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Published: December 28th 2005
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Ok, I am actually writing this from Waikiki Hawaii, but I will make separate posts for each of the days that have gone so far… Sorry for the time delay, it has just taken me a while to finally get around to going to an internet café! Don't worry, we are still alive. You will notice that the date of this post is 25th December. Actually, the first half (while in NZ was the 27th December), but landed in Honolulu on the 26th December due to the date line. I needed to make this the 25th so the next post on the 26th came out at the right order.
The night before leaving I was up until midnight trying to squeeze everything into my unusually huge suitcase. I’m sure I don’t have that many clothes however, it’s just things like my sleeping bag and cold weather gear (big jackets etc) for Yosemite that takes up the all the space - that’s my excuse anyway and I’m sticking to it 😉
I also decided to squeeze into my suitcase another squashed down smaller suitcase in anticipation of buying lots of stuff while I am over here. I think Shannon was
a little concerned that he was going to forget something, and was quite funny when he arrived at the airport with a suitcase half the size of anyone elses. Our philosophy is though, if we forgot anything we can always buy it over here…
It was a big family re-union at the airport, we all arrived in 4 separate cars. All up there were my parents, Shannon’s brother, Sunita’s friend Raf, and Amanda’s parents and brother. After the Auckland airport departure gates, quite a lot has changed - I was most impressed at a particular toilet that spoke to me. I thought it was so high tech actually that it would lock itself, and I’d just need to stand in close proximity to the door for it to open again, but no - a most surprised lady with a child walked in on me - damn technology!
It should have told me “warning - incoming toilet crasher - warning. Warning.” And I would have armed the doors appropriately.
The flight went smoothly, Shannon, Amanda and I were in the middle 3 seats, and Sunita had her very own window seat (as you can see in the photo). We
were waiting for a big fat man to come sit next to her, but it never happened, so she was able to spread out a live it up over there. For a little while, Sunita and I were low riding in our seats listening to the pimping beats channel AirNZ was playing through our headphones, listening to some Flava - I even put my shades on, we were quite cool. Shannon would laugh out loud every now and then as he was reading his book that I’m sure the whole plane could hear 😊 At one stage Sunita came back from the toilet panicking because someone before her had left some interesting smells - and she was worried that the person after her was thinking it was her. She asked us if we have the same phobia - I said yea - especially if it's a girl, Shannon said, "yea, and it's usually me" 😊
It was going to be an interesting trip..
We watched “The Fastest Indian” and some other random movie which helped pass the time.
I love Honolulu Airport, the way it is so open planned with palm trees everywhere.. We were wondering how we
were actually going to get to our hostel, but leaving the airport, we saw a man standing holding up a sign of our hotel at the same time him saying “You must be Hamish”. Cool. We jumped into an oversized van along with a Kiwi from Wellington and two Australian girls from Brisbane. By this stage it was 11pm at night and was still balmy hot - even in the middle of winter, nice! The first thing you notice about the states is all the cars seem to be an order of magnitude about 2 to 3 times bigger. The lanes got up to I’m sure about 8 lanes across - just in the little state of Hawaii!
Our new friends were all keen to go have a look around the place and so were we. We got rid of our stuff in our rooms, reminded ourselves of the weirdities of America by confirming that the water in the toilet did indeed flush anti-clockwise and that the lights flicked off by pushing them upwards. We got into some shorts and met our friends again in the foyer before we started on our small scout of the area. Our hostel is very close to Waikiki beach so we strolled down there down there and pretty soon came across an interesting local character with his guitar offering us a bit of Marajuana if we felt so inclined. We ended up going to a bar called “Bobby’s G Spot” (photo’s attached), that was full of Americans and a few local looking people. They were selling Steinlager! We then moved on to complete our scout of the local area, noticing an “ABC Store”every 100m or so. I bought a chocolate chip muffin, which was ghastly sugary sweet. Our friend Peter hadn’t paid for that night so his plan was to walk around by himself for the rest of the night and fill in time somehow. He asked the hostel manager in a thick Kiwi accent, “hey bro, I’m just gonna cruise around a bit aye, but if I get dodged out, is it sweet if I can come down here and crash bro?”.
The manager leaned forward with a questioned look - so Peter thinking he wasn’t heard properly the first time repeated the exact same sentence but slower, I don’t think it helped too much, we had a bit of a giggle and left him to it.
Later that night, Amanda got a little sick and we stayed up till about 4:30am making sure she was going to be alright.
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Ray
non-member comment
what's this about attaching photos? Where's Bobby's G Spot, and the night photos from the next entry?