Aloha.
I have a few mates and relatives who badger me to write emails when I go anywhere - they like them more them pictures. I couldn't be bothered going on-line while I was there, so I wrote stuff down on paper. I'm now putting stuff into emails for the gang. Thought some of you would like to read them.
Mahalo,
Scott
The only time I’ve even been to Hawaii was when United Airlines used to make people travelling to the States change planes there. So I’ve never been out of the airport. I was looking forward to seeing the place.
But first it was Fiji – for a 3 hour stopover. And in that whole three hours there was not one military coup or cyclone in Fiji! We flew Air Pacific on a very old 747 that they probably picked up cheap somewhere – it was like being in an early 90s Tarago van (the favoured transport of Fijians everywhere). The flight was full of Fijians returning home from Australia for a visit between coups. They’re such big buggers. I would have thought an airline that flies out of Fiji would have bigger seats? I watched a huge Fijian across the aisle hover above the seat before dropping into it with a little grunt. Her husband was having real trouble. They were jammed in so tight they wouldn’t have needed seatbelts. Their armrests worked like levy banks, and I knew if those levy banks ever gave way we would all be in trouble. I remember when I was a kid getting fitted for school shoes and the shop assistant would have one of those metal shoe horns they would put behind our heel to ease our foot into the shoe. Air Pacific should equip their hosties with a bigger version of that to help those Fijians get into their seats.
We were on the last flight out of Fiji that night and the mood in the airport was pretty relaxed. I’m guessing even when there is strife in Fiji things are pretty relaxed. There was a game of football on the TV – Fiji vs New Zealand. Most of the staff in the airport were watching it. From the sound of things, Fiji was winning, so they were pretty happy. I’m not sure whether it was a live game or whether it’s an old one where Fiji won and they replay it every Sunday night.
Because we were flying to Hawaii, we had to have a body search before getting on the plane to leave Fiji. The security guys dragged themselves away from the TV and manned the booths when it was time to get serious. We filed through, got patted down, had our shoes checked, and came out the other side. The only thing that separated the screened passengers from the unscreened ones were those movable queue barriers – ropes on posts. I saw one bloke on the unscreened side pass a beer to his screened mate on the other side of the barrier. ‘They’d be Aussies’, I thought to myself.
We flew into Honolulu at dawn on Sunday. Pearl Harbour was out the left hand side of the plane as we came in to land. It was just after dawn on a Sunday in 1941 that Pearl Harbour was attacked. Our plane was full of Americans and Australians, but it would have been interesting to be on a plane coming from Tokyo. I wonder what the JAL pilots think when they make that approach.
The sum total of my research before coming to Hawaii was watching the movie Pearl Harbour. I didn’t learn much about Honolulu from that, but it’s good to see they’ve fixed the place up. I probably should have done a bit more research on Hawaii - maybe tried to track down that double episode of the Brady Bunch where they went to Hawaii and Greg knocked himself out in that surfing competition because one of the younger kids had picked up some sort of native trinket that brought bad luck.
Honolulu is on the island of Oahu. It wasn’t until a few weeks before we left that I found out there are 300 islands in the group that makes up Hawaii (not sure if that’s at high tide or low tide). No wonder the Skipper and Gilligan got lost in that storm when they ventured out of Honolulu for that three hour cruise (there sure is plenty of history here). Oahu would be about 70klms long by 50klms or so wide. Honolulu sits at the bottom edge of the island toward the east side.
We’re staying at Waikiki. That’s where all the tourists stay. I had been told that Waikiki was just like The Gold Coast. It’s similar, in that everyone there is either a tourist or someone who makes money off tourists, but I’m sorry, you Queenslanders, Waikiki is so much better than The Gold Coast. And there are no loud Americans here! There are loud Aussies, instead. It’s funny how people seem to be more annoying when they leave home.
Waikiki Beach is fantastic – just like the postcards and movies. It’s a beautiful crescent shaped beach maybe a kilometer across. There are lots of hotels on the beachfront – mostly down the western end – but because the beach runs east west, the hotels don’t shade the beach. At the eastern end is Diamond Head – an old volcano. It’s a shallow beach and the surf rolls in forever. It seems like such a slow wave. Do waves travel the same speed everywhere? These ones are so languid. I hired a surfboard and paddled out the back. I sat for ages looking back at the beach front (between you and me I was buggered from the long paddle and had to get my breath back). Every person in the water would have been a tourist, locals wouldn’t bother surfing Waikiki. So it was all very friendly. On the very first wave I tried to catch I stood up long enough to get through a good chunk of the theme song from Hawaii 50 – dah dah dah dah dahhhh dahhhh, dah dah dah dah da. To be fair, if you can manage to stand up on a houseboat you’d be fine on one of those hire boards. I even managed to adopt an deceptively nonchalant swagger as I shuffled up and down the board. Practically every wave I went for, I caught. I learnt quickly to fall flat when things went pear shaped. The water is only a meter deep and it’s a rocky bottom. The rocks aren’t sharp, though – worn down by thousands of tourists over the years getting dumped on them. Then I started getting chaffed and packed it in.
There are loads of Japanese in Hawaii. I didn’t expect that. They would be the biggest single tourist group, after Americans from the mainland. Our hotel – the Sheraton is very flash and they cater to the Japanese. The Japanese men in particular spend a lot of time round the pool getting very red with that quiet determination the Japanese have. Those Japanese not lying in the sun are either shopping, or getting married. On any beach at any time there will always be a happy but slightly confused looking Japanese couple in elaborate wedding gear getting their photos taken. Sometimes they are accompanied by a woman I assume is the wedding organizer. She holds the props for the photos – parasols are very popular. The happy couple never look entirely comfortable, and they keep their shoes on. They don’t do that favoured beach shoot pose where the couple stroll on the sand, the groom with his jacket slung jauntily over one shoulder, tie askew, and the bride casually carrying her shoes in one hand. Or that playful one where the groom has his pants rolled up over his calves and he’s standing in ankle deep water carrying the bride and they’re both giggling like teenagers (the groom through slightly gritted teeth). I guess they rent the wedding gear and don’t want to take it back wet.
There are also lots of tattoos here. But unlike The Gold Coast, no tattoo shops? I haven’t see tattoos on any Japanese, but every second white person – Americans and Aussies - has at least one tattoo. And there are more women than men with them. There are the mid forties women with their first tattoo – some sort of mid life crisis thing, I guess. They want to show that they have a bit of the rebel in them, even if they have never done anything remotely rebellious before, so they get a tattoo on their shoulder or lower back. And now with the number of women sporting tattoos, it’s probably more rebellious to not have one, so they’ve lucked out again. Then there are the mid forties women with old tattoos, a bit faded and stretched, and a more recently inked one nearby. They would have got their first tattoos when they were younger and it was a bit more of a rebellious thing to do. When I was a teenager, we used to call tattoos ‘slag tags’. We were sure that a girl with a tattoo was easy game. Despite our best efforts and the lies we told eachother, I don’t think any of us really managed to prove that theory.
Some of those white western bodies here provide a huge canvass for tattoos. There are some big people around this pool – lots of them Americans. Given the food, it’s not so surprising. At the coffee shop in the hotel, the smallest cup they have is bigger than the biggest cup at the coffee place across the road from my office in Sydney. I got a coffee at the hotel the other day, asked for the smallest cup, and asked them to half fill it. They looked at me like I was a nut. I’ve been reading some of the US papers and the Obama health reforms are still big news. I’ve got a simpler idea for the obesity problem: get a smaller cup. Or instead of calling the really big bucket sized cups the ‘Americano’ as I saw at one place, call it the ‘Fat Ba$tard’. (Those ‘all you can eat’ buffets might need a bit of a rethink, too.)
Pearl Harbour is in the next installment.
I have a few mates and relatives who badger me to write emails when I go anywhere - they like them more them pictures. I couldn't be bothered going on-line while I was there, so I wrote stuff down on paper. I'm now putting stuff into emails for the gang. Thought some of you would like to read them.
Mahalo,
Scott
The only time I’ve even been to Hawaii was when United Airlines used to make people travelling to the States change planes there. So I’ve never been out of the airport. I was looking forward to seeing the place.
But first it was Fiji – for a 3 hour stopover. And in that whole three hours there was not one military coup or cyclone in Fiji! We flew Air Pacific on a very old 747 that they probably picked up cheap somewhere – it was like being in an early 90s Tarago van (the favoured transport of Fijians everywhere). The flight was full of Fijians returning home from Australia for a visit between coups. They’re such big buggers. I would have thought an airline that flies out of Fiji would have bigger seats? I watched a huge Fijian across the aisle hover above the seat before dropping into it with a little grunt. Her husband was having real trouble. They were jammed in so tight they wouldn’t have needed seatbelts. Their armrests worked like levy banks, and I knew if those levy banks ever gave way we would all be in trouble. I remember when I was a kid getting fitted for school shoes and the shop assistant would have one of those metal shoe horns they would put behind our heel to ease our foot into the shoe. Air Pacific should equip their hosties with a bigger version of that to help those Fijians get into their seats.
We were on the last flight out of Fiji that night and the mood in the airport was pretty relaxed. I’m guessing even when there is strife in Fiji things are pretty relaxed. There was a game of football on the TV – Fiji vs New Zealand. Most of the staff in the airport were watching it. From the sound of things, Fiji was winning, so they were pretty happy. I’m not sure whether it was a live game or whether it’s an old one where Fiji won and they replay it every Sunday night.
Because we were flying to Hawaii, we had to have a body search before getting on the plane to leave Fiji. The security guys dragged themselves away from the TV and manned the booths when it was time to get serious. We filed through, got patted down, had our shoes checked, and came out the other side. The only thing that separated the screened passengers from the unscreened ones were those movable queue barriers – ropes on posts. I saw one bloke on the unscreened side pass a beer to his screened mate on the other side of the barrier. ‘They’d be Aussies’, I thought to myself.
We flew into Honolulu at dawn on Sunday. Pearl Harbour was out the left hand side of the plane as we came in to land. It was just after dawn on a Sunday in 1941 that Pearl Harbour was attacked. Our plane was full of Americans and Australians, but it would have been interesting to be on a plane coming from Tokyo. I wonder what the JAL pilots think when they make that approach.
The sum total of my research before coming to Hawaii was watching the movie Pearl Harbour. I didn’t learn much about Honolulu from that, but it’s good to see they’ve fixed the place up. I probably should have done a bit more research on Hawaii - maybe tried to track down that double episode of the Brady Bunch where they went to Hawaii and Greg knocked himself out in that surfing competition because one of the younger kids had picked up some sort of native trinket that brought bad luck.
Honolulu is on the island of Oahu. It wasn’t until a few weeks before we left that I found out there are 300 islands in the group that makes up Hawaii (not sure if that’s at high tide or low tide). No wonder the Skipper and Gilligan got lost in that storm when they ventured out of Honolulu for that three hour cruise (there sure is plenty of history here). Oahu would be about 70klms long by 50klms or so wide. Honolulu sits at the bottom edge of the island toward the east side.
We’re staying at Waikiki. That’s where all the tourists stay. I had been told that Waikiki was just like The Gold Coast. It’s similar, in that everyone there is either a tourist or someone who makes money off tourists, but I’m sorry, you Queenslanders, Waikiki is so much better than The Gold Coast. And there are no loud Americans here! There are loud Aussies, instead. It’s funny how people seem to be more annoying when they leave home.
Waikiki Beach is fantastic – just like the postcards and movies. It’s a beautiful crescent shaped beach maybe a kilometer across. There are lots of hotels on the beachfront – mostly down the western end – but because the beach runs east west, the hotels don’t shade the beach. At the eastern end is Diamond Head – an old volcano. It’s a shallow beach and the surf rolls in forever. It seems like such a slow wave. Do waves travel the same speed everywhere? These ones are so languid. I hired a surfboard and paddled out the back. I sat for ages looking back at the beach front (between you and me I was buggered from the long paddle and had to get my breath back). Every person in the water would have been a tourist, locals wouldn’t bother surfing Waikiki. So it was all very friendly. On the very first wave I tried to catch I stood up long enough to get through a good chunk of the theme song from Hawaii 50 – dah dah dah dah dahhhh dahhhh, dah dah dah dah da. To be fair, if you can manage to stand up on a houseboat you’d be fine on one of those hire boards. I even managed to adopt an deceptively nonchalant swagger as I shuffled up and down the board. Practically every wave I went for, I caught. I learnt quickly to fall flat when things went pear shaped. The water is only a meter deep and it’s a rocky bottom. The rocks aren’t sharp, though – worn down by thousands of tourists over the years getting dumped on them. Then I started getting chaffed and packed it in.
There are loads of Japanese in Hawaii. I didn’t expect that. They would be the biggest single tourist group, after Americans from the mainland. Our hotel – the Sheraton is very flash and they cater to the Japanese. The Japanese men in particular spend a lot of time round the pool getting very red with that quiet determination the Japanese have. Those Japanese not lying in the sun are either shopping, or getting married. On any beach at any time there will always be a happy but slightly confused looking Japanese couple in elaborate wedding gear getting their photos taken. Sometimes they are accompanied by a woman I assume is the wedding organizer. She holds the props for the photos – parasols are very popular. The happy couple never look entirely comfortable, and they keep their shoes on. They don’t do that favoured beach shoot pose where the couple stroll on the sand, the groom with his jacket slung jauntily over one shoulder, tie askew, and the bride casually carrying her shoes in one hand. Or that playful one where the groom has his pants rolled up over his calves and he’s standing in ankle deep water carrying the bride and they’re both giggling like teenagers (the groom through slightly gritted teeth). I guess they rent the wedding gear and don’t want to take it back wet.
There are also lots of tattoos here. But unlike The Gold Coast, no tattoo shops? I haven’t see tattoos on any Japanese, but every second white person – Americans and Aussies - has at least one tattoo. And there are more women than men with them. There are the mid forties women with their first tattoo – some sort of mid life crisis thing, I guess. They want to show that they have a bit of the rebel in them, even if they have never done anything remotely rebellious before, so they get a tattoo on their shoulder or lower back. And now with the number of women sporting tattoos, it’s probably more rebellious to not have one, so they’ve lucked out again. Then there are the mid forties women with old tattoos, a bit faded and stretched, and a more recently inked one nearby. They would have got their first tattoos when they were younger and it was a bit more of a rebellious thing to do. When I was a teenager, we used to call tattoos ‘slag tags’. We were sure that a girl with a tattoo was easy game. Despite our best efforts and the lies we told eachother, I don’t think any of us really managed to prove that theory.
Some of those white western bodies here provide a huge canvass for tattoos. There are some big people around this pool – lots of them Americans. Given the food, it’s not so surprising. At the coffee shop in the hotel, the smallest cup they have is bigger than the biggest cup at the coffee place across the road from my office in Sydney. I got a coffee at the hotel the other day, asked for the smallest cup, and asked them to half fill it. They looked at me like I was a nut. I’ve been reading some of the US papers and the Obama health reforms are still big news. I’ve got a simpler idea for the obesity problem: get a smaller cup. Or instead of calling the really big bucket sized cups the ‘Americano’ as I saw at one place, call it the ‘Fat Ba$tard’. (Those ‘all you can eat’ buffets might need a bit of a rethink, too.)
Pearl Harbour is in the next installment.
