Insects:
One of the first things we needed to get used to was the insect population. We noticed strange piles of black sand in certain places...not the black sand at the beach either...this was in our house. Turns out this black sand is the product of termites tunneling thru the wood above. Many locals have told us this is common in old plantation homes and someone even told me that you shouldn't kill the termites because they are usually the only thing holding the house together. So, no biggee. We don't own the building, so it's not our problem as long as we avoid the soft spots in the floor. Another kind of termite we encountered was of the swarming variety...yes, swarming. We were sitting watching TV one night when we see little flaky things falling slowly from the light above us. Upon closer inspection, apparently termites swarm towards the light and find a nice piece of wood to crawl around on and then their wings fall off. That's about the strangest thing we've seen. Cockroaches are another insect you need to get used to. Hawaiian cockroaches don't hang around in shorts and Aloha shirts drinking Mai-Tai's. What differentiates them from the cockroaches we were used to in California is the size. The first one we encountered was about 2 inches long. I was the one that found our first cockroach. It was crawling on our ceiling in the bedroom. Julie was cooking dinner in the kitchen and since I knew she had quite an aversion to most insects, I thought I'd take care of this myself. At first, I thought a bear trap would be the most appropriate choice for the size of this thing but chose a rolled piece of paper instead. I made my strike and not only was this thing not phased, but it decided to TAKE FLIGHT!! Now that's another thing that differentiates a Hawaiian cockroach from a Californian and one that I really did not expect. Apparently I needed heavier artillery. I non-chalantly walked into the kitchen and grabbed a frying pan and when Julie asked what was up, I slyly said "oh, nothing"...smooth huh? Anyway, I went back to the bedroom and found that I couldn' hit the cockroach with the frying pan because it was in the corner, so I picked up a shoe. So, Julie decides to walk in and sees that I have a frying pan in one hand and a shoe in the other. I couldn't really make up any story of why I had such things in my hands so I pointed to the beast. I first heard the words "OH MY GOD!" and I said "Yup"..."and it flies!"....."WHAT?!?"...."yup"...OH MY GOD!" Well the cockroach wasn't impressed by our conversation and decided to take flight again. I swung with the frying pan and BAM...actually it was more like a "GONG" sound...direct hit..Home Run! Unfortunately I home runned it right into the space between the wall and the head of our bed. After some careful searching, we found it stunned...not dead under a pillow. We took it outside and threw it in the bushes. I couldn't understand how something that big could get in a house that I had caulked every square inch. Well, I found a hole the size of a golfball in our bedroom screen, we sewed it upand no more cockroaches in that house. There have been more in our current house but they tend to stay out of our way and if they don't go hide behind something when we come into the room, we just trap it in a cup and toss it outside. The good thing about Hawaiian cockroaches compared to the California variety is that one cockroach doesn't mean there's 20 more nearby.
Let's see, other bugs we've encountered are the Mosquitos which seem to have stealth capabilities because you don't know you got bit until it starts itching. Centipedes are another creepy insect. Fortunately we havn't seen any living ones but the dead one I saw was enught to scare the crap out of me. I work in a medical clinic and have seen many bites and they're vicious. We've made little contracts with them saying as long as we don't see them in the house or are ever bitten by one, we agree to not kill them when we see them anywhere else. So far, it's worked well. Also, we've heard if you give them a good bunch of dead mulch to hang around in outside, they have no need to come inside. Ants. The ants here can find any piece of food in your house that's left out for over 5 minutes. We had a problem with them taking a liking to our cats food. In fact we thought there was a large bug crawling up our counter but upon closer inspection found out it was a bunch of ants carrying a piece of cat food. We eventually bought a special dish that puts a mote between the cat food and the floor...has worked well so far.
Cane spiders are quite scary looking but apparently harmless to humans. They do eat the aforementioned cockroaches which is a good thing. They kinda look like Tarantulas but lighter in color. And they jump which is a bit creepy. There's stories of baseball sized Cane spiders in the Sugar Cane fields where you can see little glowing eyes staring at you. We haven't experienced that yet, so we don't know if it's true. The 2 I've encountered were chased into a jar and tossed outside. No biggee.
Anywayz, we loved living in Kauai with her Beautiful Beaches and wonderful people but we just couldn't afford to buy any property there. And prices were going up and up. Our credit wasn't great so we couldn't qualify for any more than about 150,000 and there is like one condo I think that's going for that and it is the ugliest thing I've ever seen...inside and out. I continued to work for Kauai Medical Clinic and found another side job at a Holistic clinic which was right up my alley. One of the guys I worked with told us about the Big Island of Hawaii and how cheap the land is. Well, he wasn't kidding. We found us a 3 bedroom, 2 bath place for 125,000 bucks on 2 acres of land. Check out the story on how we got there.