Naupaka and Mo'o

[khiemtran]

These flowers belong to the Naupaka plant. See how they each look like only half a flower? There are stories behind that...




One story tells of two young lovers, who ran foul of the volcano goddess Pele. When the young man rejected Pele's advances in the form of a beautiful stranger, Pele, in a rage, turned on both of them, chasing the young man into the mountains and the woman into the sea. The goddess's gentler sisters took pity on them and turned them into matching naupaka flowers, which put together, make a single blossom...



A different story here, this time featuring a love story between a Princess named Naupaka and a commoner.

Speaking of beautiful (and potentially dangerous) strangers, take care if you walk by the fishponds, in case you meet a Mo'o...





As you walk by the water, you may also see other life and death battles. In this case, the spider is being dragged to its doom by the smaller wasp.



The black and white rocks are a striking feature of the beach at Waikoloa.



The black is lava...



While I think the white is actually dried coral. (I'm not entirely sure about this...)



Here you can see where someone has made a fort from the white rocks.



That's it for Hawai'i. Hope you enjoyed the brief sojourn as much as I did...

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I heard from my sister that you're not supposed to take the black lava back with you, or it's bad luck--and that in fact the post office gets sent packages of lava from people who've taken some and then regretted it.

The double flower is neat. Plenty of flowers have both male and female sex parts in one blossom, but I guess in this case the story comes just from the two different styles of petals.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Yes, they really do look as though each flower is just half a blossom. It's easy to see where the story came from.

With the lava - yes, I've also heard that the "curse" was actually deliberately started as a rumour to prevent people from taking lava from one part of the island - unless that was just the rumour in the first place. Stories everywhere on this isle.