Love, Mud, and Pneumonia

In my opinion, the best part of wedding planning is honeymoon planning. I think it's great how you get to skip town right after your wedding party, leaving the enormous mess for everyone else to clean up. So you want to go somewhere far away.

We wanted ours to be in some warm place that could combine our love of the outdoors and hiking with relaxing times on the beach sucking down Mai Tai's. Our first choice was Bora Bora. That idea was killed by its exorbitant price and utter remoteness. So we "settled" on something about 40 degrees straight north of there: Hawai'i.

I won't go into the virtues of Hawai'i, the weather and waves, lush greenery and Jurassic Park scenery. That has been done ad nauseum previously by others. Suffice it to say it was well worth the jet lag.

We wanted to see the North Shore of O'ahu, the great surf beaches that lie beyond Makaha: Sunset Beach, Banzai Pipeline, and of course the mighty Waimea Bay. Pretty much every stretch mentioned in "Surfin' USA". They were awesome, although we were a couple months off peak season. I want to go back in winter and see the really big rollers.

Our hiking was done on the north shore of Kaua'i, on the Kalalau Trail. It was pretty hot, and to say the trail was just muddy would be an injustice, because the trail WAS mud. We were up to our ankles the whole way. Slurp. Slurp.

The trail was beautiful as it climbed the rocky shoreline, higher and higher, through breadfruit and guava trees. The entire area smelled like Hawaiian Punch, it was like walking through a big brown fruit smoothie.

From our starting point at Ke'e Beach, we hiked the two hours to a wicked little alcove called Hanakapi'ai. There were ample warning signs preceding this dangerous place, warning of the near-certain drowning of anyone who dares enter the water there. And it was pretty scary. White water gushing in every direction, I decided to stay out and give myself the opportunity to experience my new marriage.

After a brief rest, it was up, up again, to a falls about two more hours into the jungle. It was worth it, the falls were spectacular, just like the guide books promised. But now we had four more hours back out through the muddiness.

We were hot and made several wrong turns on the unmaintained trail, so it really wasn't much of a surprise when I was pelted on the head twice in rapid succession by guavas. I just figured my new lovely wife was getting tired of my routefinding skills. But no, according to her, these fruits both fell from the trees on me. Both of them. At almost the same instant. Coincidence?

I didn't feel so good during the hike that day, something I attributed to the heat. Turns out I had pneumonia. It was a pretty hard 8 hours. But we did it.

And, bonus: I'm transported back to that place every time I smell a guava now. And the bumps on my head have gone down.