Saturday

To Hawaii!

Six wonderful days and five fabulous nights in Hawaii - it was gorgeous!  

Day One

Well, we've arrived!  Here's the view from our room!

We stayed at the Ohana Waikiki Beachcomber - we've never heard of Ohana before - it turns out they're affiliated with Outrigger, which is directly across the street at about twice the price!  We're about 100 yards from the beach, and otherwise, right in the middle of Waikiki - we'll be able to walk to anywhere - and our hotel includes free passes on the "pink trolley" which circles around the main area of Waikiki and out to the Ala Moana Mall.  We booked our trip through Costco and got a package price with an upgraded room.

Just as we're settling in, there's a knock at the door - a delivery of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts - Costco told them we were celebrating our 20th anniversary! 

We go out for a walk to see what's nearby.  First stop is the Royal Hawaiian, where Vern thinks he used to hear a weekly radio show from - "Hawaii Calls".  

This would have been in the 1930's - he asks at the front desk.  The clerks look it up - nope - it was at the Moana Surfrider (then just called "The Moana") in the Banyan Courtyard, two doors down - we'll check it out!

Meanwhile, we LOVE the Royal Hawaiian!


I loved this map in their lobby!

We decide to walk along the beach to find the Moana Surfrider - and stop in to their Banyan Courtyard, which is now a bar, and have a drink!  
We're already getting tired, and the gin isn't helping!  ;-0

 This is the Banyan Tree in the Banyan Courtyard - where Hawaii Calls was broadcast from.

This looks like we stayed into the night - but it was still a sunny afternoon when we left - we went by the front door to see what the hotel looks like...
A  quick and quiet dinner tonight - we have to be up and outside for pickup at 6:30 a.m. - our first full day of touring!

A quick note about tours - this is what we mostly did while in Hawaii - we wanted to see as much as possible and though it might seem strange, we're not sun worshipers, swimmers or beach bunnies!  We just wanted to see Hawaii, and we did.  I would highly recommend doing this by tours - at least one or two - after that, you could go back to the spots you really wanted to spend time at by taking the city bus - it goes all over the island!


There are MANY choices for tours - most companies seem quite large and you'll basically get the same tour no matter who your guide is.  We took one of these for our first tour - the "Circle Island".  While we saw a lot, and the guide was probably pretty knowledgeable, we found the constant patter of jokes a bit much.  


Our second was an "inadvertent" tour - we had arranged, and paid for, tickets to the Polynesian Cultural Center, including door-to-door transportation.  We'd intended to then ask for a tour guide from among the students who work there, and expected to set that up when we arrived.  Instead, our bus driver had a full complement of people who were already on a tour that he was leading.  He took us along and at the second stop asked us if we wanted to join his tour...  It was hard to refuse, as he had our tickets in his pocket, and well, it would have been rude.  So we said yes.  His jokes were so constant (and so bad) that it was very difficult to tell if he had much "real" information - we would never have chosen him had we known.   I've heard the students give a really great tour, so if you possibly can, do make those arrangements.


The last three tours were with a wonderful, smaller company, called Oahu Nature Tours.  These were very small tours - our largest was probably the last one with about 12 people, and our smallest included only one other couple.  We really enjoyed these tours, all guided by very knowledgeable people and showing us a bit of the flora, fauna and history of Hawaii - I can't recommend them enough.   You'll notice I didn't mention the other two tour companies - while I can't recommend them, I know that many others enjoyed them, so it was probably just whatever your tastes are.  If you'd like the more informal, jokey kind of tour - any of the major companies will do.


Day Two

Our guide stops right at the hotel door and calls out our names - and we hop on the sightseeing bus.  We stop at several other hotels, then head on to Pearl Harbor.  There is nothing else like this - I was surprised at how touching I found the tour and the monument.  The pictures can't do it justice, but  you have to look at SOMETHING!  The Arizona is still leaking oil - one of the pictures shows it on the water - at a rate of a quart a day, I think it is - but there is so much there - something like 500,000 gallons, that it will continue to leak for a long time.  You'll also see the USS Missouri, which is anchored nearby and on whose bridge the peace treaty ending WWII was signed.  We didn't tour that, though.

After a couple of hours here, we were back on our tour bus for a "circle island" tour.  We drove about half the island of Oahu, and began to get a good idea of the beauty and variation on the island.

This spot is probably the most beautiful on the island - Pali Lookout - the view from here is like nothing on earth and looks different from every angle!  It's the windiest spot on the island, too, I think - I had trouble holding my camera steady here.  But what a view!  Every tourist guide we went with took us here, except the one that was really just a ride to the Polynesian Cultural Center.  Obviously, this is a favorite spot, and you can see why.  King Kamehameha waged a very bloody battle on Oahu to become the single ruler of all the islands.  It ended here, where he drove the defenders of Oahu over the cliffs in 1795.

We saw a lot of flora and fauna - the birds were wonderful, though not many were really native to Hawaii.  These are Cattle Egrets - supposedly very common everywhere.  I'd never seen one before and when I came home and looked it up I see they are in almost every state except Washington!  I thought they were beautiful.


And these guys are Brazilian Cardinals  - I tried for days to catch them on the camera - turns out this one - the first picture - was the best!

Chinaman's Hat

We passed this spot in the bus - this man sold sculptures he carved from Monkeypod Wood.  The Marlin was bigger than I am!
 Here are two very different churches - the Mormon Temple (BIG Mormon population which has been here since the late 1800's when they came as missionaries) and a small local church, with it's Hawaiian name on the sign.


We went to several different beaches and saw different scenes.

Legend has it that Oahu is a dragon lying in the water - normally you can't see that, because you are too close - but here you supposedly see the last of the dragon's tail trailing off into the water on the left.
Can you see the crouching lion in the stone formation pictured below?

 Does this help?

How about this?
On our last stop of the day, I dropped the camera - thank heavens it continued to take great pictures!  I was sure it was a goner!  This is "the blowhole" - several different guides took us here and never called it anything else.  You can really see the curvature of the earth in this first photo.


From this same spot, you could also look down on the "From Here to Eternity Beach.

All the guides knew all the movies that had ever been made here - they must get asked about them all the time, as they all showed us spots where "Lost" or "50 First Dates" were filmed.  They knew where Tom Selleck lives and which house they filmed for "Robin's Nest" on Magnum P.I.  They also  all talked about the cost of the average home and the "above average" ones - which I thought odd until the one guy who didn't say anything about it was asked by one of the other tourists - so I guess they're just anticipating the questions...

We returned home about 4:30, very tired, and ready to rest up.  


Day Three


This was a little more civilized - we were picked up at our hotel around 10 a.m.  A few more stops later, we were on our way -  going north  on  the island, retracing some steps from the day before.  But today, we're doing only one thing - the Polynesian Cultural Center.  It's up by Brigham Young University - it's a kind of "theme park" which hires students from the U.  It gives them a way to earn money while they're studying - and lets the rest of us learn a lot about Polynesia.  I couldn't possibly do justice to much of what we learned here, so I will really just show you all the pictures.  It was a wonderful day.  After most of the day was over, I was tired, and so didn't take any pictures of the luau, and of course, we were not allowed to take photos during the show, so the pictures stop just before the luau starts.  We visited 6 villages, I believe, saw a wonderful parade on water, and learned quite a bit about the history of Polynesia and Hawaii in particular.

Our first village was in Samoa, where we saw a demonstration of how to make fire, and then tree-climbing to pick coconuts.  Check out the tattoos on these guys! 
On to New Zealand and the Maori village, where most of the excitement was indoors and difficult to photograph.  The people there sang some amazing songs - really wonderful!


And on to Tonga, where entertainers play the drums and nose flute, and teach us a few rudimentary hula-type hand movements.  All of Polynesia does these kinds of dances and you can see how they've each developed a little differently.  Then a few of a number of houses decorated wonderfully with tapa cloth or ngatu.
 We spent a quick moment in Fiji, then saw a presentation on Hawaiian music and dance.  This was also indoors and the pictures are not good.
Next came the parade, on water!  Barges floated by with dancers from all the different Polynesian countries.  They were spectacular!

Fiji

Hawaii
New Zealand - Maori
Samoa
Somebody's rockin' the boat!
Splash!  There goes the "driver"!
Tahiti - nice hats!
Tonga
After the parade was over, we had a boat ride back to the entrance area where we were given leis and went into the luau.  After that, the show "Ha!  The Breath of Life" - which was spectacular - especially the fire dancers! 

We arrive back at our hotel about 10:30 at night - a very full day!  

Day Four 

Back to touring today - this is the first of several with tours with one company - the one I would definitely recommend - Oahu Nature Tours.  The guides on these tours were all very informative, friendly, but not always "performing" like the others.  They clearly love Hawaii and are proud to show you some of the highlights.  This first one was with Stan, who grew up in Hawaii loving the nature.  He took us first to another hotel, to pick up the only other people on this tour - a couple from Australia.  Then we were off driving through the forests and seeing trees and vegetation, Stan pointing out those that were native to Hawaii.  Our first stop is a familiar one - Pali lookout.  As you can see from the pictures, it looks a bit different each day...


If, like me, this is your favorite spot on Oahu, not to worry - we'll be back to take more pictures!  


Next stop is a Hawaiian temple - while it's now a pile of rocks, it doesn't really look that different from when it was in use as a temple - it's more a "sacred place" and was never a building, per se. 

If you click on any picture, it will come up larger and in this case, you'd be able to read this sign.


Our next stop was a pretty beach...
There are lovely small beaches all along the coastline - we stopped at quite a few.  In many cases, there were only one or two people enjoying the beach.  In other cases, there were lots of folks.  I actually have NO pictures of Waikiki beach - we really didn't go there, though it wasn't more than a few hundred yards from our hotel room.  We walked along it the first day and saw firsthand that it is elbow-to-elbow crowded.  If we were the kind of people who spent a lot of time on a beach, we'd choose one of these isolated spots - there are many to choose from, and they're all beautiful.  Here are a handful that we saw on day four.
This one was my favorite - probably because I want to look at the beach not be on it.  This seemed like an idyllic view.



Though the beaches we were right on allowed for some gorgeous photos!  

Here is one that seemed pretty wild!  
Do you see the lighthouse on the promontory of this rock formation?
Not every beach had sand...in fact, they told us that Waikiki's sand is all brought in from somewhere else.  They had lots of different stories about where it came from - Australia, California... so who knows?  But they all agree it has only been a "beach" in recent times - before that it was really a swampy area.  The water was all diverted by a canal and they brought in the sand, put up some hotels and the rest, as they say...




The line up the left side of this mountain is a set of stairs - there were usually people up there when we saw this (on several different tours).
The brown under the green here is a mongoose - you'll have to trust me on this.  I'd never seen one before, so tried very hard to take his picture but he was shy...


This is Hanauma Bay - where the snorklers were just kind of wandering around and bending over to see all kinds of wonderful sealife.  We didn't go down to this beach though our guide told us how to get there if we wanted to go back on our own.  It certainly looked like they were having fun, and it's a truly beautiful spot.
Lest you think this tour - Natural Highlights didn't include much wildlife or vegetation, here is a picture of the only palm type native to Hawaii - the  loulu, or Pritchardia, palm.  In fact it's not only native, it's endemic to Hawaii, which means that it is only found there.  Like so many other native Hawaiian plants and animals, it is now rare, and can probably only be found in protected areas and gardens.
This one was planted in a protected area by a renewed Hawaiian fish ponds.  These ponds were originally basically fish farms that the Hawaiians used to raise food fish.  It might be part of a larger farm.  This one has been re-made as a protected environment for native fish, plants and birds.  There were several fish that we saw but my camera wasn't quick enough for, and also several birds - the only one I could get to stand still long enough was the black-necked stilt, and these were taken from a pretty big distance.
This fellow above has his head down in the grass looking for something to eat.
And here's another view of him with his head just coming up. 

There was beautiful vegetation everywhere!



This was a great tour - we'd go again in a minute!


Tomorrow, we see the North Shore...


Day Five


Our tours all start with a drive out of Waikiki, through Honolulu's downtown and into the rural areas - and we usually pass some wonderful scenery on the way. 


Our first stop today is a Buddhist temple.  We spent some time here just enjoying the scenery and tame birds and fish.  While there were signs everywhere telling us not to feed the peacocks, we saw ne'ery a one.  We did see one later on but I couldn't get him to hold still...
This large bell was at the entrance and hardly anyone could resist ringing it. 


There was a pair of black swans swimming in the moat, along with the biggest koi I've ever seen. 
 Ring-Necked Dove


 The Buddha was very beautiful.






Some of the vegetation surrounding the temple.
We stopped at several more beaches and saw various rock formations and birds...This "beach" is in the largely Mormon town of  Laie.

Is it just me, or does this seem like an odd place to camp?  I guess you can't see it from this picture, but this is a rocky promontory sticking out into the sea with nothing around it - I think these people are fishing.


This rock formation is said to be a dragon's head just coming out of the water.  The hole is his eye and his snout is on the right.
There's a blowhole in his nose and here's the closest I could get to him "blowing off a little steam"!


This is Turtle Island - named so because it supposedly looks like  a turtle floating in the sea with his head and neck on the left.

We saw lots of wildlife.  My favorite - the Brazilian Cardinal.

And my second-favorite - the Cattle Egret - they walk so erect.

The Hawaiian Coot.

And the Hawaiian Gallinule.


Pacific Golden Plover in breeding plumage.


We passed this odd little temple/shrine...


And every day, we passed cemeteries, where every grave (or so it seemed) was decorated with flowers.  Each guide told us that it's Hawaiian custom to leave "offerings" for the departed, of items that people enjoyed in their lifetime, and often it would be food or drink.  They had to stop allowing people to leave a can of beer though, as the local teenagers would raid the cemeteries and drink the beer, no matter how much it had spoiled.  For their safety, only empty cans were allowed now.


Every guide also pointed out the pet cemetery which was in front of one of the "people" places - it looked just the same.


This is the state tree - the Kukui or candlenut tree.  The nuts  - seen in the second picture  - were burned for light and the nut oil is also touted as being a wonderful skin cream.  


Our guide took us to Turtle beach, where he said we were sure to see the rare Green Sea Turtle sunning himself - they crawl up on the beach every afternoon, apparently, like clockwork.  Sure enough...

We spent our second trip to the Dole Plantation outside in the gardens...


We wended our way home after this stop - tired but happy.  At this point, I had taken 500 pictures - all my camera's card would handle, so this evening, I spent some time going through my pictures and deleting any that weren't good.  


Day Six


It's hard to believe we have to leave today - it's all gone by in a whirlwind!  But there is one more wonderful tour to take - A Tale of Two Palaces.  We are picked up by our guide in the morning, and taken out of the city again to our first stop at Queen Emma's  Summer Palace.  Queen Emma was married to King Kamehameha IV.  This "palace" is really a nice, but small, house which had been her childhood home.  After her marriage to the king, they used it as a vacation home.  It's now a museum, and no photographs are allowed inside, but I do have a few of the grounds...


This is a Jackfruit tree above, and below, the Ohi'a lehua tree  - native to Hawaii.
Next, we stopped at the Kamehameha mausoleum, built by Kamehameha IV and Emma, to bury their only child, Prince Albert Edward Kamehameha, who would have been Kamehameha V if he had lived.  The remains of all the other Hawaiian royalty were moved here, except Kamehameha I because, according to the custom of his time, his remains are buried in a secret place so his enemies could not desecrate them.  Since Kamehameha IV, all other monarchs were buried here, as well, so this is where all Hawaiian royalty are spending eternity.
 As this is a sacred place, we did not go inside, but looked in from beyond the gates.
Our guide explained the Hawaiian Coat of Arms to one of our tour members.


The Kamehameha monogram also graces the gates.
Prince Albert Edward Kamehameha's tomb - yes, he was named after Queen Victoria's consort, Prince Albert - Queen Emma and Victoria had much in common and were great friends.  Queen Victoria was Emma's son's Godmother.
As we head toward our last stop, we spend a little bit of time at the State Capitol building.  This building was designed to embody all that is Hawaii - the columns are palm trees, there is a pool beside it which represents the sea, and sets Hawaii apart as the only island state.  The central atrium is open, simulating the corona of a volcano, and denoting that Hawaii's only ceiling is the sky. 

 A statue of Father Damien stands outside the Capitol.
The State Seal of Hawaii is on the facade.
And across the way is an eternal flame - a memorial to those Hawaiian residents who have served in the US military.

Our last stop on this tour is Iolani Palace, home of Hawaiian royals and a museum now commemorating Queen Lili'uokalani, Hawaii's last monarch.  To read a bit about her and see her quilt made in captivity, take a look at my company's blog
Iolani Palace - another museum, does not allow photography, and since we were taken in the back way, we never had a view of the outside to take pictures.  I was also sad to not get a photo of the statue of King Kamehmeha I, which stands outside the palace.  There are many on the internet, though, and I used some of those in my blog post for the company - above.

When we were dropped off at our hotel, we had one last treat in store - we'd booked afternoon tea at the Moana Surfrider Hotel, on that very Verandah where Hawaii Calls was broadcast from.  Here are our pictures from that - they hardly need narration, except for the tea selection, which I'll point out.



The menu for the afternoon tea is set, of course, but there is a selection of teas to choose from.  Your server will bring a long, thin tray with about six canisters of loose tea.  You can just see it on the right side of the table above. For each in turn, she explains the qualities of the tea, and then you check the aroma to see if you'd like that one.  Each of you then gets a pot of your choice of teas.

With the last bite of mango sorbet, we know that the sun is setting on our wonderful trip to Hawaii, but we'll be back!

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