UPDATE, September 2007: Holy helmet! The prices of land in Nanawale has fallen to around 13-15K a lot. This is wonderful news. Perhaps more of my friends will actually buy up postage stamp of their own so they can paste themselves right next to me. Email me at lynchiang at yahoo dot com if you are interested. I am not a real estate agent, but I will direct you to my person on the ground there ... Lynette

More Gal in Hawaii

I've just spent one week riding the long and unwinding road in Arizona, on the Bike Friday Desert Camp 2006. Now in Texas, homestaying with customers and discovering some crazy spider must have crawled into my cycling clothes and is slowly eating me alive. Woe is me. Googling Arizona Spiders brings up some stuff rivaling Hollywood's makeup dept for "Staph Wars". Welcome to Scorched Pavement country.

That's The Gal Esq. to you. I am now officially the owner of a postage-stamp sized piece of turf - or rather, lava, fern and Ohia - on the Big Island, Hawaii. It's in the Nanawale Estates subdivision in the far east region of the island, about 18 flat bikeable miles south of the clapboard town of Hilo and about a mile from the cool hippie pueblo of Pahoa, just off Hwy 130 (click on color map below).

I looked at land in the Big Island 3 years ago when prices were more like $5-10K a sliver, but kept procrastinating until they rose to around $20-30K in the cheapest areas. I don't quite have enough money for this (I now have $50 to last to the end of the month) but I thought, what the hell, this time I'll buy it. Now I can quite irrationally tell myself 'I own a piece of land in Hawaii' even though I can't really take advantage of it unless I marry a US citizen or garner a greencard, neither of which look like they're happening any time soon. Oh well. Think of it as forced savings. Property tax is just $100 a year, there's no time limit to build and I can't retire on $20K in the white western world anyway.

The lot is in a largely undeveloped, unmanicured (thank Bhudda) which got a bad rap at one time for its lowlife. But, as my real estate savvy biker friend Charles said, good deals usually have to come up from somewhere less salubrious - if it's already yuppified, it's already unaffordable. I think the correct word is 'emerging' as in 'emerging markets'. I lived in Costa Rica for 2 years and frankly, it reminds me of there. Why, for under $15-20K you can even purchase a cheapish slab of solid, unspadeable lava in the nearby Kalapana region to erect your architecturally significant, Gehry-inspired yurt-on-stilts, or an acre of windswept wilderness in the frontiering southern Kau region of the island. See this website for this week's cooled magma deals.

But what about eruptions (visions of Pompeii scroll beneath swaying palms and piina coladas)? Well, it's not like the Big Island is Mt Etna, for the most part it's eruptions are slow flow, and apparently in the past there's been time to back up your laptop, feed the cat and drive to a higher place. What I do notice is that there is a vitality about people there, not a paved-in quiet desperation I experience in many urban places on the mainland. Perhaps it's that hot, churning movement deep underfoot, like walking over the proverbial hot coals. Down in the south it's pouring into the sea, day and night. If lava covers my yurt, wait til it cools, come back, dig it up or build right over the top just like everyone else. See the volcano movies and photo galleries in my Hawaii Chronicles.

Click on map for an exploded and zoomable PDF view of the neighborhood (if you view it in Acrobat). Mine's the pizza-slice circled 785 and underlined "15"

Why The Big Island? Just take a look at the way my car-free friend Ann Kobsa lives, 99% self-sustainable, in my Hawaii Chronicles and you'll see why. Sun and rain are offered freely and copiously in Hawaii. I plan to maybe cut a little trail into it, camp on it, grow some papaya trees and vanilla ... I do believe that if everyone had a little piece of land to put a yurt on and grow a papaya tree, there'd be less war. Look at much of the misery in the world. It's often about not having a place for your footprint, fighting over a strip of land. The notion of even having to buy a piece of land is bizarre; it will outlive every puny body on this planet, even that of Oprah (who felt the inexplicable need to buy up and fence off an entire hunk of Hawaii coastline because "god's not making it anymore"). We're only here to borrow it; the native Indian tribes knew all about that, but that's whole other philosophical discussion. As I said, people in Hawaii seem bouyant and yet calm, even the many just scraping by. Perhaps it's something to do with the subconscious knowledge that the very basics ingredients need to sustain life - sun and water - are falling freely out of the sky, and no oil consortium or government or utitility company can stop it. Think about that.

I'd love it if people I liked and vice-versa bought a lot near me ... to be part of my community. For those who want to buy a similar, 1/5 acre, circa $20K lot near the really neat, hippie-ish town of Pahoa (good internet, library, wholefoods store, Thai restaurant etc) contact me and study this site.

Click on photo below to wander around my postage stamp piece of Hawaii (3.5 Mb Quicktime movie clip)



Click here for a neat topo map of the entire subdivision
(thanks to hilojohn.com for that link)


The funky hippie town of Pahoa, about a mile away


The disused Railroad Avenue at the back of the subdivision, a street away from my lot. It's a former railroad track now earmarked for development as a dedicated bike path, which will offer quicker access to the coast by bike than the10 miles on the main road. Yay! Those are rose apple trees.

SOME LINKS

Look for land in Hawaii A good starting point
Month by Month Sales Data for Nanawale and other interesting links
Hawaii Property tax site You can see if your neighbors are paying their tax :o)
Hawaii County Website For residents and landowners
Nanawale Topo map of the entire subdivision (thanks to hilojohn.com for that link)
Another Nanawale real estate site with pics of other areas in the subdivision