Band on the Run: Surfing & The Superferry in Maui, Hawaii

by Ember Swift on
Ember Swift, Canadian musician and touring performer, will be keeping us up-to-date on what it’s like to tour a band throughout North America. Having just arrived back from Beijing where she spent three months (check out her “Canadian in Beijing” series), she offers a musician’s perspective on road life. Enjoy!

My five days (four nights) in Maui went by too quickly. I filled them up with as much as I could, and even then the time seemed to slip between my fingers like sand.

On Thursday evening after the last family event that followed the wedding from the previous day, my roommate Elaine and I decided to skip out early and head to Kihei, a surfing town farther south by about an hour where she had spent a few days on her own before joining the wedding party earlier in the week.

My motivation for leaving (besides seeing another place other than “resort row”) was to connect with an old friend and fellow musician: Erin Smith. She and her husband moved out to these parts about three years ago and she is now making her living as a musician in Maui, playing almost every night and “touring without touring.” Basically, that means that she plays to new faces and new nationalities every night because Hawaii is such a tourist center, but she never needs to leave her home and pile into a van or a plane to do it.

Now there’s some foresight.

Before heading to Kihei, we stopped into the town of Lahaina where Erin was playing that night and headed to the venue called “The Cool Cat Café.” She was playing her acoustic and singing – no band – but had a two hour contract with the restaurant which included both original music and covers. The place was open air, as are most venues in Hawaii, and so the sound of her voice caught my ears as we were parking the car and I followed her voice music right up the stairs and into the café, as I’m sure other patrons do when they hear her soulful singing.

Brilliant. That’s marketing at its finest.

Erin noticed me as I walked in and flashed me a big grin while she was playing. Elaine and I sat down to some local beer and watched the last few songs before Erin was on break. At that point, she came over to our table and we chatted for about twenty minutes before she had to get back on stage.

Life on the island of Maui seems to have done Erin quite a bit of good. She is freckled and smiley and has taken up surfing. Seems funny to imagine a Canadian (non-coastal) girl on a surfboard, but I celebrate it for her. She talked about the surfing movement in Hawaii and how much of a state pastime it is. She even referred to the energetic wave (pun intended) that takes over the community when the swells are high. To me, the funniest thing she told me was that it’s not uncommon for people to “call in surf” (rather than sick) when there’s good waves to be catching. Employers generally accept it there! It’s to be expected after all.

Elaine and I slipped out of the café during her second set in order to get on the road for Kihei and to check into our accommodations that evening. We were staying in the same cottages that Elaine had rented before the wedding (Lihi Kai Cottages) and hers came with a cot for me since it was only the one night that I would be staying.

These cottages also came with full kitchens, full baths and a huge main room. Easily double the size of the resort rooms and half the price. Not to mention the fact that the kitchen came stocked with real cutlery! I had to laugh when I noticed this (and take a picture, of course!)

The next day, I had a lovely brunch with Erin and her husband Ross and then spent most of the day watching the surfers before having to catch my plane for San Francisco that evening. It’s not hard to get lost in the sea air, the rhythmic roar of the waves, the transit of the sun across the sky. I took it all in with every pore that day, eager to keep some of that ocean air in my system for as long as possible.

Just before packing up and heading for the airport, I caught a report on the news about the new “Superferry” in Hawaii and how environmentalists are trying to stop it from launching. They said that inadequate environmental assessments had been carried out and that whale calving grounds were in jeopardy. I looked up more information on the internet and found these interesting sites and articles, but had to leave before I could ask anyone who lives there anything else about it.

I did feel happy to hear that the environmental activists were at least being taken seriously enough to have the courts involved. I’ll be trying to keep up with it from here.

I waved goodbye to Hawaii from the departures lounge, a floor of the airport that has no walls. It is open air just like the cafes. You arrive on the sidewalk and you have no need to walk through any doors because there simply aren’t any. You just walk towards the desk of your airline.

I laughed out loud when I noticed that and one of the porters looked at me strangely. I just smiled back at him and checked into my flight at the very last possible moment.

There was still sand under my nails.

I’m taking some of Hawaii home with me, in more ways than one!

Literature via Cell Phones

by Neil Woodburn on

In the mad rush to load up our smart phones with tiny video and entertaining games, there remains one form of media sorely lacking in today’s modernized world: literature.

Remember passing time on a plane or waiting for the subway with a magazine or book in hand? Such gray matter activities are sadly becoming increasingly scarce these days. Just look around the next time you fly. The majority of passengers will be plugged into their MP3 players, personal DVD players, or engrossed in the latest game on their new iPhone. Reading is nearly dead.

And so, it was with a sigh of relief that I came across a small company combining the best of both worlds.

DailyLit.com delivers short snippets of literature to your cell phone screen, PDA, or email inbox to be consumed at your leisure. The idea is that entire books are serialized into consecutive snippets–each of which can be read in about five minutes. All one needs to do is to pick a book, decided upon how often you want the snippets to come, and then read the entire thing five minutes at a time.

Sure beats Donkey Kong in my book!

Big in Japan: Making Biofuel Out of Used Chopsticks

by Matthew Firestone on

Today’s ten-million yen trivia question is this:

How many disposable, wooden chopsticks are used each year in Japan?

Give up?

The answer is approximately 90,000 tons (81,646,000 kilograms) or approximately two-hundred pairs per person per year. Needless to say, the Japanese aren’t exactly the world’s greatest environmentalists!

Indeed, one of the biggest culture shocks foreigners experience upon arrival is the incredible amount of trash that the Japanese generate. For example, if you go to the convenience store to buy a bento or lunch box, it’ll be skillfully double or even triple bagged by the clerk. After unwrapping the endless layers of your bento, inside you’ll sometimes find as many as three pairs of chopsticks- just in case you feel like sharing your lunch with a few friends.

So, what can be done you ask – how about making biofuel?

Earlier this week, the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fishery announced plans to allocate funds to support nationwide chopstick recycling programs. The aim of the program is two-fold: the first is to raise public awareness about the need to conserve resources, particularly items that are a daily fixture in people’s lives. The second aim is to support projects by businesses and local governments to turn disposable chopsticks into biofuel.

Currently, used chopsticks are simply discarded in the burnable rubbish bin (one credit to the Japanese is that they routinely separate burnable and non-burnable garbage). In a country obsessed with hygiene and cleanliness, the idea of reusing chopsticks is unheard of, especially with the fear of pandemic illness on the rise such as SARS and avian flu. Indeed, environmentally conscious foreigners like myself who carry our own chopsticks around with us are usually the subject of intense ridicule!

However, the current plan is to install boxes to collect used chopsticks outside restaurants and convenience stores. Private contractors will then transport these boxes to special facilities where the chopsticks will be ground up and compressed into wooden pellets, which can be used as a high-energy fuel.

Typically, wooden pellets are formed using heat and pressure to compact sawdust and paper, though disposable chopsticks are clearly a more abundant resource. There is also hope that disposable chopsticks can be converted into ethanol, which is becoming an increasingly important additive to gasoline. Currently, there are approximately thirty facilities producing wooden pellets across the country, as well as ethanol-producing facilities in Osaka and Okayama.

The Ministry is hopeful that the program will also help raise consciousness about the social responsibility of large corporations across the country. This is particularly relevant as global climate will be a major topic on the agenda at the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized nations’ economic summit scheduled for June of 2008 in Hokkaido.

Furthermore, I think I can speak for everyone here in Tokyo that after suffering through one of the hottest summers on the book (I’m tired of sweating through everything I own), stepping up the fight against global warming is something all of us can agree on.

Japan may have sparkling whale-free seas, but at least there’s hope for the forests.

PS As a disclaimer, I am by no means knowledgeable on the process of making biofuel, so please feel free to comment on the efficacy of this program!

** Special thanks to Flickr users Rick (Chinese Lunch), MShades (Bento Box) and View-Askew (Pollution) **

Vietnamese Coffee

by Catherine Bodry on

I’m waiting for Vietnamese coffee shops to sprout like Starbucks in mini-malls all over America. Such a coffee-crazed country is a ripe market for a drink so strong, rich, and crazily caffeinated.

I was prepared for pho (Vietnamese noodle soup) when planning my trip, as Anchorage already has a couple of Vietnamese restaurants. But I was completely taken aback by the quality of Vietnam’s coffee, which is sold on the sidewalk for a few cents.

Cups are brewed individually by pressing coarsely-ground beans inside a stainless steel filter and pouring boiling water over them. A lid covers the top, which keeps the water hot while it drips into your glass. Often, as much as a half-inch of sweetened condensed milk has already been added to the glass — it was always too sweet for me so I was careful not to stir too much, leaving most of the sticky milk on the bottom.

After a couple of minutes you remove the aluminum contraption, using the lid as a foundation now in order to catch any stray drips. What’s left is a cup of coffee strong enough to make you grind your teeth for hours in a caffeine rush. No 16-ounce mocha-lattes here; glasses aren’t much larger than shot glasses. Sip it slowly.

And if you get a chance, visit the coffee plantations and roasters in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. You can smell the roasting beans for miles, and when you get inside a roaster you’re surrounded by a thick hug of chocolate-smelling coffee beans.

What’s Your Favourite Souvenir? (The Office Cleanout Continues…)

by Brett Atkinson on

Thanks to everyone for the feedback on what to do with the old guidebooks at my office. Part of the shift also involves bringing home a few favourite souvenirs from past travels. Here are some special keepsakes I’ve now got to find room for at home.

  1. A framed front page of La Epoca, the Buenos Aires newspaper, from the day after Eva Peron’s funeral.
  2. An 18th century map of Asia Minor I bought in Istanbul
  3. A screen print by an artist called “O” who hangs out at Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Basically it’s an American flag with the word “Democracy” spelt out with the logos of various American corporations. D for Disney, E for Enron, M for McDonalds…you get the picture.
  4. A faux gold plated microphone from when I played guitar (a shocking version of Wild Thing) at an advertising conference in Cannes, France.
  5. A copy of Kerouac’s Big Sur that I bought at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, California

What are the poignant, heart rending or downright tacky travel mementos you hold dearest?

Thanks to kristenhillier on Flickr for the stunning pic of Venice Beach.