Travelling The Islands, Pt 3--Oahu

Currently I am in Waikiki on the island of Oahu, as previously stated. I've been here for four days, and am able to give it a little better review than I did on the day I first landed in Hawaii.
This is a crowded mess of tall hotel buildings, so I was still right on the money with that. The beach is crowded with tourists, along with vendors hawking catamaran cruises, snorkeling trips and other activities. I feel sorry for the tourists, as they have little reason or inclination to venture past their hotel area. They spend all that money to lie on the beach and eat at the same bad restaurant for a few days, and they'll spend the rest of their lives talking about it. I get a tiny bit of glee when talking to them. They tell me where they're from, and ask where I'm from when they hear the Southern accent. I get to say "Maui".
I'm writing from my balcony, and it's a noisy place, with foodservice carts echoing over the flagstone walkways and dishes being shuffled. Much of this hotel is under construction, so the laundromat is out of service, which means I get to have a petty revenge against the Transportation Safety Administration when I go back....Let them rifle through my smelly, unwashed clothing!
The city streets are vibrant and clean, and I was pleased to find them peopled with hundreds of hot Japanese girls in light clothing. I don't remember any attractive Japanese women in North Carolina, but they sure are abundant here.
On my first night out wandering, the boss and I found a Korean BBQ steak house tucked back in an alleyway. "In business for over ten years!" they claimed, which is a good sign. Meals were served shabu shabu style: there's a round gas grill countersunk into the tabletop, and you cook the meat yourself. This is fun, and keeps the price way down. Sides were delicious as well, and though the portions appeared very small, I left very satisfied. Perhaps I will build my own Shabu table one day.
The next night I tried the same concept in a Japanese restaurant, but it wasn't quite up to par, as you had to cook your own vegetables as well, and they charged extra for those. I still came out cheap, but with hunger less than sated.
However, I was amused and taken aback momentarily when, while being shown to my table, the host yelled out loud something in Japanese, and all the staff looked at me and responded with a loud and boisterous "ArrooooooHAAA!!!"
The stereotype appears to be true...you'd think they could pronounce "aloha" by now.
I've been out and around the block a few times now, and it all starts to run together...the buildings and glass windows full of things which I have no interest in whatsoever. It's a giant mall surrounded by a giant mall and a few other smaller malls in between. I did stumble onto one mall that was interesting: the International Bazaar. Stuck in an alleyway between tall buildings, it was composed of a large group of kiosks piled under a gigantic banyan tree. The wares were uninteresting--apparently the vendors believe that there is a catastrophic costume jewelry shortage in the world--but the draw was the tree stuck in the middle of this concrete jungle. I absolutely love banyan trees, and made sure to get some pictures. They are an amazing species. A member of the common edible fig family, they have a unique ability to shoot roots out from their branches, allowing them to cover a large area. A banyan in the Lahaina Courthouse lawn on Maui covers nearly two-and-one-half acres. They look like something right out of an Indiana Jones adventure. The parks along the beach in Waikiki boast several of them, and I took great delight in inspecting the one pictured above up close.

Travelling The Islands, pt 2--Lana'i

The island of Lanai is a wonderful treasure to behold...but it takes less than two days to behold it, and that's pushing it.
Lanai has a small airport or two, but is mainly accessed by ferry from Lahaina, Maui. I had the blessed fortune of making this crossing at the best possible time: the hight of whale season. Every winter, humpback whales migrate to Hawaii to birth their calves....and they come in the tens of thousands! The channel between Maui and Lanai becomes whale soup! Crossing the channel, you can see them all around spouting, breaching, jumping and playfully slapping their tails repeatedly on the water's surface. When they know they've gained your attention, they put on quite a show. Our event was being held in a putting green atop a cliff overlooking a cove, and a pod of whales with new calves frolicked just off shore in that bay all day long. We were having trouble keeping our crew focused on the job at hand, as were the musicians, sound and light crew, hotel staff and caterers. It was a marvelous and wonderful thing to behold. Further out in the water I could see one swimming around a whale-watching cruise, jumping high out of the water on each pass. Ooohs and aaahs aplenty could be heard that day.
Lanai only has two ferry landings, and one narrow road each which climbs the mountain to it's summit. As we approached the southwest landing, sheer, flat cliffs rose high out of the ocean, looking as if someone had sliced away part of the mountain with a carving knife. Above them, ridges and valleys of green forest stretched up into the clouds which obscured the peak. A little further past the landing, a large obelisk of rock jutted out of the ocean just off of the shoreline which appeared to be at one time the other end of a natural bridge. Lanai is very proud of this rock, and it is featured in most of the brochures that I saw as a treasured monument.
Our lodging was on the summit of the island in Lanai City. We followed the road winding up the mountainside, noticing a significant temperature drop along the way. There are no auto or truck rentals on the island, so the only modes of transportation are a shuttle bus which runs the island constantly or the kindness of strangers who would loan you a vehicle, and we utilized both. We finally arrived to our hotel, which is highly acclaimed as one of the finest in the world--The Four Seasons Koele Lodge of Lanai. It was a large, two-story plantation home, with extremely enormous pine trees lining the entrance. A front porch stretched the entire face, with plenty of rocking chairs and whicker furniture. It occurred to me that this seemed entirely out of place here...one would expect to find this sort of place in northern Virginia as opposed to Hawaii; plus it was cold, and all I had to wear were shorts.
We began work as soon as we landed on the island, so it was 7:00 pm by the time we arrived at the hotel, and I never got to see it. We were instructed that we had only twenty minutes to shower and return to the shuttle in time for dinner. I missed the shower, and we all missed the shuttle, so the hotel staff drove us into town and dropped us off at the only open restaurant-the Blue Ginger Cafe. This was a tiny hole-in-the-wall with a few tables and counter...a typical mom-and-pop burger joint kinda place. Two doors down was a corner church which doubled as the town movie theater with first-run films on a second-run schedule. The place was packed with local teenagers, and from what I read of the billboard, the movies only run for a couple of nights. Come early.
Being in Lanai City is really like being in a time warp. The entire town shuts down at 8:30 pm. All "restaurants" close at 7:30 pm, except for the Blue Ginger which stays open a generous 30 minutes more. There is almost no industry whatsoever...the entire economy seems built on service work, with the exception of one custom furniture and woodworking company in the middle of Lanai City. There was once a great pineapple industry--Dole Pineapple owned 98% of the island-- but Dole has pulled out of Hawaii, and fields now go untilled. To make matters worse, Dole will not allow the natives to farm the abandoned land. This seemed like the smallest of Depression-era rural small towns. It's hard to fathom that when I look out at this nearby island while swimming in the comfort of Kihei's endless beaches, I am looking at a rock populated by a very few of the wealthiest people in the world, and a whole lot of broken dreams.
We finished dinner at 9:00 pm, and were back to work from 11:00 pm until 3:00 am. We slept, and when I awoke the coffee service had already closed. I was shuttled back to the ferry twenty minutes later. I had seen none of this grand hotel but the room and the hallway from the front porch to the room. But aside from that, I had seen everything there was to see on Lanai during my short little 24-hour visit.

*To be continued, with addendum from a second trip*

Travelling The Islands, Pt 1, The Big Island and Makaha, Oahu

I've been lucky and blessed enough to have procured employment with a company that does a fair amount of travelling throughout the islands, and I have been surprised to learn that the islands are both very much the same and yet so very different.

My first trip away was to the Big Island of Hawai'i. As the plane approached the leeward side of the island near the town of Kailua-Kona, I looked down from the plane onto a landscape that looks nothing less than lunar. The ground was nothing but a vast expanse of hundreds of square miles of lava rock. The black asphalt roads which cut through this barren landscape appeared from above to be long strips of black duct tape pasted over the land. The faster-flowing lava had left fields of smooth, jet-black lava with the ropy texture of water flowing through a pebbled stream bed. The slower lava expanded outward as it cooled, forming a field of sharp, rust-colored coral-like rocks which gave the appearance of the land having been tilled and overturned by gargantuan earth-moving machines. From the ground, there was nothing to be seen but Moana Kea in the distance, the ocean and an enormous desert of rock thinly glazed over with dead, dry, brown grass....God's own Chia pet.
The ancient Hawaiians would travel across this land, slowly cutting a single-file footpath through the rock-a lesson in perseverance. They camped at night sleeping in the mouths of lava tubes which gave some minor shelter from the wind and rain. At their encampments, they would carve petroglyphs into the rock...small stick-figure graffiti that supposedly told who they were, what their rank is, and what their exploits were. For example, a circle with three dots inside is assumed to mean that the party circled the island three times. Ranks of tribal members were signified by adornments around their heads, such as domes and rays. These petroglyph designs remain a firm fixture in popular culture, and are seen in company logos and in stickers on the backs of automobiles and on surfboards, or painted onto the walls of theme restaurants, or fashioned into jewelry, etc, etc..
It was a long drive to our destination hotel...about 30 miles away to the north. The desert of rock expanded for as far as I could see to a mountain in the distance, and was terribly featureless and boring save for the creativity of the natives: all along the highway was grafitti created by dragging white coral rocks from the shore and placing them into letters and designs onto the black and red lava rock. I saw nothing that would be considered lewd....all initials of lovers placed inside hearts, memorials to lost loved ones, and cheers for the graduating class or high-school sports team. This was interesting and charming to see, and became even more interesting when you consider what a huge undertaking this was in terms of labor. It was a lot of coral, and it travelled a long way...the shore was over half a mile away with very little access. One would have a very difficult and downright dangerous time hiking across this landscape, and driving over it was absolutely out of the question. With no trees and desert-like conditions to boot, it becomes obvious that the artist would devote an entire day just to have his message put in sight of passing motorists.
The resort areas are very sporadically placed along the shoreline of this island...very remote. Our first event was at the Waikoloa Village Hilton Resort, and what a fantastic and spectacular piece of architectural engineering this place is!...especially considering that it was carved into a pure rock landscape. Three guest towers surround a seperate hotel lobby building, and are accessable by footpath, boat and monorail tram. An enormous marble stairway covered by a 40-foot high arbor leads down into the waters of an ocean-fed lagoon complete with tropical fishes and trained dolphins. Each building is a museum, with foyers adorned with paintings, sculptures and artifacts from various periods and locations, from Buddhist China to Hinduist India to colonial America. Designed by a former architect of Walt Disney World, this resort is a wondrous achievement.
Nearby is Anaeho'omalu Bay--affectionately known as A-Bay--and a beach park to which I ventured one evening to watch the sunset. I had heard in my youth of Hawaiian beaches with red and black sand, but....tweed? Yes, tweed sand! I dug through it with my hands and observed it closely.....course granules of blond, black and emerald green---and nothing else--combining to create a color that can only be described as tweed. It was thick and heavy, pleasant underfoot, and with the extra added benefit of not being sticky...a flick of your hand or foot, and it was all gone!

A second trip to this island placed me in the considerably more lush, green and populated harbor town of Kona, south of it's desert airport. There's little to tell of it, other than it's a basic town on the hillside overlooking the harbor, with a quaint little tourist trap boardwalk. Our event site was much farther north next to the Waikoloa Village Hilton, but management saw fit to opt for the longer drive and the considerably less expensive hotel--the King Kamehameha Hotel, which appears very much like I imagine it did in 1972. Though not the finest of accommodations (having been spoiled by being given my own private 3-bedroom condo on the previous trip), this hotel seemed like the Ritz Carlton after experiencing the horror that was Makaha Valley on the island of Oahu. More on that in a moment.
A fair amount of night driving was involved in this trip, and it was my first experience with driving in pitch black conditions. The road from Kona to Waikoloa is long and straight, much like a southwestern desert road. I could see neither the land to my right nor the ocean to my left...nothing could be seen at all that lie outside the field of my headlamps. This was a very creepy experience...one would assume that there would be something to see, but alas, on an overcast night, there was nothing at all. Nothing.
Our event for the week was held on a lawn right on the shoreline, and our props were stored in a shipping container up the hillside near the highway. After the event, and after all the props were locked back into the container, I turned around to see a most breathtaking view: It was past 2:00am, and all the condo lights were out...the only light available was from the full moon setting straight ahead over the ocean. A path of shining silver pointed towards it on the water's surface, fading out in rippling feathers to either side. It was the most beatiful thing I had ever seen, and as I stood there mesmerized by it, I noticed that it was also deathly quiet--no wind, no breeze, no birds, no rustling trees, no cars--no sound at all but the blood rushing through my ears. I had worked a long and hard shift, and was well paid by being suddenly thrust inside a postcard world. With any luck, I will never forget that moment for the rest of my life.

As I am writing this, it is 3:32 am, and I am on the fourth-floor balcony of my hotel room overlooking Waikiki Beach on Oahu. Now, I slammed Waikiki pretty hard when I first landed here in Hawaii, and I wish to retract my comments. It's bigger than I realised, and the streets are overflowing with outlandishly attractive young Japanese women. But more about that later....On to Makaha Valley:

The Makaha Valley Resort is situated between two high mountain ridges in the west side of Oahu...hence the term "valley". Duh. This resort could be nice, but it's bland, with bad food, and it's a golf villa, so there's nothing at all to do but play golf and compare shades of blue hair....and those are the highlights.
To get to Makaha, one must travel along a busy beach road through the town of Waianae (pronounced "why-an-eye"). This is the part of the island to which all of Oahu's homeless and downtrodden are herded to keep them out of sight of the tourists. Cramped, dilapidated homes pile up along the roadside, mingled with tacky pink convenience stores which thrive on sales of alcohol and cigarettes. The one local grocery store actually has a side room by the front door with it's own checkout just for alcohol and cigarettes, which both helps to control shoplifting and keeps the riff-raff from waiting at the checkout. Drugs and crime are the primary industries here.
The Waianae beach front is a vast tent city...it looks like a retirement village for all those people who spent their lives following the Grateful Dead on tour. Tarps and machanical refuse are cleverly fashioned into extra rooms and lanais for a ripstop nylon condominium effect.
I have heard that Hawaii's growing homeless problem has been making the news on the mainland. While it is an epidemic, there are some things that need to be kept in perspective, as revealed to me by a retired military vet who spends his time managing charities and homeless advocacy affairs:
There are basically three classes of homeless people in Hawaii. The first is the obvious--the mentally disturbed, addicted, alcoholic, and the aging and disabled. Our hearts go out to them. The criminal are also in this class, and they get no sympathy.
The second class are people who have jobs, have money in the bank, and seek to improve their lives, but some past misfortune has left them with unsavory credit which makes them ineligible to rent a home. They carry on their lives hoping for a kinder and brighter future.
The third class have jobs and money in the bank, and their money grows; but they simply do not see any point in throwing that money away on the ridiculously high rental rates. They are perfectly happy with a shelter in Paradise and a shower on the beach front. I was amused to see one of these types pushing a mower around his neatly-kept nylon condo.
I point this out because I am one of the privileged few that have a full-time job and full medical and dental benefits; but anything can happen here, and I could become another of Hawaii's statistics at the drop of a hat.

To be continued...