Circle Island Tour of Oahu – Shrimp Day

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How to see a lot of the island of Oahu in a single day....hmmmm ? The answer was a Circle Island Bus Tour. There’s a lot of this type of tour around so we picked one which included an early morning visit to Pearl Harbour. It was an early morning rise with the bus picking us up at 5:50am (we were the first pickup point as we found out as we were still collecting people until 7:00am). First stop was Pearl Harbour so we headed straight for the cafe to grab something to eat seeing as we had to skip breakfast. We had a look around the main area where all the WWII memorials were along with some old military exhibits. We also watched some of the original footage of the real bombing of Pearl Harbour. We were allocated the 8:30am timeslot to visit to the sunken Arizona. We were taken to the memorial via a 5 minute boat manned by navy personnel for the ride across the harbour. The memorial is built over the top of the original sunken navy vessel Arizona which is clearly visible a couple of metres below the surface....pretty eerie seeing as it is a tomb for the sailors and marines who went down with the ship all those years ago. Something really strange was that the Arizona appeared to be still leaking oil as drops constantly rose to the surface from where the sunken ship lie. It was an interesting visit but not my cup of tea I’m afraid as I don’t like anything to do with wars and fighting – leaves me cold.
We left Pearl Harbour at 9:30 to begin our circumnavigation of Oahu. We were soon to realise that this was definitely going to be just a whirlwind trip as there was not much stopping and we just whizzed past anything of significance....although we did take note of some of the more significant things and, right there and then, decided we would hire a car for the day on our return trip to Oahu and visit some of the places we would like to spend a bit of time at. Anyway, we stopped briefly at the famous surf beach Waimea Bay and we got to stand on the famous Bonzai Pipeline - not a wave in sight of course as the big waves only occurs in winter. We flew past a lot of TV and movie set locations for Jurassic Park, George of the Jungle, LOST and, of course, the old and new Hawaii Five-0. You had to look quickly though or you missed them ! Never mind, we’ll catch them on our return visit early in July.

We stopped for lunch at a roadside shrimp diner where they farm fresh shrimp and serve umpteen different varieties to passing tourists. It was very tasty shrimp (prawns) but they cook them with the shell on which turned out to be rather messy de-shelling garlic butter and salt & pepper shrimp – very tasty though. After lunch, we got back on the bus and zipped past a few more points of interest before being dropped back at our hotel at around 3:30pm - I think our driver was in rather a hurry to get home as our tour wasn’t supposed to finish until 4:30.

After getting dropped off we had a bit of time to kill so walked around the Ala Moana shopping centre just across from our hotel , watching yet more hula dancing on their centre stage and then went off in search of something to eat. After wandering around in circles (it’s a huge shopping complex) we stumbled upon the Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurant and bar so stopping there to eat was a no-brainer for us. It was themed after the Forest Gump movie so, as any who know me should realise, I was in my element. They had all kinds of shrimp - shrimp fry, shrimp cocktail, coconut shrimp, bbq shrimp, shrimp and potatoes.....hehehehe .....so we weren’t stuck for choices. If you like shrimp, then this is the place for you. Cocktails over here are also really cheap so I had a Blue Hawaii (of course) and it made me very very verrrrrry sleepy. Before leaving we bought some Forest Gump memorabilia to put in our home theatre.

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