyon could provide great backcountry adventures, and the trails are there already, but they’re overgrown. I now see that I need to write about places like that and send the adventurers on the overgrown trails. Hopefully, the result of that impact will be some worn tracks on renewed trails.

Certainly a huge topic in the end. Readers, do you have any perspectives to add, any insight to share?

Update, one day later: I was thinking about this post all day, maybe I’m being too hard on myself; maybe I’m overestimating my readership. But this evening I just heard about another blog reader who read about a remote place here and decided to go. My friend on Kaua’i who had paddled with me to Kipu Kai just went back again yesterday. While there, he met a visitor from Minnesota who had seen the original blog post and decided to go himself!

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