Travel

Volunteering with the Hawaii Land Trust

I checked into Howzit Hostel and saw the chance to volunteer as one of their tours

In Wailuku, Maui there’s a hostel named Howzit Hostel. It’s one of the best hostels in town, and even though it’s kind of far from the beach, it has daily tours that are free.

In addition to activities like Whale Watching, Drum Circle, and hikes, one of the tours they offer is Maui Love. It’s a chance to partner with a local not for profit on Maui to do service work. I love volunteering when I travel. I recommend everyone takes the opportunity to volunteer, either when traveling or with your local community.

So together with about a dozen others, we drove about 15 minutes to the Hawaii Land Trust at 8a. I thought it was ironic that the volunteer tour starts the earliest of them all (7:45a, yawn, get me some coffee, please).

We started out with a short orientation from the manager of the site. Gosh, I really should be better about recording the details, but I don’t know his name. But that’s his picture. He was a big, cool Hawaiian dude, and he sang a couple of songs at a blessing/intention setting ceremony.

Anyways, our job for the day was to clear spaces in the grass, dig holes, and plant a bunch of trees…about 70 as far as I can tell.

The trees were Loulu trees, native Hawaiian trees. Apparently, rats eat holes in the trees and then feed on the growth wood or something and they kill the entire tree.

The Hawaii Land Trust bought about 277 acres of land adjacent to the beach that was supposed to be developed into a golf course at one point, and has decided to protect and restore it. Part of the restoration is making a wetland and it would be the only wetland on the island, they said. These types of projects take years, and they are very grateful for the volunteers.

So after our orientation, we got tools and we walked to the first site where we dug and planted about 25 trees. This was about 20 meters from the beach, and unfortunately we found a lot of plastic.

After we dug and planted the trees, we drove to another site. We had to clear castor bean plants and then plant the trees. For this one, I took a before and after picture. Some of the trees were very, very small.

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First Work, then Play

We finished volunteering really early actually, so our tour driver took us to Ioa Valley. We went into a river to cool off and hang out.

After chilling in the cool river for a few minutes, we then laid on the rocks warmed by the sun. It was really nice.

After that, the tour driver took us on a little hike and we found a passion fruit tree. We found a passion fruit fruit on the ground and opened it up. It was so good! It was my first time eating passion fruit!