God’s Country

WAIMEA – It wouldn’t be easy to find a more perfect day for the 24th Annual Waimea Cherry Blossom Heritage Festival, held here Saturday.

With blue skies, splashes of pink cherry blossoms and the snow-capped Mauna Kea in the distance, it was exactly what keeps visitors coming out.

“It’s God’s country,” said Waimea resident Kupono Ng, who came out to Saturday’s festival with his family.

“Look at that view right there,” he added, pointing to the blossoms and Mauna Kea behind them.

On Saturday, hundreds of visitors, from near and far, came out to Historic Church Row Park. Many of them took part in the Lion Dance, “feeding” cash to the Chinese lions of the Hawaii Lion Dance Association with hopes of good luck in the coming year.

Others, meanwhile, simply took in the day’s sights, sounds and smells, sitting beneath the trees as their branches swayed in the breeze.

The park would have looked very different decades ago, before the trees ever took root here.

“This area was just open field,” said Braley Pastorino, a board member with the Waimea Lions Club.

It was in 1972 that a committee of Lions took to putting the trees in the ground, he said.

Pastorino, who was among that group of Lions to plant the first cherry blossom trees at Historic Row Church Park, at the time said he thought it was “just a nice idea to do something for the community.”

Putting in those first trees was no simple feat, however.

According to a program provided at the festival, early trees were the victims of “careless maintenance people,” “would-be rodeo stars” who practiced barrel racing around the trees, blasting winds and “a drought or two.”

Nonetheless, the Lions persevered, and several trees were replaced in those early years.

Cherry blossoms continued to go up over the years, often to mark special events. The program states that in 1975, the Lions planted 50 additional trees in honor of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese immigrants who had settled in Warimea 100 years before.

The first festival took place in 1993, according to the program, and today, the cherry blossoms are part of the community.

“I guess it’s just now something people think of when they think of Waimea,” Pastorino said. “They think of the cherry blossoms.”

The event draws visitors from all over. Betsey and Richard Edwards of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, said they enjoyed the festival so much last year, they made it a point to come back again for this year’s event.

“The diversity of the Big Island is amazing,” said Betsey Edwards. “The cultural and geographical diversity, and music and food and everything.”

She said they’ve been to Maui and Kauai before, she said, “and we like this, by far, the best, just because of that diversity.”

At the festival, she said, they’ve enjoyed the drums and dancing.

Richard Edwards said the diversity of the island, such as what visitors can see in Waimea, isn’t like the rest of Hawaii.

“There’s ranching here for Heaven’s sake!” he said. “And as far as tourists, it’s more real and less touristy, by far, than anything that people have been to.”

And while there were some return visitors from afar, some local residents were discovering the Cherry Blossom Festival for the first time ever.

“I’ve lived in Kona for 40 years and I’ve never been,” said Chelle Ching, 58, who came to the event with her friend, Kathy McRobbie, 63.

She said she saw an article about the festival in West Hawaii Today, which piqued her curiosity about the event.

“The write-up … was enough for me to turn to my friend and say ‘Hey Kathy, we need to do this! Wanna come with?’”

Now that she’s had a chance to take it in, she said, she’s not only impressed with the trees, but the whole community itself and their efforts to put the event on.

“This is local; this is aloha,” she said, “This reminds me of why I moved to Hawaii 40 years ago and why I’m still here.”

When she arrived in Waimea Saturday morning, she said, a complete stranger helped her get her bearings and assured her that she could get to Church Row from the Waimea Starbucks.

It’s that kind of friendly attitude that makes it a great experience, she said.

“I’m really glad that I got out of my comfort zone,” she said. “Otherwise I’d be sitting at home playing Farmville.”