Kailash and Shivana Maharaj2013-05-21T18:46:22-04:00Kailash and Shivana Maharajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=kailash-and-shivana-maharajCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Kailash and Shivana MaharajGood old fashioned elbow grease.Toeing the Line Between History and Present: A Stay in Mauitag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16225712012-06-25T12:14:27-04:002012-08-25T05:12:04-04:00Kailash and Shivana Maharajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/kailash-and-shivana-maharaj/
The site encapsulates the latent dynamism between Maui's history and present -- the tug of tourism in a land once given to the spirit of aloha. In the late 1980s the site was discovered just as plans for the hotel were being designed. Nae'ole clarifies:
"The Ritz-Carlton gave this piece of property back to the state of Hawaii, which we maintain. We became the first hotel in Hawaii's history to provide sanctity and dignity for our people. From that came new lessons, new laws and it redefined the whole hospitality industry and its effects. Were we a hotel with an ancient site on it, or an ancient site with a hotel on it? You had to make the judgment. Of course it is an ancient site with guests."
Though tourism has come to define modern Hawaii, its ancient traditions are still alive though often embedded in thoroughly modern life. Nae'ole continues:
"Start opening your eyes. When you're landing at the airport, you have the volcano on one side, Haleakala, and on the other range Puʻu Kukui. So you have a male entity and a female entity, and you're right smack dab in the middle; you're right in the bosom of these two heads that are saying welcome. The rest is up to you. I want you to be immersed in this place, not just the tangible things but the intangible side as well. I think here especially, you can find yourself. I think that is the real essence of Hawaii."
Nae'ole's easy balancing act with one foot in the modern and the other in the ancient, of reciting Hawaiian chants yet equally enthralled by the latest NFL scores was hard won. After graduating from high school, he was chosen to take over the family lands by his grandfather, a man who had been self-sufficient, growing bananas and taro, catching shrimp and fish. Refusing the call, Clifford opted to move to California instead.
"I made a really young and stupid mistake when I told grandpa 'why don't you just sell your land and take grandma on a cruise.' I thought he was going to hit me. He said 'if I open my hand and you give me all the money in the world, it's just going to go through the crack of these fingers and I've got nothing. But if you turn your hand this way, you can put it into the earth. You can take out of the earth and put into your body, and our family will be secure forever.'"
After years in California and Washington, Nae'ole returned to Maui with a new perspective. "From that point on was my renaissance," explains Nae'ole who today runs the only male hula school in Maui. He is versed in the Hawaiian language, culture and lore; he conducts "sense of place" discussion tours near the Honokahua preservation site, and hosts Mai Ka Pu'uwai (storytelling from the heart) and is chairman of the Celebration of the Arts, a three day festival held annually over Easter weekend in honour of Hawaii's culture.
We stop near the Makaluapuna Point (known as Dragon's Teeth to some), mere meters from the burial site. Waves crash onto black volcanic rock. Lamentably, many travelers come to this place looking only for the descriptive moniker the place has earned. "People come looking for this place not knowing how sacred it is. And it blocks the essence," Nae'ole says providing a clue to the mystery of Maui. If you come looking for something and distractedly miss the resonance of the place, miss the feeling, then you've missed the whole thing.
That afternoon I enjoyed a spa treatment at the hotel recalling Nae'ole's advice. "Here's the trick to the spa treatment -- when you're done there, you're not done yet. What you need to do is take a walk outside to the Honokahua preservation site. That's when your treatment ends, when you go down there to your ancestors." I try to mentally locate the spot where Clifford Nae'ole had said a prayer as we exited the burial site. In my mind I replay his translated words. "May you live so old that your eyes become beady and you're hunched over on a cane. And when you end your life, may you remember this place and say, 'ah.'"
Ah, indeed.
This blog was originally part of an article that first appeared in City Style and Living Magazine's summer 2010 issue.]]>The Mango Man Cometh (in the Cayman Islands)tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15440322012-05-25T17:40:40-04:002012-07-25T05:12:18-04:00Kailash and Shivana Maharajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/kailash-and-shivana-maharaj/
Photography By K&S Media
We made one wrong turn, that was all. Though a small island, leave it to my sister and I to end up lost on Grand Cayman. Irritated and circling the roundabout once again, we notice a fruit truck, laden with bright orange mangoes and piles of other fruit -- a necessary diversion.
Charmaine is chatting with a local man who has stopped to buy bags of ripe mangoes from the truck -- its back doors ajar to expose mangoes arranged in neat rows on cardboard boxes, soursop and green round fruit in plastic bags. Crouched inside the truck we meet Tony Wright who proudly describes the bounty before us.
"This is all from 'Mr. Willie.' Whistling Duck is the biggest farm on the island. We have all kinds of things up there. If you have a few minutes, you have to make a stop," he explains, adding that he has helped plant hundreds of fruit trees with Mr. Willie since the 1980s.
Intrigued, and armed with directions, we decide to visit. The topography changes slightly as we drive to the north side of the island -- rocks and sand giving way to greenery. A young boy around 13 grins at us as we pull up.
"Is Mr. Willie here?" we ask, uncertain if we have found the farm. He disappears into a red truck and reemerges introducing himself as Kiernan, William "Willie" Ebanks's grandson.
As we wait for Willie, Wright who has come back up to the farm, takes us on a breakneck tour of the property. As he speaks, he picks guinep (chennette), plums, custard apples, sweetsop and starfruit handing them to us as we greedily gorge on the glorious fruits. Each tree is planted with ample room to spread.
"All this used to be cliff you know. Mr. Ebanks and I broke and crushed up all of this," Wright tells us with a decided sense of accomplishment. There are huge rocks in a cleared area of land in the distance, but even here beneath our feet the soil is gravelly -- its limestone source still apparent.
Willie is a small gentleman, with a thick Caymanian accent and soft voice. Before leaving, Wright warns,
"You're in good hands, but Mr. Ebanks could stand here all day and talk to you about mangoes." It's a friendly jibe, accompanied by an undertone of utmost respect.
Though there are hundreds of trees on the present property (Ebanks owns several plots of land) stretching for 17 acres, Willie's particular affection is for mangoes.
"We had a very unusual season because we peaked in May. Usually you can't get enough mangoes in May to eat, but two weeks ago we were picking 1500 pounds a day," Willie notes. The farm grows dozens of mango varieties including Arlien, Dot, Haden, Jakarta, Julie, Nam Doc Mai, Springfeldt, Tommy Atkins and Valencia Pride. Ebanks talks about the intricacies not only of each of the varieties, but of each tree as if they were children, each with quirks and affectations of their own.
There are two Jamaican workers washing mangoes in a bathtub -- preparing them for the market. Elsewhere, there are workers pruning trees. We stand in the shade of one of the large mango trees while Willie points to another tree a meter away telling us about the variety of mango. Slowly he inspects the fruit until he finds the perfect specimen. Then he nudges Kiernan to pull the fruit from the tree using a homemade contraption resembling a lacrosse stick. With the mango in hand he explains its taste, its stages of ripening and its foibles. It is the sort of education it would take years to amass. And so from tree to tree, the afternoon passes.
"What you'll hear from anyone from the Caribbean is that we have a wide variety of mangoes because we have a wide variety of people. Everyone brings his little thing. With all the seamen travelling all over the world, they bring back a potato or pumpkin seed, and that is how so many things appeared here," states Ebanks.
Later, as we sit with Willie back at his home with his wife Zelma Lee and their granddaughter, talking, peeling and slicing an unripe Nelson for a salt, pepper and vinegar snack for the road, we cannot help but think: We would have missed all of this were it not for a little wrong turn that we were so fortunate to make.
This was originally part of an article that first appeared in City Style and Living Magazine's Fall 2011 issue. ]]>My Hike With a Grenadian Legendtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15101572012-05-11T16:01:18-04:002012-07-11T05:12:13-04:00Kailash and Shivana Maharajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/kailash-and-shivana-maharaj/
The characterization could equally apply to Bedeau himself, whose soft voice and quick laugh belie a determined nature.
Having swapped the seaside charm of Grenada's Carenage for the verdant rainforest interior I am hiking to the Seven Sisters waterfalls accompanied by the indomitable Telfor Bedeau. A former surveyor, sailor and British railway worker, Bedeau is the most recognized face in Grenada hiking.
He began hiking in 1962 and since 1990 has been regularly guiding travellers throughout Grenada. He has even helped to map the country and discovered topography that had been previously undiscovered. He is wearing woven yellow jellies which he calls the best shoes for hiking. I wonder aloud whether he is ever bitten by ferocious rainforest insects and he calmly answers, "that don't bother me."
He moves swiftly through the forest and exhibits an endless fascination with the world around him. At various moments during our hike Bedeau points out trees and plants used by Grenadians as bush medicine or for practical everyday use. "This is bois canoe the French name is canoe wood because it will float," he says while cutting a piece of the wood revealing the hollow interior.
Elsewhere, the wind breezes through a patch of bamboo.
"You hear that? It is a bamboo orchestra. Long ago people thought there were spirits living in the bamboo. Don't plant this because you can never get rid of it. But I say I will cut it down. When it grows up, I cut it down. When it grows up again I cut it down. I say it must have a point of exhaustion. Eventually it will die away."
This undeterred plodding, working little by little until a goal is reached, is characteristic of Bedeau who has made 168 ascents of Mount Saint Catherine, Grenada's highest peak. "But my favourite hiking is at Fedon's Mountain," he says, adding that he once devised a hike through Grenada that did not cross any rivers. "That was a little hard because you have to go to the source of the river if you don't want to cross it."
Fit and sprightly at 73 years old, Bedeau is fond of celebrations that mark any and every event of his life. Particularly challenging ascents or anniversaries (like his 150th ascent of Mount Saint Catherine) are toasted with champagne, and birthdays are celebrated for a month. He says that when he turns 100 years old he will turn this into a yearlong celebration. His stories, and for that matter, his presence make an example of the superiority of gentle endurance over brute strength.
"I rowed my little boat around the island," he says modestly of the two round-the-island voyages he has made. His gift is finding delight in things that others would overlook. "Life is never boring when you can interact with nature," says Bedeau who prefaces nearly every statement with a half-chuckle. This coupled with his predilection for celebration lends him a sort of ebullient quality as though the world is a constant merriment and revelry to which he is especially attuned.
We approach the falls, primed for the acrobatic exploits of another local, Butterfly, who has raced ahead to prepare for a jump into the cool water. Bedeau recalls the days when neighbours would cook communal pots of food and redistribute them among the neighbourhood and roosters and hens made sport for precocious boys.
Then in his typically unassuming manner he recalls a seminal decision in his life. "Mummy left for Trinidad when I was younger which was probably better because I never wanted to take the straight and narrow way and she would have kept me on that path like my brothers and sisters. I never wanted to be a doctor, lawyer or teacher I wanted to be a rough and tumble guy. If I had taken the straight and narrow path I may never have been acknowledged by the Queen," he says referring to the British Empire Medal he received in 2007.
This impulse for a life out of the ordinary is something I know too well, and I hope that I can answer my own call to adventure as Bedeau has done.
The short hike to the falls is but a warm up for Bedeau who will go on to a hash, Grenada's favourite pastime that involves embarking on a long running trail ending at an ubiquitous rum shop to rendezvous. Bedeau is off on the trail again.
*This was originally part of an article that first appeared in City Style and Living Magazine's Fall 2010 issue.]]>
