Hōkūleʻa Update | August 5, 2015

Aloha mai kākou, this is Kaniela reporting to you from Bali on the Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage with Hōkūleʻa. This whole week has been an amazing experience. We came to a place that has so many connections with home. You know the culture is alive here – some of the dances we’ve witnessed, and songs we’ve heard are beautiful. We’ve had a chance to share our voyage, our mele, and our ʻoli as well.

Along with all the beautiful things we’ve seen on our learning opportunities and learning journeys, we also noticed they have a lot of the same issues with what goes on environmentally. Case in point, you can look right now and look at the water, just floating around as we see plastic and garbage collecting. These are the things we keep noticing, as we go to these beautiful places, as we go to island communities, we find that it is so similar to back home. The people are more similar than different and the aloha spirit is alive here. Everybody has helped us, everybody has opened the doors, given us food, but the more we talk to them we find that with Mālama Honua we need to continue to work harder because there’s a lot of trouble in small communities like this. They are impacted by a larger population and it’s the problems with plastic we see and the problems with environmental degradation when you bring a lot of people that don’t really know.

We had a great canoe opportunity to share our canoe, our waʻa, our story with the people of Bali. We heard their stories, we gave them our stories and it’s just been all smiles. We are looking forward to seeing what happens as the canoe leaves and makes it’s way across the Indian Ocean, more uncharted territory for Hōkūleʻa, as they go to Mauritius and across very dangerous seas to some very amazing places. Please keep following us, Hokulea.com and please keep trying to mālama honua back home, we miss you all, we can’t wait to get the canoe back there. Aloha!

Please help keep us sailing for future generations. All contributions make a difference for our voyage. Mahalo nui loa!