I am not one to take silly North American rules too seriously. Everywhere you go there is a sign telling you what you can, or mostly what you can not do.
In an attempt to find some off road trails for my running exploits I decided to go on a short hike and ended up wandering the trails north of Honolulu on my own, on Sunday afternoon. The trails were quite well marked to start with and I had seen the signs with the red writing but not taken notice of them! Why should I? They would just be more ridiculous restrictions on my freedom, so I had ignored them, until I that is, I came to up to a three way fork in the path which was taxing my navigation. It was a beautiful spot, with a good view so I sat down on a log to check my small map. It was at this point I read the sign! Then I looked down at what I was wearing. Brown shorts, green T-shirt. Pretty much I had chosen to wear.... Camouflage! Damn it! The signs say 'hunting with dogs', but this is America and hunting, is always hunting with guns, whether they have a dog with them or not. All I needed to do now was to squeal like a pig and there would be the whole redneck hunting community trying to kill me. On a Sunday, on a public trail!
The pig hunting thing had moved to a place further back in my mind as I walked on through this network of stunning trails. Soon I found myself in a thicket of bamboo so dense and tall that it made the path dark and was like a weird narrow corridor. I will photograph it next time I am there because it was really cool. However! this was the moment I started hearing, BANG! BANG! BANG! Then I started to run, I considered making loud human noises but was busy calculating whether the density of the bamboo thicket was enough to keep me safe from bullets, meant for wild pigs? "Yes/No, Yes you'll be fine!/Nope you wont! Yes this is pretty thick/Shit! I'm not sure." BANG BANG BANG. I was running nearly as fast as Cliff can at this point, when I came rushing around the corner upon an elderly couple on the trail. They were the first people I had seen so far and I had surprised them a little by running up on them through the dense bamboo. feeling pleased that at least we had safety in numbers! I said to them that I was worried about the pig hunting and what did they think of the shots? They laughed..
We rounded the next corner and the path opened up a little where a few cars were just visible through the trees. Just to the left, there was some buildings. On the roof of one the building there was some guys using a NAIL GUN, fixing something on the roof!
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