My friends Dee and Dom planned an overseas trip a while ago. Dee was going surfing in Costa Rica again, and Dom was going to Hawaii and New York before catching up with him there. How could I pass up an invitation to come along and visit three new places in three weeks?
Dom and I arrived in Honolulu on 16 November to incredibly good weather, very similar to that we’d just left in the other hemisphere. The first day didn’t go entirely to plan: we had booked a fairly cheap hostel in Waikiki Beach and went straight there to check in, but soon found that they didn’t have the two private rooms we had booked. We dropped our stuff there anyway and went straight down to dig our toes into the sand of Waikiki Beach. Very nice – on a par with our amazing Australian beaches. For lunch we went to The Cheesecake Factory, a family restaurant just behind the beach, and ordered a caesar salad, a pizza, a beer and a gin and soda. Well, I could have sworn that Dom and I shrunk during the flight because the servings were all huge! The cesar salad looked like a whole shredded lettuce with some chicken added, and my pizza definitely challenged the definition of ‘small’. The 8 million litre glass of beer went down very well though.
After checking out a bit more of the beach, we went back to the hostel to see if we could sort something out. They couldn’t give us what we booked, so we spent a couple of hours calling and walking to other hotels to see if we could get something better at short notice. We found a couple of rooms in the Kuhio Village Towers which were available for the week, so we booked them and the hostel operator was happy to refund us for the misunderstanding. We couldn’t move until the next night though, so he let us stay there that night for free. The mixup was annoying, but they were very good about it - a great Aloha to Hawaii. We found a Mexican restaurant for dinner where Dom had a fish taco and I had a huge burrito.
On day 2, after moving our stuff to the new hotel, we caught a shuttle to Hanauma Bay, a U-shaped bay at the south-east of Oahu, not far from Honolulu. It’s sheltered from the ocean waves and its main features are a great white-sand beach and lots of tropical fish swimming amongst the coral right next to the shoreline. It’s perfect for snorkelling, and that’s just what we, and everybody else, went there for. To protect this amazing location, they limit the number of visitors and there’s a fee to enter, but they let you in again for free within a few days afterwards. Dom had a waterproof housing for her camera and she caught a few good shots of the local fish. After catching a bit of sun, we headed back up to the carpark and saw a ferret-like creature around the bushes, which happens to be a mongoose. Apparently they were introduced to the islands to reduce the number of rats, but that didn’t go entirely to plan. The rat is nocturnal, but the mongoose is diurnal so it ate mostly birds and animals other than rats, and thrived so much that it became a pest itself.
Back in Waikiki Beach, we spent the night exploring cocktails and shops, most of which seem to be open every night here. Dom was lured into a shop by some tokidoki bags whose tentacles were strong, but just not as strong as those of the cocktails at Duke’s Bar. Mmm… Long Island Iced Tea.
Now, we were familiar with the Hawaiian word Aloha, thanks to movies and TV, but there’s another word which they say a lot – mahalo – which is like ‘thank you’. Well, on the way home that night, Dom had just commented on a cute dog sitting in the front seat of a van, when the dog said, “Maharo!” right back at her. Oh, how we laughed…
I felt crappy the next morning. Not from food or drink, but a cold which I reckon I caught on the plane from Australia, or from an un-disinfected hired snorkelling mask at Hanauma Bay. I also still had a splint on my left wrist which was broken about 5 weeks ago and still weak, but I wasn’t going to let that trap me in the hotel while there was so much to see…
Just east of Waikiki Beach is Diamond Head, an extinct volcano, so much so that the inside of the crater is not only grassy and forested, but there are buildings and a carpark there. There’s a trail up to the top of the crater rim, which for a while tunnels though the actual rock. The lookout at the top offers an amazing view and it’s amazing to just look down into the crater and ponder the forces that formed these islands.
