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Josiah's Hawaii Travelogue
December 2011 |
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Thursday (December 15): Off on Vacation | |||||||||
While winter vacation at the college where I'm working officially began late last week, I still had to come into work though Wednesday. But now it was finally time for my vacation. My parents have always loved Hawaii (they met there, in fact) and have been vacationing on Oahu for a couple of weeks already. The plan was to meet up with them for the rest of their trip and then head back to Colorado for a week before returning to work. Unfortunately, a few phone calls revealed that a taxi to the nearby airport would be way more expensive than I'd expected so I decided to just park there. That wasn't cheap either, but it was close and more convenient. |
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Friday (December 16): All Around Honolulu | |||||||||
My mom and I got up early Friday morning and headed down the road to a popular breakfast spot. I got some really good macadamia nut pancakes and then it was off to Hanauma Bay for some snorkeling. There are a bunch of small reefs right off the bay, making it a popular scuba and snorkeling spot. While not spectacular, I did see a lot of cool fish. If you're really lucky, there are supposed to be eels, octopus, and sea turtles around as well, but I didn't see any of them. After a couple hours of snorkeling, we met my dad at a large mall. I didn't have time to look around the mall much, but the reason we were there was to visit a genuine Japanese department store. While seeing a Japanese department store here in the US was cool enough, this one had a small Book Off (a Japanese chain of used book, movie, music, and game stores) and a number of food stands as well, so that was a lot of fun. We stayed for lunch and then headed off to China Town. Like most China towns, it's a bit dirty and run down, but there's a lot of stores and restaurants around. After walking around for a while it was back to Waikiki for another sunset. |
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Saturday (December 17): Flowers and Music | |||||||||
I got to sleep in a bit, which was nice, but it wasn't too long before my parents and I headed off to a botanical garden. This particular garden was up in the mountains and rainforest. Which is fitting since it was raining a lot of the time. Fortunately, the rain was mostly light enough not to cause a problem. We walked around a bit and saw a lot of very pretty tropical flowers. And, for something unusual, check out these pink bananas. Once we finished looking around, we drove to an overlook and got a nice view of the Northern side of the island (Honolulu is on the Southern shore). That night, we headed to downtown Honolulu (which, as a note, is pretty dead at night on the weekends). After supper at a Cuban restaurant, we got to see Neil Sedaka in concert. It was a nice concert. Small, but pretty long, and he's still got a really good voice. Definitely worth it. |
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Sunday (December 18): Museums and Malls | |||||||||
Sunday my parents and I needed to switch hotels. But checkout time at the old hotel came way before check in time at the new one. So we loaded up the car and paid a visit to The Bishop Museum. It's got a lot of different exhibits but the main hall is focused on Hawaiian history. It went all the way from early Hawaiian culture through when Hawaii became a state. It was pretty interesting and each section had a good combination of text and artifacts. While there, I also took a look at a couple of temporary displays. One was about the early Japanese immigrants to Hawaii (but I'll talk about that more in a later entry) and the other was about Mars. It was a good museum overall, and there seemed to be a lot of different shows and presentations throughout the day. Certainly not a bad way to spend a couple hours if you're interested in history. Random Hawaii Comment: The Japanese Influence |
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Monday (December 19): The Northern Side of Oahu | |||||||||
Honolulu is on the Southern side of Oahu. Today, my family and I paid a visit to the Northern side. We started out by heading to the Dole Plantation. While most pineapples are grown in other countries these days, Dole still has some pineapple fields in Hawaii. At the plantation you can see pineapples (and a number of other plants) growing, check out a very large souvenir shop, and work your way through what they claim to be the world's largest maze (though I have a tough time believing it's bigger than some of the corn mazes I've visited. Unfortunately, the maze was closed due to mud (it had been raining on and off throughout the night and morning), but seeing the growing pineapples was cool. Random Hawaii Comment: Rain |
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Tuesday (December 20): Hiking Diamond Head | |||||||||
Diamond Head Crater is one of Oahu's major attractions. While you can see it easily enough from Waikiki Beach, the main draw is the trail that goes to the top. Despite iffy weather, my parents and I headed out to hike it. The trail started simply enough. It was raining most of the time but more a drizzle than anything else, so it wasn't too bad. A rainbow even came out later on. The trail was paved and simple to follow, but it wasn't entirely straightforward. Back during World War II, Diamond Head was used by the military and there's a bunch of bunkers and the like carved into it, including a long tunnel that the trail passes through. Overall, it wasn't too bad of a hike. Kind of steep at spots but not too long or rough. And, despite the rain and clouds, the view from the top was still good. Random Hawaii Comment: The Smell of the Ocean |
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Wednesday (December 21): A Palace | |||||||||
After so many days of touring, my parents and I took things a bit easier on Wednesday. I spent most of the morning between the beach and the swimming pools at the hotel then walked with my mom to the big mall I mentioned before to get lunch at Coco's Curry House (a popular Japanese chain that has some branches here). It wasn't until the middle of the afternoon that we headed out to pay a visit to Iolani Palace. For a while, Hawaii was actually a sovereign kingdom of its own. That began when King Kamehameha united all the islands under his rule in 1810 and lasted until a US official staged a coup and overthrew the monarchy in 1893. Despite the questionable legality of his actions and numerous protests (including those by President Cleveland), that was the end of Hawaii's independence. Iolani Palace is a remnant of the Hawaiian monarchy and the only true royal palace in the US. There palace itself, while not as fancy as some of the ones in Europe, is a nice building and has lots of fancy decorations inside, along with a throne room and all the other things you'd expect to find in a palace. It also has this neat castle like side building. We took an audio tour of the inside of the palace but pictures weren't allowed. It was interesting though and worth an hour or so if you're ever in the area. After that we swung by a farmers' market (there's a lot of them around Honolulu) to look around and get some food for supper. It wasn't one of the biggest farmers' markets I've been to, but there was a pretty nice selection of produce and food (I got guava chicken). After that, the rest of the day was spent relaxing. After all, this is a vacation. |
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Thursday (December 22): Kualoa Ranch | |||||||||
My mom had originally planned this activity for Wednesday but, due to the weather report, we switched it to Thursday. In the end, we still got rained on, but anyway... While my dad stayed at the hotel to relax, my mom and I went back to the Northern part of the island, specifically to Kualoa Ranch. It's a large cattle ranch containing some of the island's more scenic landscapes. As such, it's been used as a setting in numerous movies and TV shows including Lost, Jurassic Park, George of the Jungle, and Hawaii Five-O, just to name a few. They have all sorts of different tours you can take to the filming locations including bus tours, horse tours, and ATV tours. We did the ATVs. While I've ridden an ATV before (a very long time ago), this was my first time driving one. It really wasn't too hard, though since they lack power steering you really need to keep a firm grip on the handles. Despite the rain, it was a lot of fun and we got to see a number of different filming locations. We ended up being the only people in our tour (which was rather unusual, judging by the size of the other groups I saw) so we were able to move pretty quickly and cover a lot of ground. Unfortunately, movie sets are often built with the intention of demolishing or tearing them down at the end of the shoot, so there wasn't anything too elaborate. But there were still some things to see. This mountain range, for example, is featured in tons of different movies if you look for it. And here's the location of Hurley's golf course from Lost. See the giant footprints? They're from Godzilla (the relatively recent American remake, I believe). Our guide said they were originally ten feet deep, but had to be filled in a bit since the ranch's cows kept getting stuck in them. For Jurassic Park fans, here I am with the log the kids hid behind. Now this statue isn't from any movie or show (though I heard it was shown in an episode of National Geographic). Basically, a lot of scientists have trouble believing that the people of Rappa Nui (aka the Easter Islands) could have made the giant stone maoi heads by hand using traditional tools, so some locals without any real carving experience decided to give it a try. While not on the same level as the real maoi heads, it's pretty impressive considering their lack of training. Hard work - 1. Skeptical Scientists - 0. Random Hawaii Comment: Produce |
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Friday (December 23): Hanging Around Honolulu | |||||||||
My parents had some things they needed to do in the afternoon, so this was a pretty easy day. In the morning, my dad and I walked to the aquarium at Waikiki. It wasn't all that big, but it was nice. Their collection of coral was especially impressive and they had some things you don't see too often like an octopus and a bunch of different types of jellyfish. We also got to watch them feeding their seals. I spent the afternoon swimming and reading and then we ate supper in the food court at the Ala Moana Mall. That might not sound too impressive but with a lot of nice Asian restaurants (including several types of Japanese food, a fairly elaborate Chinese restaurant, Vietnamese, and Thai, among others) it's no ordinary mall food court. At night, we went out to watch the fireworks. They weren't for Christmas, the Hilton does a show on the beach every Friday night and, judging by the crowds, it's quite a popular event. The show wasn't especially long but it was well done, and gave me a chance to play with the under used fireworks mode on my camera. |
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Saturday (December 24): Heading Out | |||||||||
Our flight back to the mainland didn't leave until 10 PM, which meant that we had a lot of time to kill after checking out of our room. Though, since it was a Saturday, that kind of limited our options. I spotted this gingerbread house version of Byodoin on display in one of the Hilton's lobbies and we went to services (getting caught in the rain on the way). After that we walked around a bit, saw one last rainbow (here's a shot of my parents in front of it), and watched the sun set over the ocean once more before starting to make our way towards the airport. We'd planned to stop somewhere to eat along the way but, being Christmas Eve, most places were closed. We suspected a lot of things would still be open down by Waikiki but that was in the opposite direction so we ended up just grabbing some things in the airport. And that's pretty much it. The flights to Salt Lake and then on to Colorado went well. I'm not a big fan of overnight flights since I really can't sleep on planes, but I managed to stay pretty awake and alert throughout the following day despite the lack of sleep. Overall, it was a fun and relaxing trip. Oahu (and especially Honolulu) certainly has a stronger Japanese influence than most other parts of the US (the exceptions being the Japan towns in San Francisco and Los Angeles), the weather is nice (though it can get rather windy and rainy at times), and you've got the beach, some nice hiking, and a lot of good stores and restaurants. I don't know if I'd call it "paradise", but it's certainly a nice place to go on vacation. |
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