This article is written by Vikram Narayan
Aloha! and welcome to the paradise folks. It was a 32 hour air journey escaping the European winter and landing at the tropical pleasant temperate Hawaii. During the dead of the night when we landed, it looked not so different from Goa or rest of the Kerala country side. We reached our hotel which our company had booked for us and pretended to sleep to overcome the jet lag. The beach and the mountain facing resort, threw up all its grandeur as and when the dawn tore up the dusk. A picturesque view from the apartment balcony had such an embossing impression that the landscape looked as if it was artificial and painted. Hawaii is the southern most tip of US and lies in the same latitude of Nagpur. The Hawaii state is an archipelago with the biggest island called as Hawaii (Big Island). The capital of Hawaii state Honalulu is in a different island from that of the big island. The mean temperature is a warm 25 C with a variation of 3 C above and below. No torrential rainfalls or floods and no major recurring natural calamities makes Hawaii a paradise on the Earth.
Hawaii has a typical biodiversity which can rarely be come across. Some species of plants looks like the one which can be seen on some planet X as in the serial star trek. The sparrows look typically Indian except that they are soaked in some sort of turmeric color. The lizards have a weird colour of green and resemble more of a chameleon. The landscape is dotted with baniyan, coconut, gulmohar, peepul, neem, banana, palm, eucalyptus, cactus and a wide variety of flowers rich in both fragrance and color.
Hawaii was initially discovered by Polynesian sailors who arrived on ships a thousand years back. They seemed to be expert sailors and in the absence of magnetic compass and cartography, they relied on tide direction, flight of the birds, and knowledge of the stars to navigate their ship. They developed a typical language without a script and continues to be spoken till date. The first contact with the outside world happened when the British sailor Capt. Cook discovered the island for the rest of the world. Over the period of the next two centuries sly diplomacy and brute force the US successfully annexed Hawaii into the union and what happened later in the Pearl Harbor episode is well known in the history.
Todays Hawaiian population is typically German, Japanese, Swedish, Portuguese and the native Hawaiians. Unlike the rest of the states, this has the least Anglo Saxon influence. Its a thriving agricultural economy with commercial cultivation of coffee, exotic herbs and fruits. The islands depends on hydro electricity and solar power. It has a flourishing university and an array of energy research laboratories. All the civilization, people or the biodiversity in Hawaii is foreign and the only thing that is native is the lava.
Hawaii is an volcanic island having a large active volcano. The road dredging and agricultural activities are fraught with the risks, as it might lead to revelation of lava tubes and chambers. That apart Hawaii lives upto its hype. One square feet of land is around 3000 USD which is expensive by US standards, but Indians living in Mumbai or Bangalore consider this price very much affordable 😉