At the Newsstand: $3.99

The GreatHomecoming Höküle‘a in South Africa

Frontier of ScienceBishop Museum in Papua New Guinea

ExtremeRowingCrossing oceans by muscle and oar

volume 19 number 3June / July 2016

T h e m a g a z i n e o f h a w a i i a n a i r l i n e s

hanahou

! w

ww

.hanahou.com

June / July 2016

Rose

P

hoto

: Sel

f-po

rtra

itFe

rrar

P

hoto

: Car

oly

n A

nner

udBe

ntle

y

Pho

to: R

ob

Step

hens

on

Co

sta

P

hoto

: O

livie

r Ko

ning

Contributors

“Everybody in the village spoke about the world in threes and in absolutes: If you don’t have fish, garden, canoe, then you die. If you don’t have taro, cassava, sago then you die,” says Sarah Rose, who traveled to Kamiali, a remote fishing village in Papua New Guinea, for “Where the River Meets the Sea” in this issue. “When I explained that I live on an island, too, and that their island is even bigger than my island—Manhattan—and that I don’t have any of those things, they gave me a puzzled look, as though astonished that I was still alive.” Rose is author of For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History (Viking) and writes for the Wall Street Journal and Men’s Fitness.

To shoot “The Farthest Shore” in this issue, Honolulu-based photographer Monte Costa flew literally halfway around the world to rendezvous with Höküle‘a in South Africa— the halfway point in its landmark circumnavigation of the globe. “It was just amazing to think this little canoe that carries so much ancient wisdom had sailed as far away as possible from home,” Costa says. Before she left Hawai‘i, Costa heard a talk by Louis G. Herman, a political philoso-pher at the University of Hawai‘i. Herman, who was born in South Africa, noted that both human culture and humanity’s connection to the sea began along Africa’s southern coast. That sparked a realization for Costa. “It’s this universal pull to the ocean that inspires me in my own work,” she says.

“The villagers asked me how their world compares to mine,” says photographer PF Bentley, who shot “Where the River Meets the Sea” at the Kamiali Biological Research Station in Papua New Guinea for this issue. The answer took some thought. “Most of their days are spent dealing with food — growing it, harvesting it, walking it three kilometers down the beach, preparing it, cooking it, maybe killing a pig on Sundays” he says. After two weeks at Kamiali, Bentley finally found the words to answer the villagers’ question. “I told them that their world is simple but difficult. My world is easy but complicated.” A former TIME Magazine photog-rapher and special correspondent, Bentley currently resides on Moloka‘i and is a frequent contributor to Hana Hou!

“Connecting with Höküle‘a in South Africa felt a little like being a contestant on The Amazing Race,” says Derek Ferrar, who sailed aboard the Hawaiian voyaging canoe for “The Farthest Shore” in this issue. “The itinerary on that leg of the journey around the world changed constantly to adapt to the cape region’s notoriously treacherous weather,” he says, so after flying halfway around the globe to Johannesburg, “I actually had to check the voyage’s live online tracking map to find out which port town to get to.” The former Hana Hou! editor also wrote about Höküle‘a’s voyage to Japan in 2007. The best part of covering the canoe, Ferrar says, is that “as soon as you come aboard, the crew just immediately adopts you as family no matter who you are.”

Questions? Comments? Story ideas? Follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/HanaHou.

Meeting Hokule‘a

at the halfway point

on its journey

around the world:

The coast of Africa

102 103

Literally a world away from home, the crew of the Hawaiian voyaging canoe Hokule‘a

stands at the mouth of a tall sea cave at the far southern end of Africa. They gaze out at the golden shoreline,

contemplating the shared roots of our human family. Their host, South African archeologist

Peter Nilssen, spreads his arms wide and proclaims,

“Welcome home.”Continued on page 116

STORY BY DEREK FERRARPHOTOS BY MONTE COSTA

104 105

Midway into Höküle‘a ’s Mälama Honua — or “Care for Island Earth”— voyage around the world, crew members explore an ecological “hope spot” at South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. An incredible multitude of life thrives along the kelp shoreline here, providing a rich food source for early human ancestors who once dwelt along this coast. Opening spread: After rounding the cape, Hökü makes her way past the soaring cliff line known as the Twelve Apostles. From the start, planners had considered this leg — notorious for shipwrecks and home to the legendary ghost ship the Flying Dutchman — to be among the riskiest of the entire voyage. Previous spread: A member of a Hawai‘i school delegation that met the canoe in Cape Town offers a maile lei to the ancients in a cave where some of the earliest evidence of human intelligence has been found.

106 107

Members of the Xhosa tribal dance and music group Ke Kuru warm up to officially welcome Höküle‘a at a Celebration of Friendship along Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront district. A beaming Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu presided over the proceedings, which featured hula and chant from the Hawai‘i delegation in tandem with the drumming, ululation and flying leaps of the local performers. Tutu’s daughter Mpho spoke eloquently on the world peace icon’s behalf, saying that Höküle‘a ’s visit “reconnects us with each other on a primal level. … Even though Polynesia is so far away, if you go far enough back, you will find African blood.”

108 109

Draped in the cloud layer known locally as the “table-cloth,” Table Mountain towers over Hökü’s arrival at Cape Town, the culmination of her South African leg. Considered some of the most ancient topography on earth, the cape region is also home to its own distinct endemic floral ecosystem, which includes many varieties of protea, South Africa’s national flower and a favorite exotic in Hawai‘i. Founded by Dutch settlers in the 1600s as a supply point for merchant ships rounding the cape en route to and from Asia, South Africa’s “Mother City” has seen booming visitor counts since the end of apart-heid in the 1990s.

110 111

112 113

Jenna Ishii, an apprentice navigator and education coordinator for the worldwide voyage, contemplates land’s end at the very southern tip of the African continent at Cape Agulhas (not, as is commonly believed, at the Cape of Good Hope, which lies about 150 miles to the northwest). After Höküle‘a sailed in the dark of night past this meeting point of the Indian and Atlantic oceans, students in the Hawaiian delegation returned to pay respects to the powerful land- scape and our human forebears who once inhabited it. Previous spread: Chief navigator and Polynesian Voyaging Society President Nainoa Thompson said that one thing he hadn’t been prepared for in South Africa is how giving people were. “Whenever we needed something, it’s almost shocking the lengths they’d go to in order to help us,” he says.

114 115

been capable of settling vast areas of the Pacific purposefully, using large, double- hulled sailing canoes and celestial naviga-tion. Höküle‘a’s maiden voyage to Tahiti in 1976 unleashed a wave of Polynesian cul-tural pride, and the wa‘a (canoe) became an icon of the Hawaiian cultural renaissance.

Over the next four decades, Hökü voyaged nearly 150,000 nautical miles, including several major journeys through the Pacific Islands as well as to Japan and

(Continued from p.105)A year and a half and more than ten

thousand nautical miles into her epic journey around the world, Höküle‘a has arrived in South Africa—virtually as far away from Hawai‘i as you can get—only to be welcomed to a spot that all of us might call home.

In 1997 Peter and fellow archeologist Jonathan Kaplan were conducting a survey here at Pinnacle Point, near the beach town of Mossel Bay, as part of the approval process to build the golf resort that now sits atop the cliff. “I’m the blessed arche-ologist who first walked into cave 13B,” Peter recalls, his blue eyes blazing. “I came around the corner, saw this and was just blown away.”

What he saw were man-made artifacts dating back more than 160,000 years, cemented into exposed layers of sediment and protected for millennia by a sand dune that had once sealed off the entrance. Peter explains that scientists now theorize that all human beings descend from a small population of “anatomically modern” Homo sapiens who lived in southern Africa around this period. From these caves, he says, have come the earliest known signs of uniquely human creativity: shell jewelry, pigments for body adornment and symbolic painting, refined stone tools.

To reach the caves today, you have to pass through the resort’s security gate and park at a posh clubhouse. A winding path leads past a precarious clifftop green— a tough shot— to steep wooden stairs de- scending the cliff face to the shore. Peter warns the crew to keep an eye out, because the low bush is “rich in puff adders.” Inside the shallow cave, the crew mills around quietly, absorbing the magnitude of the place and reflecting on Hawaiians’ part in this story as one of the most recent indige- nous people to have discovered and settled their homeland, only fifteen hundred years ago or so. “It’s an amazing moment,” says chief navigator Nainoa Thompson to no one in particular, “when one of the young-est native cultures comes to see the place of the oldest.”

It’s mid-November 2015, and the crew of fourteen has already been together for more than a month on this African leg of a worldwide voyage that began in Hawai‘i a year and a half before. Named for the “star of gladness”—Arcturus to the Western world—that hangs like a beacon directly above Hawai‘i, the sixty-two-foot Höküle‘a was initially built to demonstrate a point: that ancestral Polynesians had

the US Pacific Northwest. Then in 2008, leaders of the voyaging community gathered to discuss how the canoe could address what they saw as an environmental crisis facing the world’s oceans and beyond. They decided to “string a lei of hope” around the planet by sending Höküle‘a to become the first Polynesian canoe to circumnavigate the globe, carrying a mes-sage of mälama honua, or caring for the Earth—a phrase that became the title for the voyage.

After six years of preparation, Hökü left Hawai‘i in May 2014 and revisited familiar Pacific Island ports of call as far south as Aotearoa (New Zealand), before venturing for the first time to Australia and becoming the only known Polynesian canoe to enter the Indian Ocean. From northern Australia she journeyed to her only Asian stop— Bali—before making the deep-sea crossing to the island nation of Mauritius, where the African leg was to begin.

Planners at the Polynesian Voyaging Society knew from the start that this leg could be the riskiest of the voyage, because the waters around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope are notorious for shipwrecks, freak storms and rogue waves big enough to swallow tankers. Over the centuries some three thousand ships have met their end in these parts.

The first segment of the leg had already been rough. A planned stop in Madagascar —one of the globe’s most significant envi- ronmental hot spots—had to be scrapped when a violent storm kicked up and offi-cials closed the harbor. Then, as the canoe continued on, a crashing wave ripped through the canvas covering a section of bunks, dousing the sleeping area and forc-ing crew members to labor through the gale to stitch the material back together.

Just as the wa‘a was making a beeline across the channel to mainland Africa, another nasty front started blowing up from the south, so Nainoa made the call to turn north and seek shelter at Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. Unable to dock there due to immigration restrictions, Hökü rode out the fierce lightning storm while tossing at anchor in the city’s harbor amid the rushing currents of a major river mouth, as huge cargo ships plowed by. When the weather cleared, the wa‘a began port-hopping down the South African coast, mostly under tow by its escort vessel, the fifty-foot sailboat Gershon II, in order to make it to safety as quickly as possible ahead of the next big blow.

Now, in the parking lot above the Pin-nacle Point caves, Nainoa says it’s just

occurred to him that we are within a mile of the exact opposite longitude from Hökü’s home berth in Honolulu. “That means that every inch we sailed in the thousands of miles to get here, we were leaving Hawai‘i. And every inch we sail from here on will be taking us home,” he says. “So to me, spiritually, this is a critical turning point of our voyage. And then when Peter says ‘welcome home,’ it just blows my mind.”

In the first rays of a chilly dawn, big man Sam Kapoi, the crew videographer, sends a trio of conch blasts echoing through Mossel Bay’s industrial port as Höküle‘a casts off. Destination: the harbor village of Simon’s Town, some two hundred miles east in the shadow of the cape. From there it’s a day-hop to the comely metropolis of Cape Town, South Africa’s “Mother City” and the final port of the African leg before the canoe crosses the Atlantic to Brazil— another historic first in Polynesian voyag-ing. A large cultural and educational dele- gation from Hawai‘i is due to meet the wa‘a in Cape Town, along with friend of the canoe Desmond Tutu, who had blessed Höküle‘a and even taken the helm on a brief sail during a visit to Hawai‘i several years before.

Soon we’re cruising off the coast under a dark, squally sky. As the canoe slices through gray-black water, groups of seals seem to salute, holding one flipper up in the air (a cooling mechanism, apparently). Every so often a humpback whale breaches; we’re told it’s the most abundant year for them that anyone here can remember. At night the wa‘a leaves incredible trails of phosphorescent plankton in her wake.

At sea, life on the canoe follows a comforting, rhythmic cycle. Everyone is divided into four-hour watches, with each crew member spending two watches a day helping to steer and maintain the canoe. Because there are more crew than beds, several crew members have to “hot bunk,” with one occupant sleeping while the other is on watch. The crew sleeps scrunched head-to-toe in a line of five-foot “holes” built into the top of each hull and covered only by a leaky canvas tarp. As one familiar canoe saying goes, “If you want to stay dry, stay home.”

A highlight of being on watch is manning the sweep, the giant paddle that serves as the canoe’s rudder. To steer, you tuck the polished wood handle under your arm and lever it against the wave action. In calm water all it takes is a gentle lean, but as the wa‘a gets into more serious swells the sweep rears and bucks like a rodeo bull.

“Don’t oversteer it,” one veteran advises. “Feel the canoe.” Working the sweep gets addicting, and people often find them-selves reluctant to give it up when their watch is over.

On this relatively brief—and chilly— hop, no one bothers taking a bucket shower of cold seawater. But there’s no getting around strapping on a safety harness, closing the token privacy curtain and hanging your ‘ökole out over the waves to

“commune with nature.” That’s where I’m headed in the freezing wind at one o’clock in the morning when watch captain Keahi Omai, a Honolulu policeman, suddenly hands me a Tim Tam cookie. “Congratu-lations!” he says. “We’re passing the southern tip of Africa.”

In the moonless dark we can see the blinking beam of the lighthouse at Cape Agulhas—which at close to thirty-five degrees south is the true southern end of the continent (not, as in popular belief, the Cape of Good Hope). An umbrella of stars illuminates the African sky, including a meteor arcing overhead like a benediction as we pass symbolically from the Indian Ocean into the Atlantic. It’s humbling to think that Hökü has just entered her second “first-ever” ocean, home to so much human history but unknown to ancestral Polyne-sian voyagers. The bundled-up watch crew poses at the stern for a group photo that promptly gets beamed back to Honolulu for the evening news. “Wow guys,” Nainoa says pensively. “The Atlantic.”

Toward the end of the two-to-six a.m. watch, the sky lightens and blooms into dawn, revealing row after row of coastal mountain ridges. A following breeze kicks up, and we’re finally able to break tow and open the sails. Now the deck rings with the cry of “One-two-three huki!” as the crew pulls lines. The climbing sun has us shedding layers, and it’s nice to feel the deck under bare feet. The ride is much smoother under sail, and everyone seems happier. As the hour creeps past noon, Hökü rounds a hilly point into huge False Bay, so named because early mariners thought it offered shelter from the cape’s fierce storms, but they were tragically mistaken. To our left lies Cape Point, one of the world’s great nautical landmarks, its long finger of hills ending in sharp cliffs.

The action picks up as we approach Simon’s Town, with constant sail adjust-ments in the stiff breeze. Eventually the canoe is met by a boat from the all-volun-teer National Sea Rescue Institute, which has been shepherding Hökü into ports all along the South African coast. It pulls alongside, and one of its crew jumps aboard in a bright red wetsuit and yellow helmet.

Because Höküle‘a has no motor to slow her down, docking is always an adventure. After the NSRI boat tows us past the rather humble home base of the South African Navy, where a line of penguins preens along the seawall, we do a quick spin into the yacht harbor dock. There are a few tense moments, with Nainoa yelling to

From tribal drummers and a red-hot kids’ brass band to student dancers at a township elementary school, Höküle‘a ’s crew was welcomed to South Africa with exuberant music and dance. Crew members were struck by the local traditional value known as ubuntu, or human kindness, and its resonance with the Hawaiian credo of aloha.

During a visit to Hawai‘i several years earlier, Desmond Tutu (third from top, with Nainoa) had blessed Höküle‘a and even taken her helm during a short sail. In return, Nainoa and the visiting cultural delegation honored the famed archbishop emeritus in Cape Town as one of the world’s great navigators of humanity. Top and bottom: Youthful traditional performers from opposite sides of the planet come together in rhythmic unity, while a steady stream of visitors aboard the canoe learn about the voyage from crew members like Maui fisherman Timi Gilliom.

116 117

to smear some on. “This literally goes back more than a

hundred thousand years,” Craig says, adding that the remains of sea creatures found in the caves also provide the earliest evidence of human interaction with the ocean. “Imagine early folk coming down from the caves, gathering food on the shore- line and learning to swim and dive. It’s hard to imagine how connected they were.”

Drawing a rough star compass in a

cinch or slacken various lines, but in the end Hökü snuggles in among the pleasure boats without mishap.

While a group of drummers dance a welcome from a nearby wharf, a delegation of yacht club officials comes aboard to welcome the crew to this artsy seaside village, essentially a suburb of Cape Town. The harbor director, a cheery, snow-haired chap named Spilly, declares, “This town was founded to give refuge to mariners like you, so we welcome you. Your canoe is definitely one of the most unusual vessels ever to put in here.”

On a rocky beach near the tip of Cape Point Nature Reserve, Nainoa and several crew members are getting a taste— literally—of how the ancient humans of this area lived. With a troupe of curious baboons spying from the underbrush, documentary filmmaker Craig Foster picks small limpets and bits of seaweed off the rocks and gives them to the crew members to taste (you guessed it; they’re crunchy and salty). Foster grew up in this area and has spent years getting to know every nuance of its intensely diverse shoreline environment. Known for spending long periods tracking with the San people in the Kalahari desert, he tries to experience the coastline, too, as its ancient residents might have. This includes conditioning himself to dive for long periods without a wetsuit in the cape’s frigid, kelpy waters.

Craig is the primary reason for Hökü-le‘a’s stop in Simon’s Town, at the urging of Nainoa’s friend and famed ocean ex-plorer Sylvia Earle, whose Mission Blue initiative has designated the area one of the planet’s “hope spots”—places critical to the health of the ocean that need special protection. A million people come out to the cape each year, Craig says, “but most of them just to snap a photo at the ‘tip of Africa’; they have no idea about this highly cryptic environment.” He turns over a rock to reveal scores of tiny white mollusks. “There may not seem to be much, but there are literally billions of animals around us,” he says.

Perching on a flat rock, he produces an abalone shell and some soft, red ochre stone, a piece of white bone and some charcoal—the same kind of pigment tools found in the prehistoric cave sites. “I’ve never done this before, but this is probably the most powerful symbol of the explosion of intelligence that occurred here,” he says, grinding the ochre against the shell, mixing it with a little seawater into a reddish-brown paste, and inviting everyone

patch of sand, Nainoa explains to Craig the traditional navigation system he learned from his teacher, Micronesian master navigator Mau Piailug. One key, he says, is knowing the flight patterns of different seabirds so you can follow them to islands. “It sounds very similar to tracking with a San master in the desert,” Craig says. “There’s lots of bird language, which can tell you what kind of animals are around. In many ways the ears are more important than the eyes. My teacher could feel a leopard a mile away. You have to, or you die really quickly.”

The next day is sunny, with a gentle sea and light headwind as Höküle‘a leaves Simon’s Town to round the Cape of Good Hope. Under tow by Gershon and with an NSRI escort, the wa‘a glides past upscale hillside homes until the wildlands of the cape begin. The ridgeline is striated with bands of brown rock and green fynbos (or “fine bush” in Afrikaans), the wind-adapted, largely endemic mountain brush that is the cape area’s own distinct floral ecosystem—one that includes many varieties of protea, South Africa’s national flower and a favorite exotic in Hawai‘i.

Joining the rest of the crew in snapping selfies as we pass the point, I imagine how countless sailors must have felt as they gazed at this same spectacular view, breathing a sigh of relief at passing by unscathed. This, after all, is the dread “graveyard of ships” and the waters of the mythical Flying Dutchman, a ghostly vessel said to appear before the onset of a cape maelstrom. “With every bounding keel that dares my rage,” one sixteenth-century Portuguese poet wrote of the cape’s deadly reputation, “eternal war my rocks and storms shall wage.” Happily there is no sign of either a maelstrom or the Dutchman this fine day.

True to the digital nature of this voyage, with its live satellite tracking map, real-time social media updates and online classroom “hangouts” webcast from the wa‘a’s deck, Sam records a video of Nainoa to be shared around the world. “It’s been an extraordinary voyage, but a challenging one,” Nainoa says to the camera. “Even when there’s no wind, the ocean never stops moving here, continually working the canoe and the crew. But it’s been a privilege and honor to be along the coast of Africa, and I don’t think this crew will ever forget it.”

As we approach Cape Town, the wind picks up and Nainoa has the crew break tow and unfurl Höküle‘a’s iconic crab-claw

sails for a beauty shot. Cruising past the cathedral-like ridges known as the Twelve Apostles, we do a long series of tacks, with the crew hustling back and forth between the wa‘a’s two masts to open and close sails. “C’mon guys, it’s time for crew training,” Nainoa jokes on this last stretch of the African leg.

At first a few apartment buildings come into view, then Cape Town’s giant, disc-shaped World Cup stadium. Finally we round a point and see soaring, flat-topped Table Mountain, topped with a thin drape of cloud known locally as the “tablecloth.” We pass the low profile of Robben Island, site of the notorious prison (now a histori-cal park and tourist attraction) where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were locked up during the apartheid era.

Close to shore, the wind turns suddenly cold, sending us scurrying for our layers and proving the adage in these parts that you can have a year’s worth of weather in a single day. Soon another rescue boat of hardy NSRI volunteers shows up and guides Hökü to a buttery docking in a center-stage berth at the V&A Waterfront, a mad circus of malls, restaurants, luxury condos—even a Ferris wheel—that somehow also remains a working com-mercial harbor.

“Two months ago this crew started out in Mauritius, destination Cape Town,” says senior navigator and second-in-command Kälepa Baybayan as the crew joins hands for an arrival pule, or prayer. “Well, we’re here. It’s been an honor and privilege to spend the last two months with the crews of Höküle‘a and Gershon. You are my friends and my heroes.”

A couple of days later, Hökü is back at sea on a sunny, breezy day, tacking out by Robben Island on a celebratory sail before returning to the harbor for the official welcoming ceremony. At the sweep is the prime benefactor of the South African leg, Pam Omidyar, a Hawai‘i-based phi-lanthropist and the wife of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Like everyone else aboard, Pam is beaming.

Hökü glides back into the harbor to the cheers of several hundred well-wishers and the sound of African drums mixed with the chanting of around fifty students and teachers from several Hawai‘i schools, who have flown all the way across the globe to honor the canoe. Flashing his trademark teddy-bear smile, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, or “Arch” to those around him, sits bundled in a black wrap and fisherman’s cap with a kukui nut lei.

The crew huddles arm-over-arm at the back of the wa‘a for a final pule. Sam sounds a last conch blast, and they file in procession up the gangplank. Facing the crowd, they launch into several chants from the voyaging repertoire, ending with the crowd-pleasing “‘Aiha‘a Höküle‘a,” featuring hearty shouting and thigh-slapping. One by one, they step up and embrace the 84-year-old Arch, who keeps repeating “Wonderful, wonderful! Aloha!”

with a little clap of his hands. The US ambassador says a few words,

then a representative of Cape Town’s mayor speaks. Finally Tutu’s daughter Mpho, an Anglican reverend herself, takes the mic, resplendent in a flowing red tunic and headdress. “We lift our hearts to those who have come across the oceans to be with us today in our gorgeous Mother City,” she says. “The voyage of the Höküle‘a recon-nects us with each other on a primal level. It harks back to our oneness, to the starting point of our interconnectedness and our human journey. … Welcome home!”

After a few days of public tours on the waterfront, the crew strips the canoe down for a couple weeks of drydock maintenance before the next leg across the Atlantic, the longest single stretch in Höküle‘a’s history. Before they fly home to make way for the incoming drydock crew, there’s a small ho‘oku‘u, or release ceremony, with everyone gathering on deck to share last reflections. “Every journey has a beginning and an end,” Kälepa starts, “and I want to give everybody some kind of voice to the ending of the voyage.”

“I think the people in Hawai‘i would be very proud to know the job you did on this sail,” says Archie Kalepa, a famous big-wave surfer and lifesaver from Maui. “When you think about Höküle‘a, you think about Hawaiians and Polynesians. But after this, my thinking about the canoe has expanded from that — it goes into mankind and humanity, and the Earth. I think that’s the bigger message that this canoe is carrying right now.”

“I thought this was a well-balanced crew,” says elder statesman Billy Richards, who sailed on Höküle‘a’s maiden voyage in 1976. “We had different energies, but they worked together. Every mix is good, but this one was very special because of the leg itself.”

At the last it’s popular crew member Max Yarawamai — an eagle-eye at spotting islands—who puts this very twenty-first- century voyage into perspective. A land-scaping contractor originally from a small island in Micronesia who was close to master navigator Mau Piailug, he says the African voyage reminded him of all the times “Papa Mau would tell me, ‘You cannot just stick with the old anymore. You gotta take the good from the old and the good from the new.’ Well, this trip has taught me that. I don’t call it sailing any-more; it’s so much more than that. We’re carrying Hawai‘i on our backs, and we’re showing it to the world.” HH

Top: Hökü’s fair-weather sail around the Cape of Good Hope was hopping with hordes of curious cape fur seals (top) and thick pods of migrating whales (second from top), which locals said were more abundant this season than any other in memory. Third from top: A wooden stairway leads down a cliff below a golf resort at Pinnacle Point to ancient sea caves where archeologist Peter Nilssen (bottom) was one of the first to discover evidence of early human creative thought.

Filmmaker Craig Foster (top), who’s spent time tracking with the San people in the Kalahari, introduces crew members to the “highly cryptic” environment of the cape coast. Foster presents Nainoa and Archie Kalepa with an abalone shell palette (second from top) containing the same pigments that prehistoric ancestors likely used for decoration. This is the “old science,” Foster says. Third from top: Members of the Hawai‘i delegation at the top of Table Mountain, where park ranger Paddy Gordon explains the area’s geology and ecosystems.

118 119