The end of Part One's adventure found me submitted to the hiker's humiliation of scooting across the outcropping on the bottoms of my new khaki shorts after loosing both footing and nerve. Our story continues...
Soon enough hubby realized he’d met a dead end as no one but an expert climber or fool would make their way past the next outcropping. We headed up and over the ridge to find the jeep trail; a nearly flat and compacted dirt road where another set of hikers tramped merrily along. By then my knees were noodley, as much from the intense winds that threatened my balance, as by the frightful vision of that stone that might have been me splashing into the waters below.
This time I took the road less traveled and veered up another rock cropping assuming a vantage point that was safely not on the water’s direct edge. I wanted to see whether or not the Blowhole was spouting before I began the long climb down the cliff. Gazing mauka from my vantage point, I noticed what hikers do not like to see, especially after something’s made their legs noodly...a car. Pulling right up to the point was another place to park.
But since the fun was in this journey, I meandered down to where determination had taken me from the start. I sat near the ocean’s edge but from another cliff while my husband took the camera to the very opening of the blowhole. That way, when it spouted I would catch the action from this more distant point of reference. Unfortunately, there was nothing blowing but the wind this day.
Training my left eye on the blowhole and my right on a pair of gorgeous seabirds, I battled the wind and tried to steady the camera to capture the amazing antics of the birds. They sailed and stalled, effortlessly using the wind to their advantage, making a game of their gift of flight, their long split tail feathers fluttering in the wind, their bodies resembling paper airplanes. They would fly over the ocean then turn abruptly toward the rocky ledge and their nests, coming in with such speed that you’d surely think they’d crash into the rocks. Instead, they somehow - miraculously - put on bird versions of reverse thrusters and lighted ever so gracefully like butterflies onto a flower.
My fascination with the birds was broken when my left eye caught a vision. Water! A six foot spout, emerging from the blowhole just as my husband had abandoned his watch and turned his back on the action. The wind absorbed my calls for my husband's attention. It was gone.
We decided to follow the jeep trail back to the car discovering it was a rather easy walk after all. We met another couple at the parking lot who asked us what to expect. It’s like anything else, we told them, it all depends on how you approach it.