Lessons in How to Shoot Wild Boar?

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It’s Issy’s birthday, again, as it was yesterday, or was that the day before, when it was today. This is very confusing. I woke up in a cold sweat a few night ago thinking that I’d booked our accommodation here for the wrong nights. I then remembered the thing about the dateline, which meant that we got here before we left home …. I think. My head then spun for a long time before I managed to get back to sleep again.

Perhaps unsurprisingly we sleep in after a completely sleepless night on the plane the night before. I wonder why they don’t put bunk beds on planes. I’m sure they could fit just as many people in, they’d just be stacked vertically instead of horizontally. I’m sure there must be a good reason for this, I just don’t know what it is.

I have a lot of trouble with the overly complex shower, and wish Issy luck as she heads in for her turn. She can’t understand why I found it so hard, which always leaves me wondering whether I might have just dreamed that I had two engineering degrees and a forty year career in the water industry.

We wander down onto the very attractive sand of Napili Bay Beach in front of our apartment. It’s well populated with mostly American sounding holiday makers.... and I mean “sounding”; why do American voices all seem to carry so effectively? Do they perhaps make them all go to voice projection school as youngsters? It of course means that we get to overhear some very interesting conversations, as well as some very uninteresting ones, plus some others that are just plain scary. The guy sitting a few seats behind us on the bus in from the airport yesterday was telling his partner all about how to shoot wild boar without getting yourself gored. It seems that if they’re a long way away you shoot them with your rifle, but if they get too close you revert to your handgun, just to make sure you get them before they have a chance to stick one of their tusks into your neck.

And whilst on the subject of guns, after hearing this conversation we couldn’t help but reflect on this whole issue after the recent tragic primary school mass shooting in Texas. The guy who was telling the story clearly has at least two guns, yet I think I’ve only ever known one person in Oz who’d ever owned even one. When will the members of the NRA and their mates ever wake up to the fact that gun violence on this scale just doesn’t happen in any other civilised country anywhere on the planet, and that this might just possibly, maybe, by chance have something to do with gun ownership rates also being astronomically higher in the US than virtually anywhere else? I’m sure there’s something here that we’re just not understanding; we just don’t know what it is. Anyway, that’s enough ranting for one day. I wouldn’t want to risk this being read by an NRA member immigration official who then decides we’re undesirable aliens when we try to leave next week.

We have lunch at a cafe overlooking one end of the spectacular beach, and then head in for a dip. The water’s beautiful and gets deep really quickly. Getting back up to our towels does however prove a bit challenging. The beach is so steep that it feels like you’re climbing up a cliff face covered in treacle. It is nevertheless all very pleasant and relaxing. Issy says she wants all her birthdays to be like this. I hope that’s not a challenge she’s throwing down to me; this is going to be hard to match.

As we wander around it’s a bit hard not to notice the Hawaiian flag fluttering in the breeze in quite a few local front yards. Even more hard not to notice is that it includes the Union Jack in the top left hand corner, which apparently makes it the only US state flag to include the emblem of a foreign power. This doesn’t feel very patriotic, and I’m a bit surprised that the Donald didn’t have something to say about it when he was holding the reins … or maybe he did and I’d already switched channels. It seems that this all came about as a result of British Navy Captain George Vancouver visiting the islands in the late 1700s and presenting the King with a Red Ensign. Vancouver must have been either brave, stupid or suffering from amnesia; he’d been here before a few years earlier with James Cook. That visit didn’t end particularly well for Cookie. After a disagreement with the locals he tried to kidnap the King for ransom. Perhaps unsurprisingly the locals didn’t take overly kindly to this, and eventually caught up with him on the beach as he tried to escape, whacked him on the head and stabbed him to death. ….. which leads me to conclude that the Hawaiians must be a very forgiving bunch, either that or there’s a been a chronic centuries-long shortage of flag designers in the islands….

We head back to the same restaurant at the end of the beach for my beloved’s celebratory birthday dinner. This almost feels like an afterthought - her birthday finished twenty hours ago back home, so it’s been a day or more since messages of goodwill stopped flowing from anyone aside from me……

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Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Relaxed and happy
Happy birthday

[DaveandIssy]

Happy Birthday.
Many thanks. It was a good one!

[RENanDREW]

Birthday wishes
Sorry to tell you that it's very bad luck to ignore a birthday wish... and doubly so when the wish is about the birthday itself. Ok I just made that up, but sounds plausible to me! Better get planning for future June journeys that escape winter at home :)

[DaveandIssy]

Birthday bad luck
Ooops. Hope I wasn’t too slow to avoid the curse….