The fake fingernail incident

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Dahna: After a long flight including a particularly long and uneventful four hour stop over at Fiji airport, we flew into Honolulu sleepless. We decided to take a 12 day stop over in Hawaii to absorb a final bit of summer before heading into Canada's almost eternal winter. It almost didn't happen due to some complications with the US embassy, but that is too boring to go into.

Cheesy, busy, tacky and touristy would be the first words that come to mind about Honolulu, unfortunately, but you can also see the tropical island underneath there - somewhere. Not at 8am in the morning after over 24 hours without sleep though.

As soon as we had checked in at the cheapest hostel in town, we went hunting for breakfast. Just as we turned the corner an alert woman in some kind of traumatically red uniform, having obviously spotted the tired, dazed and hungry (vulnerable?) look on our faces thrust something like a menu in our direction and herded us in to a café, only really giving me time to absorb very limited information that went something like "Breakfast special: $2.99". I didn't think that sounded too bad. My brain hadn't really adjusted to the fact that I really needed to add 25 percent to a price to make an Australian equivalent and that you need to tip about 15 percent and add tax... anyways.

Another woman in the same sort of uniform came over and offered (American style drip) coffee. I nodded gratefully, incorrectly assuming it was free. We both ordered the breakfast special- a pile of white rubbery almost cold pancakes, a mound of yellow-cake looking egg, and a strip of bacon that I am sure had extra hormones pumped into it. After we had finished the not so cheap cheap breakfast we walked down towards the famous Waikiki beach. I felt a little ill, and reminded myself that I really ought to stick to my vegetarian diet, especially when tired!

Walking down onto the beach feels a little like walking onto a movie set - or somewhere that you don't belong. But then, everyone there has been transported from somewhere else. The motels have been planted on top of what used to be rivers (that are now channeled through the centre of the island). There were plenty of people sunning themselves on the beach - the resort customers clearly delineated from the general masses, as they sat behind witches hats that marked the high tide mark, the point that the Motel officially owns up to. They lounged above the high tide mark in deck chairs that matched the key colour theme of whichever resort they were in. They may as well have all had matching bikini's and board shorts as well.

When I dived into the beach, I looked down at Diamond Head - an old volcano that is still forested, and I was trying to block out the crowds of people and the motels and imagine what the place looked like with forest instead of verandahs and deck chairs at its shores. Nostalgia for pre-human invasion, or at least pre white human invasion filled my cells. I stood with my feet in the sand and felt my body sway with the motion of the waves, wishing myself to be a piece of seaweed. I was succeeding to convince myself that I was filled with chlorophyll instead of blood and that I was surrounded by only sky and water and forest. I was in a pre historic natural paradise... when, I kid you not, a fake fingernail went floating by under my nose. My chlorophyl disappeared, replaced by blood.

At least my fingertips are real.


-Dahna-

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Photos

Local surfboard storage
Mmm... maybe one day I could have this many boards!

Waikiki beach
There is a tropical island under there somewhere...