Part 3 - The North Shore
After six days at The Sheraton (for three of which, I was attending a conference) it was time to venture out of Honolulu and explore the island. Convertible Mustangs are the fun rental car of choice for tourists, but with four people and enough luggage for twice that (I’ve got girls), we weren’t Mustang material. I got up-sold into a big red soft top four door Jeep. It’s not my sort of car, but it was great being up high when everybody is driving on the wrong side of the road.
Every tourist does ‘the circle’. It’s a loop starting in Honolulu. People either go clockwise up the middle to the top of the island, called the North Shore, and down the east coast, the Windward Coast. Or they go anti-clockwise. We’re going clockwise. There is a freeway that runs behind Honolulu across the bottom of the island. The highway heading north turns right off this freeway and becomes a one lane road before it hits the coast. It’s not a bad hour and half drive up the middle through the pineapple plantations.
The road up the middle hits the North Shore near Sunset Beach, Pipeline and Waimea Bay. Big wave season is in the winter and we missed it, so I didn’t get a chance to put my newly revived surfing skills to the test. The North Shore isn’t at all what I expected. It’s deserted. A single road runs across the top of the island – one lane each way. It has no gutter – just grass verges. There are small towns every now and then. It’s like Byron Bay back before the developers and whippies (weekend hippies) discovered it. The locals up here are very good at keeping the developers out. I don’t know how they do it. On the North Shore there is one hotel. It’s a flash one – Turtle Bay Resort. We stayed there two nights. No turtles. Plenty of wind, though. Crikey, it was windy.
There weren’t many Japanese on the North Shore. Too far from the shops, and too windy for a wedding photo parasol. There are loads of stretch limos that cruise ‘the circle’. I suspect behind those tinted windows were Japanese tourists. Their limo would pick them up at their hotel in the morning, and they would be dropped back safely early afternoon having done the loop without stopping. I saw the occasional bus on the road with more intrepid Japanese tourists. The driver would pull up somewhere and offload them all. They would huddle together I’m sure thinking ‘So, where are the shops?’ Then a few would venture onto the sand and the rest would follow for some quick photos before scurrying back on the bus.
That road carries a lot of small buses with tourists. And there are the limos. And the mustangs – I looked down disparagingly from my jeep at those showy tourists. Of course, everyone in a Jeep with no mud on it is a tourist too. Basically every car less than two years old would be driven by a tourist. The tourist traffic must drive the locals nuts. I hardly saw any of them on the road. I wonder how many accidents there are? I did a double-take one day when I saw a confused Japanese couple in a Mustang. I parked till they were out of sight. There are also plenty of mopeds with tourists. Like all tourists, the ones who hire mopeds in Hawaii seem to think that the concrete here must be softer than the concrete at home because they don’t wear helmets or shoes.
The road hugs the seashore for most of the way. When it goes through towns, there might be a few streets of houses between the road and the shoreline. These are the better houses. The ones on the other side of the road are very different. They are much shabbier and their yards are filled with junk. I quizzed someone on this and he said that it’s expensive to get rid of rubbish in Hawaii because everything has to get taken to California, so people hang onto stuff rather than pay to get rid of it.
Down the Windward Coast (the east coast) it was even windier. Somehow the idea of Oahu’s Windward Coast conjures up images of a gentle tropical breezes – a ‘zephyr’ perhaps. They should just call it the Bloody Windy Coast. Heading down the coast on Sunday we stopped at the Polynesian Cultural Centre. By all accounts, this is the biggest tourist destination on the island. It’s acres and acres with sections dedicated to particular island people: Fijians, Samoans, Tongans, Hawaiins and probably others. They put on shows and wear native clobber and make native stuff and do native things. And it was closed. But I noticed on one of the dozen maps and guides we had accumulated that there was a huge Mormon temple just up the road, so I thought, ‘What the hell, let’s go there’. Its carpark was completely empty, too; there wasn’t a soul in sight. I thought it must have been closed, but the visitors centre seemed to be open, so we wandered in. Brother Walter was chuffed to see us. He explained that on two Sundays every year the head Mormon in the US gives an address or a pep talk or something and Mormons everywhere tune in. The town we were in was a town with 8,000 people, and way more than half were Mormon - including the staff and students at the Brigham Young University next door. So Brother Walter was manning the fort while everyone in town watched the pep talk.
I explained that I was a heathen but Mimi, our 9 year old, does occasionally attend church with a friend of hers. It’s something called the Church of Christ. We thought it might have been an offshoot of the Latter Day Saints, but Brother Walter didn’t think so. I’m not sure why we felt the need to legitimize our curiosity to see the place – I don’t think Brother Walter would have tossed us out. He offered to show us a film about the Mormons in Hawaii, and he was so nice it would have felt impolite to refuse. So he led us into an empty cinema, dimmed the lights, hit ‘play’, and slipped out. We were the only people in there. Lisa and I looked at eachother nervously across the top of the kids’ heads. I think we were both worried for a minute that we might be going to get hypnotized or something.
According to the film, the Mormons came to Hawaii around 1850. It would have been a pretty soft target for them and a nice way to break in new missionaries – none of those pesky head hunters in Hawaii, and US businesses already softening up the locals. In 1865 the Mormons, established themselves on the east coast of Oahu and coaxed the natives down from the beautiful, green, temperate hills to the drier, flat land on the coast. Then they got them into shirts and shorts and taught them how to farm – mostly so the missionaries could be fed, I’d say. It was a bit sad, but I put on a good face when we went back out to see Brother Walt. There were a few displays in the foyer to look at, but Lisa and Lulu made their escape. I stayed talking to Walt while Mimi lingered inside where the displays were.
‘You know why she’s still in there?’ he said.
‘Nope’
‘She feels something.’
‘And there are three televisions’, I added.
One interesting thing that I learnt in the film was that the Polynesian Cultural Centre was established by the Mormons. They still own and operate it. So the Polynesian Cultural Centre, the Brigham Young University, and the big Mormon temple are all part of the same huge complex. It would be the biggest development on the island, apart from the airport. I quizzed Walt on the connection. He said all the displays at the cultural centre were manned by Mormon students from the BY uni next door. It gives them some income while they study. I asked what happened if they ran out of, say, Fijian students, or if the Samoans get on the drink whether they mix them around but he wasn’t sure. I said I would be keen to go there if they re-enacted any of those wars that the Fijians, Samoans and Tongans used to have before the whites showed up. He didn’t think there were any wars between displays at the Cultural Centre but he agreed it would be a pretty good spectacle. (He wasn’t sure whether the stealing of eachothers women would be entirely appropriate, though.) Walt went on to say that the Polynesian Cultural Centre was important for Pacific island nations because the cultures of so many of them were being eroded. He was so affable and polite that I didn’t have the heart to suggest, even very gently, that perhaps the missionaries in some teeny tiny way might bear some responsibility for that cultural erosion.
It was time to go and I hauled Mimi away from the televisions. I told Walt on the way out that the Mormons or someone might get her one day and that one out of four wasn’t bad. He laughed and said it wasn’t about keeping score. I pointed out that the Muslims were probably keeping score and that they were winning. He nodded. I told him that the promise of 70 or so virgins in heaven was pretty compelling for young Muslim blokes. I suggested that perhaps the Mormons could claw back a bit of ground by bringing back polygamy – sort of a heaven on earth. I could tell that Walt thought there was some merit in the idea, even though he was probably beyond being an active polygamy participant.
.
