Friday

Morning on the Pacific

Charlotte and I begin our final full day in Oahu by pulling on our swimming gear and wandering over to the beach behind the Hilton Village — stopping at Starbucks on the way to enjoy a morning coffee and some pastries. There are two cool things about this area: first is that there’s a marina near the ocean filled with boats and garbage (that’s not the cool part), and as we’re walking by it we see multiple jellyfish swimming around, which is really neat since most of the jellyfish I’ve seen in my life have been of the “dead on the beach” variety. The second cool thing is that they have a man-made lagoon (it used to be a swamp!) that’s about five and a half feet deep at its maximum, and is super warm. This becomes extremely appealing after Charlotte and I wade into the Pacific Ocean first, which is like wading into molten lava, only the exact opposite. It’s goddamn freezing! So we spend a bit of time there and then, shivering, head for the lagoon, which by comparison is like bath water. We paddle around there a bit and then, desire for a morning swim fulfilled, we head back to our hotel to shower and face the day.

Chinese Pastries Hurt My Brain

By the time we’re all finished up and back on the road, headed for Chinatown now that it’s not a Sunday and things will be open again, it’s past noon. We’re just not early risers, which is somewhat unfortunate for Hawaii, as the islands are very sun-oriented. Sure, there’s some nightlife, but the vast majority of stuff is on a 9 – 5 schedule. By the time we reach Chinatown, it’s basically time for lunch. Charlotte doesn’t believe me that I’ll actually find someplace there to eat … I like exotic food, but usually balk at sketchy-looking places, and basically all of Chinatown is fairly sketchy-looking. But we find a Vietnamese diner that looks nice, and have a tasty meal there. During lunch we have a discussion about Asian pastries, and how they pretty much all suck. No offense, Asians … your fish and vegetable dishes are routinely fantastic, but your pastries? Not so much. We stop at a Chinese bakery in order to try and disprove this theory. Charlotte gets a chewy walnut thing coated with sesame seeds. I get a “black sugar” cookie, and a tea cookie, the latter of which I thought was a cookie made with tea, but is in fact just a mildly fruity sugar cookie meant to go with tea. None of the pastries are actively offensive, unlike many a red bean paste-based dessert, but let’s just say that none of them are going to knock the French, Italians, and Pennsylvania Dutch off the map when it comes to baking.

Why Does the Meat Market Smell Like Fish?

We continue our walking tour of Chinatown, investigating jewelry shops, lei shops (there is an amazing variety on display), and traditional uh … cheap plastic crap shops. We eventually stop at a corner, and Charlotte asks “meat market, or fish market?” to which I respond “let’s do the meat market. I’m not sure I can handle the fish market so soon after lunch.” This turns out to be a mistake, because the meat market smells like low tide on a hot summer day … just fishy to a stomach-turning extreme, despite the fact that we can’t actually see any fish on display. We soon get tired of looking at butchered animals and figure hey, what the hell, might as well do the fish market. We enter the building to discover that it barely smells of fish at all, despite there being many types lying on ice, or still swimming around in aquariums. I am at a loss to explain this phenomenon, and can only report what I experienced! Eventually we complete our walking tour, and retrieve our car from the parking garage. It’s time to head for the Bishop Museum, a collection of buildings not far from downtown Honolulu that make up arguably Hawaii’s most complete museum of Hawaiian, Polynesian, and South Pacific cultures.

So wait, we can learn about every Pacific Island EXCEPT Hawaii?

The Bishop Museum is a confusing place because they make you walk through the gift shop to get to the entrance, which isn’t even clearly marked. Charlotte and I almost accidentally enter the planetarium, and two separate employee-only areas, before finally finding our way into the museum. The fee is modest, and we pay it happily and head out onto the grounds — the museum is comprised of multiple buildings, all of which used to serve as an educational campus. We enter the main section – which contains rooms devoted to modern Hawaiian art, a collection of Hawaiian feather staffs which have a real name that I’m currently forgetting, and a collection of older Hawaiian paintings and photographs. It also contains the Hawaiian History wing, and a history wing devoted to the Polynesian, Micronesian, and Melanesian peoples of the south Pacific. Unfortunately, the Hawaiian exhibit is closed for reorganization, which means we’ve come to Hawaii to learn about every island in the south Pacific EXCEPT Hawaii … woo! Still, we spend a good two hours there, wandering through the exhibits, reading plaques, and marveling at the fact that 4000 years ago people could intricately carve crazy shit into whale bones, but hadn’t yet figured out that when you put something on round wheels, it’s easier to push. Eventually our brains reach that “museum saturation” point, and we head off. It’s time to go back to the hotel, and naturally we’ve chosen rush hour once again. We’re skilled like that.

Trying to Return the Car

We decide that we don’t really need the car for the rest of the trip, and figure we can maybe turn it in early and save a few bucks. In theory, this is an awesome idea. In practice this means we battle against Hawaii’s unrelenting war on left turns, get near the car place, realize we haven’t filled up the stupid gas tank, go hunting for a gas station for thirty minutes, and then finally make our way back to the car rental place … which is closed for the night and offers no key drop-off or overnight storage. Yay, cheapshit local car rental! So we drive back to the hotel and park for one more night, with the plan being that I’ll get up in the morning, go drop off the car, and walk back. Shouldn’t be a big deal. In the meantime, we’ve got a couple of hours to chill before we go have a swank dinner in celebration of it being one year since I proposed.

Chairman Ho’s

The actual name of the restaurant is Allen Wong’s, but I keep forgetting that and calling it Chairman Ho’s, which amuses Charlotte. We decided a few days ago that we should get dressed up for this event, even though we have seen ABSOLUTELY NO ONE in jacket-and-tie level dress the entire time we’ve been in Hawaii. We also decide to walk to Chairman Ho’s … I mean Allen Wong’s … which adds an extra level of bizarreness to the evening since the area between our hotel and the restaurant isn’t exactly swanky. As our walk nears an end, the occasional raindrops we’ve been feeling suddenly become a downpour, but fortunately we don’t have very far to go. We get into the restaurant and discover that, yes, we’re the best-dressed people in the place. Neither of us particularly gives a shit, though, so that’s good. We order cocktails and appetizers – we each get some kind of shooter featuring native Hawaiian veggies, tomato water, and some sort of mollusk, and we also share some chicken-and-kim-chee spring rolls that are out of this world. Our entrees eventually show up (our waiter was very pleasant but rarely seen), and they’re also fantastic. Charlotte got the twice-cooked duck, and I had seared fish on island greens with Parmesan mashed potatoes. Yum! We finish the evening the way any good honeymoon evening should be finished: by heading back to the hotel and watching a couple of Venture Brothers episodes. Tomorrow, we head for Maui.

Saturday

Flight to the Airport

After we get up on Saturday, I drive the car over to the drop-off point and walk back, picking up coffee on the way, while Charlotte gets started on the packing. Naturally, it’s raining during my entire walk back, but honestly it’s not that bad, especially since packing annoys me. She’s mostly done by the time I show up, so I still feel like I got the better part of the deal, even though I’m mildly drenched. We haul our shit downstairs, check out, call a cab, and head for the airport. As it turns out, you do NOT need to arrive at the Honolulu airport two hours ahead of time, if you’re taking a trans-island flight. In fact, you probably don’t need to arrive 30 minutes ahead of time. The entire airport is about the same size as a large Denny’s. Charlotte and I set up shop in the airport bar and wait for our plane to board.

Your Delayed Flight Has Been Delayed

And wait … and wait … and wait. Our takeoff time goes from 1:50 to 2:30 to 2:45 to 3:05 to 3:35 to “soon” even as other flights to Maui, scheduled much later than ours, are boarding from the same gate. Way to go, GO! Airlines. Jackasses. Once we finally get on the stupid plane, our flight is about seven and a half minutes long. There are eight of us on it, total. It’s kind of like taking a private jet only if you have to pay $2.50 for a can of coke. We opt to skip the coke, and instead just watch the islands go by, in between thick bands of clouds. Soon we’re landed. Charlotte waits for the luggage while I go off to get the rental car, which would normally have worked out great but naturally their computers have gone down and they have to do everything by hand. This, as you may guess, slows things down, so eventually Charlotte just takes the shuttle bus over herself, carrying both bags, and hangs out with me in the Budget offices. We eventually land a white Pontiac G6, or 60, or something. It’s got air conditioning, a CD player, and doesn’t shake like an elderly woman whenever you go above 30 MPH … quite a step up from the Geo Tracker.

Holy Shit, a Whale!

Now that we finally have a car, we head south on route 380 past some strip malls, which connects us to route 30, which runs along the island’s western side. Maui is not like Oahu, at all. It’s far less built up, and most of what we see on the journey is beach, scrub brush, and mountains. Kind of peaceful and nice, actually. We round a curve and see cars lined up on the side of the road, and people are standing near the shore, cameras and binoculars out. Turns out, as we’ll shortly see, there are whales hanging out just off shore. A big one surfaces and Charlotte gives a shout, but I miss it (having to pay attention to the road, and all that). I manage to glance over and catch a few glimpses of fins and tails. Never do see a full whale, but it’s still pretty cool. Eventually we pass whale country, pass the town of Lahaina, and enter the Kaanapali beach area, where we’ll be staying at the Westin Resort and Spa.

Saved the Best for Last

The Westin turns out to be the swankiest of the hotels we’re staying in this trip, which is nice. The grounds include several waterfalls, five swimming pools (one adults-only), a bar and two restaurants (with two more bars), a three-story waterslide, and a striking sunset view of the ocean. We’ve been upgraded to an ocean-view room for the second time on our trip, and we find that our balcony has a great view of the pools and the ocean. Score! We get unpacked and adjusted, and then set out to explore the hotel.

Enjoying the Evening

We decide to take a late-evening dip. The ocean’s too cold and rough at night, but the adult pool’s open until 10 and we have it all to ourselves. Charlotte and I swim around for a while until we’re thoroughly refreshed (and chilled), and then join another couple in the hot tub. We laze around there for a bit, watching surfing videos on the big screens above the bar not far away, then get out and go enjoy a tropical drink at the bar. While there, we read a menu for one of the hotel’s two restaurants, and decide to eat dinner there. It’s a short walk away, surrounded by flaming tiki torches, grass huts, and koi ponds. We each get a tomato and white-bean soup, and we split a goat cheese and veggie flatbread pizza thing. The food’s tasty, and we chow down. Eventually the meal’s done, and we’re beat from our long day of being enraged by travel. We head up to the room, and crash for the night.

Sunday

The Pacific Ocean: Not That Warm

Charlotte gets me up on Sunday morning and says “let’s go jump in the ocean before we get our coffee!” This seems like a reasonable idea, so we pull on our swimming gear and head out to the beach. It’s a grey and overcast day, but not too chilly, so we stash our stuff on an available chaise lounge and head for the waves. These turn out to be approximately the same temperature as liquid nitrogen, but Charlotte apparently has skin of steel, because she powers right into them and swims out past where the waves are breaking, and stays out there bobbing in the gentle swell and taunting me. I move in by inches, making girlish shrieking noises with each step and wondering why I let my crazy wife talk me into this, but I do eventually make it all the way in, and we swim around for a bit. Eventually we get out, dry off, grab coffee and breakfast, and head up to take showers. We’re nearly out of clean laundry, and we’re hoping to find a place where we can drop off the dirty stuff, and pick it up later cleaned and folded. You can find these places every twelve feet in New York, but this is Maui and they have exactly one … and it’s closed on Sundays. Crap.

“It’s Like a Bad Imitation of a Beach Town”

we resolve to come back to the wash-n-fold place on Monday, and head for Laihaina’s main drag, Front St. Lahaina is an old whaling town that became a tourist haven in the 60s. Various Maui laws have prevented it from being built up like Waikiki though; all of the hotels are in nearby Kaanapali, and Lahaina’s skyline is only a couple of stories high. It’s much more of a beach town, albeit one that’s completely dominated by the industry of selling cheap shit to rubes (even more so than a normal beach town). There are more Hawaiian shirt stores and crappy souvenir shops here than you can possibly imagine. Charlotte’s not terribly impressed, and after a few blocks I’m not that into it either. We’re starving though, so we decide to pick from among the seemingly endless line of beach-themed burger joints available to us.

“It’s All About the Raisins”

We pick a restaurant and get seated. I get very excited because they’ve got A1 sauce for the burgers, which most places don’t have. Charlotte, being raised in France, has no idea what the hell A1 sauce is. She picks it up and reads the ingredients, noting that it’s similar to catchup. I agree, but insist that the higher vinegar content, lower sugar content, and raisin paste make it infinitely superior in all ways to ketchup (which is disgusting). Charlotte says she’ll take my word for it. We enjoy our burgers -n- beer, and then wander the town a bit more, stopping for ice cream. Finally, tired of tourists and cheap crap, we head off back to the hotel, stopping at Barnes and Noble along the way to pick up some books for Charlotte. Inspired by the fact that I’m reading The Children of Men, she picks up a PD James mystery novel, and we spend most of the rest of the afternoon reading, until I’m done with my book and we’re ready for dinner.

Dinner at Laihana Cooler’s

Following the guide’s recommendation, we head back to the town of Lahaina for food, this time settling on a smalll, breezy restaurant that’s off the main drag. The beer is good, and the food’s even better. I get a gigantic salad, and Charlotte gets something called “Fisherman’s Stew” which is very tasty, with lots of veggies and a little bit of hot pepper. We hang out there until we’re done, then head back once more to the hotel, where we stop at one of the bars that has a late happy hour. I get a mai tai (they’re one of the cheap drinks), and Charlotte gets something using grapefruit soda and gin. It’s not bad, really, but it sounded better on paper than it actually tastes. In practice, it’s a bit too sweet, and a bit one-note. The bartender confides in us that the hotel forced them to carry that soda even though the manager didn’t want to, so said manager just made up a bunch of drinks to use up the stock, without actually tasting any of them. We find this amusing, and Charlotte gamely continues drinking hers. We watch sports highlights and I explain things to Charlotte … she humors me by pretending to give a shit, and all is well! Eventually we head off to sleep again. Tomorrow: THE SUBMARINE!

Up Late

Charlotte wakes up at something like four in the morning, but since it’s our honeymoon, she decides it would be criminal to wake my lazy ass up, and lets me sleep until about ten. For those keeping track, that’s about eleven hours of sleep, which in some countries legally qualifies you as dead. We decide that since we’re taking a day trip up to Oahu’s North Shore – surf country – we’ll get on the road ASAP and worry about breakfast on the way. Of course, ASAP includes me taking a shower and deciding I should shave my werewolf-like, five-day “beard” (quotes definitely applicable). Unfortunately, I’ve neglected to bring any shaving cream, so I decide to use hand moisturizer instead. The result? Only the BEST GODDAMN SHAVE of my LIFE! Seriously: everybody, start shaving with moisturizer right now. Sure, it’s prohibitively expensive and profoundly wasteful, but you can mow through serious growth at warp speed and not cut yourself at all.

Iced … Coffee?

Successfully shaven AND moisturized, we hit the road. We’re going to go to H1 again – this time heading westward, and connect up with 99 North, which we basically stay on right up until it becomes a choice of turning, or driving directly into the ocean. The drive will end up taking us about an hour, if you don’t count our various escapades. What escapades, you ask? Well, first we stop at “Pearl City Coffee Shop” which is in a strip mall in (surprise!) Pearl City … home of Pearl Harbor, the military base that the Japanese blew up, thus forcing the USA to enter World War II. Unfortunately, by “Coffee Shop,” the owners meant “Korean Restaurant” … we realize this when we get closer and see “home of the world famous ox-tail soup” printed under the sign, which is not a dish traditionally associated with coffee shops.

Disheartened by the lack of pastry and anything better than gas station coffee, we return to our car and continue down the road. What do we see next? Zippy’s! You might remember Zippy’s from the time when it didn’t poison us on our trip to the Japanese temple a few days ago. Zippy’s also, at some point in its history, seems to have absorbed a chain called “Napoleon’s Bakery” which serves donuts, pastries, and (we assume), coffee. We’re correct in our assessment about coffee, but it’s warm out, and I therefore would prefer iced coffee. I ask if they serve it, which leads to this exchange with our attendant, an elderly Asian woman with a shaky grasp of English:

“Iced … coffee?”

“Yes, iced coffee. Do you … do you have any?”

“We have hot coffee.”

“Okay.”

“We can put … ice? In your coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

This will eventually result in me getting approximately 68 ounces of boiling coffee and about four ice cubes with which to cool it down. So that doesn’t work, and Charlotte and I end up sitting i a hot car, wolfing down some kind of flaky pastry thing (hers has chocolate, mine blueberry) and washing it down with refreshing, magma-like coffee. Oh well. We return to route 99, and the rest of our trip is uneventful, if at times mildly confusing, since route 99 switches streets at random throughout the trip, sometimes involving hard turns onto completely new roads. Eventually, we arrive at the north shore, in the village of Haleiwa

Checking out the Town

Haleiwa is not Waikiki. There are no big hotels, no condos, no Louis Vuitton or Chanel shops. It basically started out as a small village, and for decades surfers have flocked there for the waves and stayed there to open up small restaurants, shops, and the like. The area is just beginning to really be developed, and there are some fairly aggressive anti-development campaigns happening. “Keep the country COUNTRY” is a common bumper sticker, and the general sentiment about town seems to be that no condos is good condos, so to speak. We cruise down the main drag noting places we want to stop later. There’s a famous shaved ice store, and I spy a little burger joint that seems promising. We continue on through, and reach the coast.

Surf’s Up d00d!

The surf here is amazing, and apparently we didn’t even catch it at a particularly great time of day. Nonetheless, cars are parked all the way down the road near the public beach, and there are plenty of surfers way out in the bay, catching waves that look (to my untrained eye) to be somewhere between four and six feet tall. That may not seem like much, but that shit will bowl you over and either crush you against rocks or drown you, if you’re not careful. It’s a LOT of water, moving at a high speed. They’ve closed down the beach to swimming, because of this, but it’s surfer heaven. Charlotte and I hang out on the beach, walking through the sand and taking in the sites. We also take a bunch of pictures, although unfortunately we’re way too far away to catch any action shots. Eventually we decide to move on – there’s more shore to explore, after all.

Botanical Gardener? I barely know ‘er …

We drive up the coast for a bit, coming over a hill to yet another majestic view — Hawaii’s got so many of these that you start to take them for granted after a while, which is sort of a shame. Fortunately, driving around through Honolulu’s industrial areas helps to remind you that jaw-dropping ocean vistas are, you know … pretty. So we’re looking at that, and then we look over to the right and we see a big stream with lots of flowering trees surrounding it, and a sign for botanical gardens. Without thinking about it much, I swing in to the driveway and we proceed inward. At first we figure we’ll just take a quick glance and then drive back out, but the gardens seem interesting enough that we park and pay the entrance fee. Soon we’re wandering through some pretty amazing foliage, all of it marked with ID tags and helpful placards. “You know, the only problem with this place is a serious lack of monkey,” I say to Charlotte, and she agrees. We eventually make our way to the end of the path, where there’s a waterfall that can be anything from a trickle to a torrent, based on the weather. We get something closer to the latter. You can see pics at my Flickr page! Eventually, all gardened out, we head back to the car, and return to town.

Ahi and Crab Burgers with Shaved Ice

We stop at the burger joint I mentioned earlier: the Grass Skirt Grill. It’s a tiny restaurant about eight feet wide by twenty five feet deep (not including the kitchen). They serve fish, burgers and fries. Also crab cakes. I get an ahi tuna burger and Charlotte gets a crab cake burger. We decide to split an order of garlic fries, which is a good thing because as it turns out, garlic fries are just about the tastiest thing man ever invented. Basically you make up a sauce of butter, white wine, and garlic, and then you dump it all over fresh french fries. It is good eating. Also, I think I’m going to gain a small child’s worth of weight on this honeymoon … gah! Anyway, we have no trouble finishing off our burgers and fries, and after thanking the friendly counterman, who I believe is the owner, we head off down the road for some shaved ice. Basically what this is, is a gigantic snow cone (only finer grained). I get mine with pina colada on one half, orange on the other half, and a scoop of vanilla ice cream just because I haven’t already consumed enough calories today. Charlotte gets some kind of crazy 3-flavor specialty blend, because she’s fancy like that. We pay 25 cents extra apiece to get special plastic holders, which turns out to be an awesome way to waste 25 cents, because they’re completely useless AND they make you look retarded. Charlotte throws hers away at the first available trash can. I soldier on with mine, assuming it will at some point come in handy. It doesn’t. Back at the car, we finish off our shaved ice, and begin the journey back to the hotel.

Back to the Hotel: Traffic

Charlotte and I have this awesome habit of trying to get back to Waikiki right in the middle of rush hour, every single day. This produces two problems, the first obvious: traffic. We get most of the way back to the hotel just fine, but then the H1 turns into stop-and-go, bumper-to-bumper traffic, which is truly not the way I want to spend my honeymoon, so we get off the highway in order to navigate surface streets. This leads to the second problem, which we’ve encountered previously: running parallel to the beach but about a mile inland is a main artery that serves basically all of Waikiki called Kapiolani Blvd. The problem is that from 3 PM to 5:30 PM, for traffic purposes, you CANNOT TURN LEFT at any point from its beginning to end. That means basically you have a choice between going all the way to the end, far overshooting your destination, and pulling a U-turn … or making a bunch of right turns in order to hopefully end up at a road which bisects Kapiolani and angles inward toward Waikiki, without becoming a dead end (this is harder than it sounds). We go for the latter approach, and eventually wind our way successfully to the hotel.

Bali on the Sea

After we relax for a bit and get changed, we decide to go across the street to the “Hilton Village” for dinner. The Hilton Village is basically a collection of hotel towers with a whole crapload of retail strung between them. It’s a lot like visiting an outdoor mall where everyone is wearing Hawaiian shirts and is either six, or sixty-five. We make our way to one of their restaurants that sounds interesting: Bali on the Sea. As it turns out, it’s essentially just an upscale Ameri-Euro cuisine hybrid, except it has some Indonesian-looking statues in it. Still, the meal is very tasty — we go for salad-based appetizers AND entrees because it’s surprisingly hard to get greens in this state, and we’re both craving them. The waiter makes fun of us for eating like birds, but in a pleasant way that doesn’t scream “this stuff is cheap and affecting my tip!” too badly. We decline dessert, but are unprepared for what comes next …

A Bird Pooped on My Chocolate Vagina!

Apparently Bali on the Sea has a tradition of giving chocolate truffles to their guests along with the check. They don’t bring these out on just any plate, though. No, they bring them out on top of a chocolate replica of Diamondhead Crater which looks startlingly like a chocolate vulva, and which is sitting on top of (I’m not making this up) a dish full of water and dry ice, pouring steam everywhere. I’ve never been presented with a chocolate vagina before, but surely this is the most elaborate such presentation on earth. We pay the check, eat our truffles, and get the vagina boxed up for further consumption (trying real hard to keep this clean, folks). As we’re walking home, a bird poops all over one corner of the box, causing me to go “Dude, a bird just shit all over the chocolate vagina!” at a volume louder than was probably necessary. We stop at a nearby coffee shop and obtain napkins with which to clean off the box. Fortunately, no poop made it inside, so we carry it home, careful to avoid that one corner. We soon hit the hay, ready for our final full day in Oahu, which will be full of museums, Vietnamese food, and our “anniversary of getting engaged” dinner.

We do eventually find gas at what appears to be possibly the first gas station ever established on the Hawaiian islands. The pumps are made from bamboo and jungle vines. Ok, that’s not actually true, but you get the idea – it’s old. We fill up, get ourselves turned in the right direction, and head for one of the main highways: H1. It should be noted that from this point on in the trip we pass a gas station EVERY THREE BLOCKS. Anyway, H1 links up direct with 72, so it should be quick and easy, or so our thinking goes. What we don’t know is: we’re in the midst of a huge stretch where there are on-ramps for H1 West, but no on-ramps for H1 East (I confirmed this by checking on a map later – just to make sure I wasn’t crazy). So we travel along city streets, parallel to the H1, at twenty miles an hour and stopping constantly, instead of being able to travel on the H1 at fifty-five with no stops. Long story short, by the time we hit Hanauma Bay, we’re no longer early. Fortunately, at least this time it’s open!

The bay is located at the base of some cliffs, which gives us a nifty view as we descend (see pics at my Flickr page). The reef comes literally right up to the shore in places, and it kind of looks like giant underwater brain material. Appetizing! We buy tickets, buy Charlotte some coffee, and stand in line to watch a short video, which basically repeats “look but don’t touch” about seven thousand times, failing to note that not touching is very difficult when you have to walk on the reef to get into the water, as we’ll soon discover. We rent snorkel gear, including nifty snorkels with caps that help keep the water out, and head down the beach to where it’s less crowded. Just as we get there, cold rain starts falling on us, and we take momentary shelter under a tree before remembering that we’re here to jump into the cold, cold Pacific anyway, so why are we hiding from the rain?

We pull on our gear near the water’s edge and then clumsily wade out into the water in our flippers. We’re trying not to walk on the reef, but this is NOT possible, at this area of the beach, so as soon as it gets deep enough, we lie down in the water, hovering about six inches above the coral, and begin kicking toward a space where it gets deeper, and there’s a sandy bottom. Initial snorkeling is awkward — we’ve never really done it before, and it takes some practice. Charlotte’s “omg water in the pipe!” valve keeps accidentally closing, which blocks off the air intake entirely. I’ve got the snorkel working fine, but I’m having a hard time not getting kicked in the face by Charlotte’s fins, and I keep instinctively reaching down and touching the reef. Eventually we work out these kinks, and reach deeper water, which makes the snorkeling a lot more fun and a lot less frustrating. There are fish all around us, not to mention sea cucumbers, sea urchins, various types of soft and hard coral, and the occasional other snorkeler. In all it’s a pretty awesome experience, even if at one point the currents do shove me into the reef, where I scrape the living shit out of my arm. By the end of it, we’ve even got a pretty solid handle on the snorkeling part of snorkeling, and can concentrate mainly on the “looking at stuff” part. I’m super excited to do more of it on Maui!

We emerge from the cold waters into the slightly-less-cold, now-overcast day. Charlotte is shaking like some kind of crack addict and I end up giving her my towel and hugging her until she warms up (awwww!). Since it’s not really that nice of a day, there’s no real reason to lounge around the beach. We get changed, drop off our snorkel gear, and hike it back up the hillside to the car. Lunch in the Honolulu outskirts, at a famous Hawaiian hole-in-the-wall, is calling. We manage to find our way there quite easily, amazingly enough, and end up enjoying a good, cheap meal. Charlotte gets some kind of pulled-pork dish that’s similar to barbecue in texture. I get big lumps of pork wrapped up in some green leafy stuff and steamed, and it is extremely delicious. The meals come with rice, tomato-salmon tartar, some dried spicy meat, and a tasty coconut custard. We wolf down our food, and then head down the street to Starbucks (dessert), and Bailey’s — a shop which has over 15,000 Hawaiian shirts, in addition to a bunch of antique-y crap from the 50s (old Coke merch) through the 80s (giant stuffed E.T.). I find a tasteful shirt, if you can believe it — cream colored with a single vertical stripe of black flower-pattern running up the right side. Charlotte finds a beautiful black-and-turquoise reproduction of a vintage pattern, and a lovely vintage dress. Now fully prepared to get our Hawaii on, we return to the car and head for the hotel.

When we get back, there’s a manager’s reception happening, which means hanging out in the lobby drinking free booze and listening to a pretty talented guitar/bongo duo with a bunch of other people, most of whom are older than Moses. Still, it’s a good time, and we stick around for a bit before heading upstairs to relax for a while, get changed, and get prepped for the evening. Looking snazzy, we head out for a walk — we’re going to The House Without a Key – a bar at the Halekulani Hotel which was named after the first Charlie Chan novel. It’s a classy joint, and we end up on a sea-side patio, listening to a local Hawaiian band (guitar, ukulele, and upright bass — all three guys sing) who have invited a former Miss Hawaii up on stage with them to hula dance. She’s very graceful, the cocktails are very good, and Charlotte and I rapidly demolish the warm pupu platter (pupu = appetizers) that we order. Not to mention a good bit of the basket of potato chips they put on every table.

Done with our drinks, we wander through Waikiki, along the main commercial drag. We stop and I get a chocolate-and-hazelnut gelato, but our main goal at this point is finding somewhere that’s going to put some damn umbrellas all up in their drinks. Four days, several bars, and not a single umbrella! This is officially becoming a catastrophe. We see a third-floor bar that looks likely — Sr. Frog’s — but when we get up there, we realize that a) it’s nearly empty and b) they force all of their patrons to wear giant balloon sculptures on their heads. I’m not making this up. Charlotte and I back out of there and continue wandering – see, the thing is, the balloon sculptures would’ve been ok if the place had been full … but wearing crazy shit on your head in a near-empty room? That’s just downright humiliating!

Eventually we head back in the direction of the hotel. Charlotte’s feet are killing her, and we’ve decided that we’re either going to find a tiki bar on the way there, or we’re just going to buy booze at a local store and make our own damn umbrella drinks! Fortunately, fate intervenes in the form of Cheese Burger Waikiki, which looks plenty kitschy enough to have umbrella drinks. As it turns out, we’re right, and not only are we right, but I have the option of paying a bit more to get my Mai Tai in a GIANT PLASTIC PINEAPPLE! The bartender brings this majestic creation over, full of sweet liquor and bearing two slices of pineapple, a cherry, and a tiny umbrella. At last, Hawaii, you’ve delivered what I’ve been waiting for.

Charlotte’s still hungry so she orders a grilled-cheese sandwich with ham and pineapple. I’m good with my mai tai. We sip our drinks slowly, with relish. Charlotte’s food arrives, she eats, we make small talk with the bartender, and the night moves on. Eventually it’s time to head back to the hotel, only a two block walk. Wednesday is over, and it’s time to grab some sleep — tomorrow, the North Shore beckons to us!

We wake up early on Tuesday. The good thing about having our internal clocks still somewhat set to New York time is that 8:30 AM here feels super-late. This also means we’re going to bed at like 9:30 or 10:00 every night, which helps to bring us a sense of solidarity with the nine hundred million old people that spend time in Waikiki. We hit the Peet’s Coffee downstairs, which is basically a Starbucks only with DRASTICALLY superior cheese danishes. Coffee and danish ingested, we decide it’s time we rented a car. We want to get to the eastern side of the island to see a replica of a Japanese temple.

We wander aimlessly around Waikiki for a bit looking for car rental places and not finding any. Charlotte asks a friendly dude handing out fliers for a gun range — as far as we can tell, all the Japanese tourists are here to get married and/or riddle shit with bullets — and he happily directs us to a car rental place “over near Denny’s” where we pick up our ride: a Geo Tracker with no AC, manual windows, and a tape deck that has a tape stuck in it which won’t play or eject. Also it has no back window. We ride in style.

The first thing we do in the Tracker is get lost as shit while trying to find our way to the coast highway. We end up winding our way through a residential neighborhood somewhere near the base of Diamondhead Crater before finally finding our way to route 72. We follow this all the way around the south-eastern tip of the island, which has many amazing views. We stop at a few scenic lookout spots to take pictures of waves crashing up against eroded sandstone, and of one or two of Oahu’s many extinct volcanoes. The coast road is an amazing drive; if you end up in Oahu, rent a car and follow it.

Eventually we end up in a medium-sized town (big enough for a mall, not big enough for high-rise hotels), and decide it’s time for lunch. After a few minutes, we find a place called Zippy’s that looks like it’ll get the job done. Once inside, we realize that we’ve entered the lesser known and possibly lower-quality cousin of Denny’s. The most exciting thing about Zippy’s is that they have a picture of spaghetti on the menu, and it’s covered in a sauce that can only really be described as “horrifying” … needless to stay, Charlotte and I stick with the safer options: she gets a burger, I get a cold turkey sandwich. Neither poisons us, so I guess that’s a plus. Zippy’s: It probably won’t poison you.

After lunch, we detour away from our progression toward the temple in order to visit a small garden Charlotte’s read about. This turns out to be very cool. The gardens surround a big pond, and they’re entirely empty except for us, about ten thousand tiny lizards, and three free-range chickens that run away whenever we get close. There is an amazing variety of flora about, not to mention various ponds and streams full of koi, crayfish, turtles, and other animals. We take a bunch of pictures, feed some left-over lemon-poppy cake to the fish (a school of them so large that they make the surface of the water seem to boil), and head on back to the coast road in search of our temple.

We find it not soon after, winding our way through a cemetery, at the back of which is our destination. The temple’s pretty amazing. The whole thing was built in the 60s and is a replica of an 11th-century temple in Japan. This one (and probably the original, for that matter) was built without using any nails, and considering the complexity, that’s pretty remarkable. There’s a giant bell outside that you can ring, and a small gazebo, and many more koi ponds. Inside is a nine-foot tall golden buddha, and just down the path is a small gift shop surrounded by birds, ducks, black geese, more koi and turtles, and a single cat who looks mildly bewildered by all the activity. Charlotte and I wander through some nearby bamboo patches, and then head for the car just as the rain starts. We drive home by using a tunnel to cut under the central spine of the island, rather than going around, and eventually make our way back to our hotel.

After relaxing in our room for a bit, we head down to Rum Fire again for a pre-dinner cocktail. Charlotte gets a mai tai, and I try something with campari and lemon. Both are good, and we hang out for a while listening to the live band play covers of banal modern pop-rock. The bartender, who looks kind of like Iron Chef French – Hiroyuki Sakai – prints up our tab, and we head to dinner at Cha Cha Cha’s, a dive-y joint down the street which serves an odd mix of Caribbean and southwestern cuisine. Also, they serve margaritas, which we soon discover do not come in a standard margarita glass, but are rather just served in a pint glass. Christ. They don’t skimp on the tequila either, and after a fairly delicious dinner of jerk chicken, mahi mahi, rice, beans, and so forth, Charlotte and I head off, sleepy and fuzzy-headed from the margaritas, and rapidly crash for the night.

The next morning, we do a repeat stop at Peet’s for coffee, then head back up to the room, pack up our stuff, check out, move on to our second hotel, and check in. Once settled, we jump in the car and head back to the coast road. We’re going snorkeling! Our plan is to hit one of Oahu’s most famous snorkeling spots, which is located just before one of the scenic overlooks that we took pictures from the day before. The plan goes flawlessly right up to the point where we crest a hill, see our destination, and note the large sign which says “closed on Tuesdays” … turns out this is mentioned in the book, but we totally overlooked it. So we rapidly shift plans, and continue heading along the coast toward something called the “Sea Life Park” which may or may not be an aquarium.

Turns out it may — we pull in, park, and head for the ticket booth, where the attendant tells us that the dolphin show is starting in five minutes. This will end up being the highlight of the visit, as we get to see a bunch of dolphins performing tricks, including the world’s only known “wolphin,” the daughter of a bottle-nose dolphin and a “false killer whale” (a small type of whale that kind of looks like an orca). Apparently this was a legitimate mating and not some horrible genetic experiment come to life, and no one at the aquarium was expecting the wolphin to be viable. Yet there she was, 24 years old and performing many a flip for the crowd to exclaim over. Pretty neat. I took a lot of great high-shutter-speed photos, most of which will be available at my flickr page very shortly.

After the dolphin show ends, Charlotte and I wander the rest of the aquarium. It’s small, kind of dirty, and not particularly inspiring. I think part of the reason for this is because the majority of the place is used as an actual oceanic research center; the aquarium part serves mostly to help pay the bills. We do see some seals, turtles and rays, and a dive in the main reef tank feeding various fish, so that’s pretty cool, but we don’t stick around for too long, as we’re getting hungry and lunch at the Kona Brewing Company beckons. It’s a short drive away, and by far the most difficult part of getting there is figuring out where the hell it’s located within a rat’s-warren of a strip mall. We do eventually find it, though.

For lunch we have delicious salads with seared fish, and a selection of the brewing company’s beers. Charlotte gets a pale ale, and I try a sampler which includes a golden ale, a malty red ale (delicious!), a coffee porter (Charlotte’s fav), and an excellent IPA. Our waitress also lets us try the barley wine. We finish up by going to an ice cream place, where Charlotte gets a chocolate mochi thingy, and I get a double-chocolate-chip cone. Yum!

We head back to the hotel to regroup, relax, and reflect on our next moves. There’s a man-made lagoon across the street which I want to go see, so we decide to grab our swimming stuff and head over that way. We soon learn a valuable lesson: all of Hawaii stops swimming as of 4:30 PM. Seriously, the entire ocean empties out. The lagoon is completely unoccupied, including the place where you can rent paddle boats. Doesn’t matter anyway: a cold wind is coming in, and it’s raining again, which it’s been doing off and on all day. We wander through the Hilton Hawaiian Village instead, which resembles the rest of Waikiki in that it’s mostly dedicated to parting you with your money. There’s an outdoor bar, but we decline to stop as it’s severely crowded and I can’t see any drinks with umbrellas in them. Dammit!

Finally we give up, go back to the hotel, and get dressed for dinner (which basically involves switching shorts for jeans). We then head off to Hiroshi, which is a “Eurasian Fusion” restaurant not far from where we are. They have a tapas menu along with larger plates. After getting lost trying to find the entrance to their parking lot, we finally make it into the restaurant, where we are treated to an extremely tasty dinner. We order hamachi sashimi, broiled squid, Portugese sausage potstickers with kimchi foam (unbelievably good), some kind of fish cooked with baby bok choi and tomatoes, and crab-based, bouiliabase-like soup with shitake mushrooms and cilantro foam. Satisfied, we head off to the hotel. Charlotte is chilly and so she crawls under the covers and promptly passes out (it’s about 9:30 in the evening). I write up most of this entry you’re currently reading, then fall asleep briefly at the keyboard and decide that’s my cue to go to bed as well. Monday and Tuesday have passed. Wednesday will bring another attempt at snorkeling, and we want to get an early start.

There’s not a lot of time for exploring, though. It’s already past ten Hawaii time, which is like three days into the future as far as our brains are concerned. We get checked in, and the girl at the desk decides to give us a free upgrade to an ocean-view room, because Charlotte has so many miles that she’s some kind of superhero in their system. We make our way to the room, look out at the dark Pacific from our balcony, unpack our stuff, and crash into a deep sleep from which there is no escape. At least not until about 9:30 in the morning, which frankly is earlier than I normally get up on a Sunday … so yeh, hooray for jet lag. Or reverse jet lag. Or henderson’s syndrome, as it’s known in the Asian subcontinent.

Morning brings the gentle sound of surf to our ears, which is a pretty awesome thing to wake up to.