Standing in a Deserted Hawaiian Street at 2am

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I’m woken by my alarm at the obscene time of 1.15am for today’s little exercise - a tour to the top of Mount Haleakala to watch the sunrise. Issy’s decided to give this one a miss, and perhaps unsurprisingly didn’t seem overly interested in my suggestion that she get up to cook me a nice Hawaiian breakfast before I head off. The Mount is an impressive 3,055 metres high. We read that it‘s thought to have last erupted back in 1790, and volcanologists “think” that it’s now dormant. I assume this means they think it probably won’t blow its top today, which of course means that it still might. I hope Issy doesn’t know something that I don’t and that’s why she’s still tucked up in bed as I head off into the night.

I’ve been instructed to stand in a very specific location for my 2.10am pickup, and I make sure I’m there nice and early. 2.10 comes and goes, and 2.20 and 2.30. Hmmm. I call the tour company. They tell me that I wasn’t standing where I was supposed to, and that the bus has now left without me. Any attempts to convince the lady on the other end of the phone that I‘d obeyed their instructions to the letter fall on very deaf ears. There’s only one thing at risk of erupting now and that’s my head. It’s just been a barrel of laughs getting up in the middle of the night, standing in a dark deserted street for nearly an hour, and then being told I was standing in the wrong place when I clearly wasn’t, only for it all to end in nothing. I storm back to the apartment, and fire off a few choice emails to the tour company. I pull a beer from the fridge, not something I routinely do an hour or so after having breakfast, but I think it might be helping. Hours pass, and their daytime staff have now arrived. They are super apologetic, and acknowledge that this was indeed 100% their fault. They book me on the Wednesday tour and give me a partial refund. This wasn’t quite the start to the day I’d been hoping for, but at least I’ll now get another chance to see the mountain; well assuming it doesn’t blow its top in the meantime.

My blood pressure slowly returns to a more normal level and I sink into a long comatose sleep. The day’s mostly gone by the time I wake up, so we settle in on our cosy little balcony overlooking the beach and I take the opportunity to read up on the local history.

The outside world left the traditional Mauian inhabitants alone until 1786, when the first European, Jean-Francois de Galaup, comte de Laperouse, landed here. Apart from anything else, this maintained a tradition of lengthy unpronounceable names in these parts - notable local residents have apparently included Lydia Kaʻonohiponiponiokalani Aholo, a member of the Hawaiian royal family, and the State fish is the humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa - I didn’t know there was such a thing as a State fish, but there you go, you learn something every day. As most colonists seems to have done, the Europeans brought with them a raft of goodies including smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis, measles, gonorrhoea, leprosy, typhoid, etc, etc and managed to reduce the population of native Hawaiians from somewhere around 300,000 to 40,000 in relatively short order. This all reminds me very much of the lyrics of one of my favourite Eagles songs “The Last Resort”, which mentions the nearby town of Lahaina, and goes on to lament: “you call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye”. Life then chugged on until the 1890s when the Americans formally ”annexed” the islands (the ever reliable Wikipedia tells us that this is “generally held to be an illegal act”) before granting them statehood in 1959. In 1993 Bill Clinton formally apologised for all of this on behalf of the US Government, making it apparently one of the very few times that the US has ever formally apologised for anything it’s done. I suspect they’re very much not the lone strangers in that regard. Hmmm. Good riddance to colonialism - Mr Putin please take note.

I go for a quick dip before we head back off to the restaurant at the end of the beach. Our waitress is from Alaska, which she says was more than a bit of a culture shock when she first arrived. She says the COVID times were a disaster for the tourism industry here, with all the hotels and beaches deserted, and the whole place looking and feeling like a ghost town. The only upside was some “killer deals” for the locals when the resorts did finally manage to reopen - anything to get things ticking over again. She says it’s all pretty much back to normal now, which is good to hear.

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