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I arrived in Hawaii after 30 odd hours since my last sleep thanks to a full day in Sydney that ended in a 7 hour wait at the airport and a 9 hour flight to Hawaii where I was seated beside the screaming baby section. I think it was revenge of the booker because I requested an isle seat after she had already printed my ticket. Note to self.
I was too exhausted to be intimidated by US customs but I was rather annoyed that they couldn’t understand why I was travelling to Hawaii on my own with no one to meet me at the other end. I decided this was not the time to start a feminist battle about how young women are actually capable of doing things on their own....pick your battles - I’m learning.
My first impressions of Hawaii were extremely disappointing. As far as I could see it was a polluted city with eyesore buildings, crowded beaches, too many Starbucks, homeless people with shopping carts for houses and a lot of loud American tourists in Hawaiian shirts. The unattractive haze engulfing the city was actually not pollution but VOG (don’t you just love this word)
which is volcanic fog from the volcano erupting on the big island. But on the bright side - there was sun. This sun was my ticket to new tanned goodness and in my excitement to get to the beach there was poor sunscreen application, which not suprisingly lead to some patchy pink ugliness. It was naive (a nice word for stupid) of me to think the sun would be ‘less harsh’ in the tropical land of bronzed beauties (me not included).
As doubt began to creep it’s ugly way into my mind I reminded myself it’s what you make if it and decided to ask the guy running the hostel what I could do that would be a). Less than the $70 everything else seemed to be b). Out of Waikiki c). Where I would find the beaches I’d seen in the movies....or Jack Johnson. During our conversation I met Bjoern, a guy from Germany who had all the same ideas as me (minus stalking Jack Johnson) so we decided it would be more fun to ditch the bus and rent a car, on the agreement that I wouldn’t do any of the driving but as it turns out
I wasn’t even stepped up to map reading. Although I was a fabulous back seat driver with the occasional sharp intakes of breath and seat gripping (a technique learned from my Mother when she taught me to drive) when I momentarily forgot about the whole ‘drive on the wrong side’ issue. Mayer, a Dutch girl from my dorm room, joined us on our day trip of Oahu and I was delighted to find that as the best speaking English person I became the dictionary and translation expert. How wonderful to be a wanted know-it-all. I did enjoy cracking up at Bjoern’s pronunciation of English words. He said he was “shoeing his sushi slowely” which was “chewing it slowly” and could I open the “bag of ships” which was “chips”. My LOL (laugh out loud) was cut short when he said “oh funny is it, why don’t we talk German and I’ll give you shit”. Yes good point and my mother would probably accuse me of not even being able to speak English properly anyway.
Jokes aside (and I loved that they laughed at most of mine...surely it wasn’t politeness?) the 3 of us had a blast, even managing to tick
off most my TO DO list:
- Visit beach from the movies - check. Visited beach LOST was filmed at and I even recognised it. Didn’t recognise Jurassic Park or other films mentioned
- Admire long white beaches with aqua water & palm trees - check. Plenty of those postcard perfect delights outside of Waikiki.
- Visit the shrimp shack for the most delicious shrimp in the world - check. I was super excited to see they had NZ muscles which allowed me to brag about NZ
- Find Jack Johnson’s house - cross. Neither of the other two were particuarly interested in this activity but bless them I was so excited at the prospect (because of course he’d be sitting outside playing guitar on the deck) that they obliged and drove the 20km area I’d been told he could possibly live in. We even resorted to following the mail truck until she pulled over and asked us to stop.
- See some surfers - cross. There are NO WAVES this time of year ...of course, just my luck.
- Have first disagreement - check. This wasn’t really on the list but when we got lost about 7 times trying
Trying coconut water
I wasn't sure but it tasted amazing to master the crazy freeway/highway action in Honolulu to get home it was predicable that after 3 hours of polite but misunderstood English and approaching midnight someone was going to break. But it wasn’t me I was sitting extremely quietly in the back seat....only because I was busting to go to the toilet but didn’t want to be difficult as I couldn’t really see any option other than the side of the highway. After only 1 day the other two became very suspicious at my quietness....really, is it that obvious? And so another good 40 minutes was added trying to find a gas station that would let me use their restroom. Nothing like getting lost to bring people closer together I say.
The day was such a success that we decided to plan a trip to Maui and get off Oahu for a few days. More about that next time.....
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