Circumnavigating Hawaii Big Island by Bicycle

The Circumnavigator

Part 2:
The Ola'a Forest

I pulled up to a seemingly impenetrable wall of green.

"Nobody goes into the Ola'a, if you fell down and got back up, you'd never find your way out!"
--The General Store's clerk after asking for directions

With that dire warning, I found myself standing outside a barely contained, impenetrable wall of greenery. It wasn't hard to see what she had meant, the light that managed to filter down through the forest's thick canopy cast the deep rainforest into twilight shadows. After marking where I stood at the forest's edge on my GPS, I plunged in.

The forest was surprsingly quiet, despite the apparent abundance of life here, the dense vegetation muffled sounds. As I stumbled across the soft mattress of decaying plant matter that served as ground here, thick drops of water rolled off leaves and splattered on my plastic rain shell. In the silence each drop sounded like a shot. In just a few steps I had lost all sight of the road. The woman I had asked directions from wasn't wrong. One mistake in here, and an unwary explorer might never leave.

At some point I crossed paths with a tree larger than any other I had seen yet. Inspired by the classic adventure trope of scouting the path by climbing a tree and looking ahead, I shed my pack and made my way towards the dim light above.

When I breached the canopy my eyes took a second to adjust. Around me, in all directions was a luxurious, neverending blanket of green.