The Volcano’s About to Blow! Michael and Dan in Hawaii
Daniel Emberley, February-March 2026
We’re wrapping up the states we’ve never visited; Hawaii at the end of winter sounded like a great idea. Little did we know we were incredibly lucky with our dates, and they were going to have major storms, floods, and an air-traffic-delaying volcanic explosion as soon as we returned home. The islands are an entirely different America: the ecology and geography incredible, Hawaiian culture fascinating, and people welcoming and friendly. Everything you’ve heard about them being expensive is true. We are glad we were able to get here and enjoy it.
Details follow if you have free time on your hands.
Monday, February 23
Our flight on Tuesday was crazy early, and we didn’t want to worry about getting to the airport, so booked a room at the Dulles Holiday Inn. Despite being one of their old-style properties, this worked really well. After dinner at home we got on the Silver Line to Dulles, their shuttle met us, and we had a restful night before travel.
Tuesday, February 24
Shuttle back to the terminal where we grabbed breakfast, then boarded United’s 8:30AM flight direct to Honolulu. No issues, six hours looking over America, then five over the Pacific. We’d been concerned about logistics getting to and around the islands. Booking through Costco made everything easy. Jumping from Oahu to Big Island was new to us, but it’s a common thing for tourists to do, and Costco is great at making popular options available at a decent rate. Their plan covered hotels, airfare, greeting/hotel transport to Waikiki, and a rental car in Kona. Lots of options, with pre-selected accommodation on all the popular islands. Is this adventure travel? Heck no, but what we do differently than most tourists isn’t the actual travel, but what we do once we’re on the ground. Knowing that you’ll be arriving jet lagged (you regain five hours traveling west), Costco had a “lei greeter” for us at baggage pickup. I thought this would be hokey and phony, but the greeter was a lovely local who ensured us everything was under control, walked us to where our van would pick up, and was a great conversationalist. The orchid leis? They’re a real thing, fun, and helped make us feel welcome. They’re itchy, though, so wear a collar; it is bad form to remove a lei in the presence of the person who gifted it to you.
The van had folks from five other hotels; our drop off was last. Almost all tourists in Honolulu stay in Waikiki, it is hard to find a hotel in other neighborhoods. I suspect military, the other big population flying in, have a separate world of housing on the bases. We were in the Marriott Resort Waikiki, at the eastern end of the beachfront just before Kapiolani Park (aka, the Zoo) and Diamond Head. This is two 1960’s concrete towers that once functioned as separate hotels, but Marriott bridged them with an open-air lobby/shopping concourse that works well. One of their towers is being renovated, so the kind reception desk upgraded us to a Diamond Head view in the other. This got us a sliver of ocean, but fantastic look at the peak. We unpacked, and went on a walk to figure out where we were, how far the beach was, and the scale of blocks on the map.
Waikiki is fun. That should not be a surprise. It’s like if you took every tourist in Miami, put them in one neighborhood, and made that the one with the best assets: beaches, restaurants, shopping, entertainment. There is a whole different Honolulu west and surrounding Waikiki, a real city with banks, schools, museums, and hiking trails, and most Hawaiians couldn’t understand that when we referred to “downtown”, that was where we wanted to go. Most tourists stay in their resort, walk to the beach, maybe shop or eat on Kalakaua Avenue, but are there for sun, pools, and blender drinks. The shopping can get very high end, branches of Tiffany and Jimmy Choo sharing malls with Cheesecake Factory and Target. We think this is the only America a lot of rich Asians see, and use it to stock up the same way the wives of oil sheiks use the Galleria in Houston, or diplomats’ families Tysons Corner. We stopped in International Center, a Simon mall (same company that manages those previous), for poke bowls at Uncle Sharkie’s. I’ve been avoiding poke in D.C., on the theory that I would want to try it first in a location that made it well. It’s good, high level raw fish on a rice bowl with seaweed and other toppings, but after a few I realized I wanted my fish cooked, not spooned out of a buffet. Michael loves it.
Wednesday, February 25
Oh. My. God. The breakfast buffet at the Marriott is amazing. Not too big, but everything you expect, with Hawaiian touches. Omelet station. Linguica fried rice. Guava that was moist and sweet, not desiccated. Mango scones with passionfruit cream. Papaya (a revelation) and pineapple (it is totally different local and fresh) on alternating days. I decided I would grovel when I met my endocrinologist in D.C. and went for it. The protein and carbo loading helped with the heavy touring we were doing. Best of all, the service was amazing: all the competence one expects from Marriott with the friendliness we learned is part of Hawaiian culture.
Michael wanted us to have a forced activity to get us moving on our first day dealing with jet lag, booking the North Shore Surf Bus’s tour of Oahu. This was an excellent idea; we never had a chance to droop. Our driver and guide, “Cousin G”, had lots of corny grandpa humor and a schedule that took us counter to most other tour groups. Hawaii’s islands are small, each is a county, and about as big as a county in Maryland. In the middle of each is one or two peaks that used to be volcanoes, so roads tend to be on the periphery, with maybe a cross-island route between the peaks. If most tour buses are going clockwise, you can do better by going counter. Worked for Cousin G, whose agenda was flexible enough that he was able to get us to sites/beaches/palisades that we would not have known to venture to on our own. Or were not legal to park a van at, but he managed.
First stop, the Amelia Earhardt Overlook on Diamond Head. Around Kahala’s mansions, Hanauma Bay Beach, and the Halona Blow Hole, where the surf spectacularly comes in as almost a geyser at the shore. A figure eight brought us north of the city past jungle and waterfalls. Good views of Aloha Stadium being demolished, and Schofield Barracks. A chance to buy the original, pre-Disney pineapple whip at Dole Plantation, where we could walk the gardens and learn about how the fruit came to Hawaii (Victorian aristocrats, not Polynesians; it originated in Paraguay). Got our first of many chances to chase chickens, which run wild all over Oahu. Beautiful tropical birds. Headed up to the North Shore beaches near Hale’iwa, home of the world’s best surfing, including one where President-elect Obama got his Secret Service detail in trouble (he knew how to handle the waves, they didn’t). Estates of Pat Morita, Duane Johnson, Jackie Chan, and Martha Stewart. A farm stand visit, where they specialize in fried banana and banana bread made from local varieties of banana. Lunch was at the Sugar Mills food truck depot in Kahuku. I got the famous garlic shrimp from Giovanni’s, Michael papaya salad, a bbq chicken plate lunch, and we shared a shave ice. Setos, the flavor “mui” is not from Mom’s maiden name, but seems to be a combo of raspberry, pineapple, and coconut. Lots of chances to cruise by surfers on a North Shore that pretends to be a Beach Boys movie, but is really pretentiously expensive: Chevy Chase, with Silver Spring attitude. Through La’ie, center of Hawaii’s Mormon culture. La’ie is known as the town that kept Polynesian culture and traditions alive when it was being erased in the rest of the islands, ready to re-seed the community with language, food, and hula during the 1970’s Hawaiian Renaissance. Waimea Falls and tropical garden gave us native flora and birds. Kualoa Ranch, where Hollywood films when it needs a tropical location (“Jurassic Park”, “Jumanji”, “King Kong”) but doesn’t want to speak anything other than English. They were currently filming the Andy Samberg/Jason Momoa film “Protecting Jared”, lots of production trailers and camera lifts. Kualoa Beach has a stone islet called “Chinaman’s Hat” that reminded us of the Oregon beaches. A macadamia nut farm and shop. Valley of the Temples, for a fun stop at the Byodo-In Temple, which could just as easily have been on Japan’s Inland Sea. The Nu’uanu Pali Lookout commemorates one of King Kamehameha I’s last great and deadly battles that unified Hawaii. His opponents were driven right over the cliff, falling to their deaths. The wind there is strong almost all the time, channeled between two inactive volcanoes. Mansions of the Nu’uana Valley took us into downtown Honolulu, past Iolani Palace, the state house, bank towers, and the mission church where Kamehameha’s royal family embraced Christianity and Western culture. Or at least, commercial integration.
A whirlwind. Lots of stops specifically for us to buy things from vendors that have contracts with the bus company? Undoubtedly. But fun, with folks from multiple resorts we would not have met otherwise, seeing places that would have been impossible for us to negotiate even with a rental car. Dinner at the Marriott’s signature restaurant, Queen’s Break, overlooking sunset on Waikiki Beach. Fish tacos, ahi salad, chocolate haupia (coconut pudding) pie. And the best mai tai we were to have on this trip: fruity, but almost all booze, not juice.
Thursday, February 26
Think a liquor store that is almost a CVS, but without the pharmacy. That’s a Hawaii ABC Store, and there were five of them within a block of our hotel. Two in our lobby, one at the base of each tower. After the breakfast buffet we hit them up for HOLO cards, which allow you to ride public transport in Honolulu. Don’t bother. While these let you transfer for free, and minimize your cost each day, the ones you can buy at the ABC Store can’t easily be reloaded. We tried the online app, and the phone. We think you have to either create a digital account (pointless for a week), or have access to a standard Hawaiian supermarket chain, which we didn’t. Maybe you can do this at one of the new subway stations, but none of these are close to downtown, much less Waikiki. A system designed to intimidate tourists.
But, fare is only $3, and buses take bills. Two riders, a $5 and a $1, and we were on. If a ride was complicated enough to require a transfer it was easy enough to hail a cab or Uber. Lots of bus lines run east-west from cool places in the city to the east end of Waikiki, and Google or the Transit app made it easy to figure out where to stand and when/if the next bus was coming.
Hawaii’s transport infrastructure is way under-built for the amount of people trying to get around. The few freeways turn into parking lots around 3PM, and city streets aren’t much better. Sadly, like in Austin or parts of suburban Virginia, if we couldn’t get back from a place by late afternoon, we realized we shouldn’t make the trip at all. It’s not entirely the city’s fault; geology squeezes it between mountains and the Pacific in a long strip. Sure, they should have figured this out a long time ago and built the fixed-rail transport currently under construction, but at least they’re building it now. Will be interesting to see how the subway changes travel/expectations once it’s built. For now, though, it’s 1970’s freeways with 2020’s traffic.
The W bus took us from behind the Marriott to downtown. This is a cool mix of Deco, 1960’s Moderne, and brutalist 70’s towers. First stop was the barracks at Iolani Palace. These tours fill up, we were able to book one for 11:30. Checked out the cool state capitol, by John Carl Warnecke, 1969. Brilliant use of Hawaii’s climate to allow a building open on all sides and to the sky, with legislative chambers like pavilions in the Modern concrete campus. Warnecke also did the Kennedy grave at Arlington, Lafayette Square in DC, and Lauinger Library at Georgetown. So, boxy Modernism, but done well here. The Hawaii 5-O statue of Kamehameha at one entrance, and a Marisol sculpture of Father Damien of Molokai at the other. Jack Lord’s office, from the TV show, is the State Supreme Court building across the street. The Capitol Modern, a museum of the state’s art collection (the first percent-for-art program in the country), is housed nearby in a former YMCA. Conversion of the former swimming pool into a sculpture court is fantastic, as was the art. Mainly work by artists who live in Hawaii, as you’d expect, but of high quality, which I didn’t.
Then it was time for the Palace. Musty Edwardian. The residences of the Kamehameha dynasty are the only royal palaces in the U.S. The dynasty itself is not what you think. Kamehameha I only unified the islands into a kingdom in 1810, with the help of munitions that came after “discovery” by Captain Cook in 1778. There had been rulers of individual islands before then, but not unification. The royal families, the ali’i, modeled themselves after European royal houses, especially the British. Between their exoticness, and the fact that no European bothered learning Hawaiian, the Kamehamehas bluffed their way into dynastic forms. The palaces show that hybrid nature, they’re all based on European structures. If you didn’t know better you would think Iolani Palace was designed by Frank Furness. Sometimes the merger is very cool, like when we got to the Bishop Museum and saw columns in the great hall based on Polynesian plants rather than typical Western/Greek forms. Interesting building, but we got a docent who could not present anything other than his canned spiel. We abandoned him about 45 minutes into the tour.
One of the few things in Hawaii you need to reserve is your ferry at Pearl Harbor. We had ninety minutes to find lunch, eat it, and get to Pearl, well west of downtown. We’d seen an L&L (Hawaiian fast food, a chain that once had a branch in Manhattan that we’d liked) in Chinatown, but when we got there it was closed. Crossed Hotel Street to a Japanese ramen/tempura shop, where we wolfed down delicious udon, chicken, and a hot dog. Met an Uber once we figured out we were at the intersection of two bus malls he couldn’t drive down; in thanks he made sure we made it to the ferry landing on schedule.
The Arizona Memorial is a classic of Mid-Century Modern design, a white marble structure that bridges the sunken battleship beneath it. Most of the ships that were sunk at Pearl were able to be removed, bodies buried, and some ships even rehabilitated to serve in WWII. Due to the way the Arizona was positioned when it sank, that was not possible, and the sailors could not be extracted with current tech. So, it became one of our major memorials to lives lost in the War. You take a ferry to a landing at one end, walk across the bridge to a chapel at the other, and when you’ve absorbed it you’re ready to line up for your return ferry to the Visitors Center. Which has brilliant interpretation of how we ended up in the War, the logistics of the attack, and the geography of the Harbor. I wasn’t sure it would be worth it, but my brothers assured me it would be, and they were right. You leave with the same sense of reverence and gratitude you do when you leave Arlington Cemetery. People spend all day at Pearl Harbor, there are several military museums, and the Battleship Missouri, where the peace was signed with Japan.
We’d learned, though, that it didn’t make sense to gamble with Honolulu traffic. We waited on a bus back to Waikiki that never showed, so opted for a cab. That got stuck in rush hour that turned a thirty-minute drive into ninety. At 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon, no weather, no accidents, no drama; just regular Honolulu traffic. Chilled at the Marriott, got decent poke next door, then walked west on the beach to the Royal Hawaiian. This is one of the grand old hotels of Honolulu, commanding a corner lot in Waikiki. It’s gotten many additions, but the 1927 Spanish Revival original is still the core. When Kalakaua Avenue evolved into luxury shopping, they turned that part of the property into a mall, preserving the gardens as a courtyard framing the building. Beautifully done.
Shopped our way east, stopping at Lawson’s (one of our favorite Tokyo convenience stores) and Reyn Spooner (fabulous Hawaiian shirts since 1956). There’s something called the Hawaiian Cookie Company, which sells okay shortbread cookies, but do they really need six outlets on that one mile of beachfront (including one in our lobby)? Once we figured it out, counting them became a fun scavenger hunt.
Friday, February 27
Papaya day at breakfast, then caught the #2 bus to the Bishop Museum. I expected this to be in a fancy neighborhood of mansions, but the housing was all pretty middle class. The Bishop is the premier institution preserving and interpreting Polynesian culture to the world. Hawaii sits at the northern corner of a triangle anchored by New Zealand and Easter Island, all islands that form an inter-related community. During our Dark Ages, when Europeans were creeping the coasts of the Mediterranean, afraid to venture across to Cyprus or Sicily, Polynesians in canoes (yeah, canoes) were crossing wild Pacific swells to settle hundreds of islands. Unlike as was taught to us, this was not a one-time dispersion (here’s your outrigger of breadfruit, pigs, and settlers, goodbye!), but a succession of visits back and forth. Currents and conditions were recorded in oral recitations and maps made of sticks so peoples could find each other again. Not, like, on weekly junkets, but in successive settlements over centuries. The result is unique to each island, but also a complete culture that evolved in the different societies.
What did Polynesia bring to Hawaii? To start, the islands were extinct volcanoes over a pair of hot spots in the Pacific. The westernmost islands had a chance to develop life from seeds blown in, washed up, or carried by birds. But the land the first travelers came to was barren, black, and rocky. Even today, there is not a lot of soil, and the Polynesians were smart (or the earliest visitors died due to lack of food) to have brought their own palms, nuts, taro, flowers, chicken, and pigs. Sweet potatoes eventually came from South America by way of Easter Island. Most everything else you think of being “native” to Hawaii probably came from post-Cook traders: sugar, pineapple, cattle, goats. Even today most vegetables come from the Mainland: there is just not enough decent soil to grow lettuce and tomatoes, much less wheat or rice. The knowledge the Bishop conveys is really deep; I recommend doing some research before you come, try reading “Shoals of Time” by Gavan Daws.
Who is Bishop, and why did she have all this amazing stuff? Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop was the last of the royal line of Kamehamehas/Kalakauas. She inherited major chunks of the islands, and all the best fish hooks, feather capes, and carved canoes that came with them. Which, when she died in 1884, transferred to her trader-husband, Charles Reed Bishop. To honor her legacy, he created a series of trusts to educate native Hawaiians, preserve their land, and protect their culture. The former still control massive parts of Hawaii, the profits endowing the Kamehameha Schools, which provide free education to anyone with a drop of native blood today. And today’s museum.
The Museum proper is fantastic, a campus anchored by Mr. Bishop’s 1898 Hawaiian Hall. This is where we first saw visual evidence of Polynesian culture we’d only read about: how they fished, farmed, lived, ate, worshipped, and governed. A reconstructed hut on the gallery floor, and whale hanging above, in a room that rivals anything at Harvard or Yale’s anthropology collections in Victorian grandeur. Gilded rare woods create three levels of balconies, each crammed with exhibits. A temporary video install of diving ocean depths was fascinating and gorgeous. Discussion of the blending of native and Western patterns of royalty and governance enlightening: with the intermarriage of the ali’i families and trader/missionaries, you could say the Polynesian families still rule the state, but with names like Dole, Stanford, Matson, and Dillingham. The Bishop takes the history forward almost to today, examining how ethnic groups the plantation owners brought in to grow sugar (Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Filipino) merged to create a language (pidgin), cuisine (heavily Japanese, but with enough oyster sauce, pancit, and donuts to reflect the rest), and culture that is uniquely Hawaiian. In the 1970’s my mother’s family discovered there were gifts Sicilians gave to America, and the Hawaiians did the same, reclaiming hula, luau, and language in the Hawaiian Renaissance. The museum tells how the Island’s unique location allowed it to unlock an economy based on U.S. military presence, tourism, and (still) extraction agriculture. I’d thought before coming that Hawaii might be Florida with more Navy and less racism, but the cultural legacy makes it uniquely different.
Got lunch in the café, run by local chain Highway Inn: poi (“an acquired taste”), kalua pork, lau lau chicken, haupia pudding, coconut juice. Delicious, and not as pricey as they could have demanded. Waited with kids from the Kamehameha School up the hill for the bus, got off in Chinatown. This is rundown but vibrant, lots of active markets serving Chinese who still choose to live here. It’s bigger and livelier than most American Chinatowns, fewer importers and more food. It’s also home to many art galleries: Mark’s Garage was between shows, but the Downtown Art Center was open, with a great show of Hawaiian photography.
We caught the 13 bus from the corner of Hotel and Bethel Streets, site of yesterday’s Uber confusion, back to Waikiki. Made sure to get on before 3PM to stay ahead of traffic. Lots of wheelchairs, slowing the system down. Got a free show as tourists argued with harmless local street people. No violence, just an interesting conflict of local experience and visitor entitlement. The system is really inefficient, they could use dedicated bus lanes, unified stops, a simpler payment system. It is heavily used by seniors. There are separate companies that compete with the municipal system, but all they do is cream wealthier passengers out of the riding pool, and confuse what could be a much simpler system. There are only, like, three streets that run the length of the city; this could be done much better.
We chilled at the Marriott, getting dinner a couple blocks down the beach at Cheeseburger in Paradise: a comfortable bar for Jack-on-the-rocks, a mai-tai, cheeseburger, onion rings, and coconut shrimp on a salad. After dinner watched the weekly Hilton fireworks from the Marriott’s pool deck.
Saturday, February 28
There wasn’t a direct bus to Queen Emma’s Summer Palace, so we caught a Lyft. The Nu’uanu Valley has long been a residence of the elite of Honolulu. Queen Emma was widow to King Kamehameha IV; she was eligible to be queen in her own right, but instead yielded the position, becoming a philanthropist. Queen’s Hospital, best one in the state, is one of her foundations. The Episcopal cathedral downtown is another.
The cab dropped us in a public park. This was very cool, the former palace grounds, now used for tennis courts and swimming pools, a hula school where we got to see the kids practice, and a Shinto shrine like we remembered from Japan. The grounds closer to the house are maintained as the botanic garden Emma had planted. Lots of banyan and other trees we did not recognize. The “palace” itself is a Takoma Park bungalow, a center-hall Victorian opened up to a massive lanai and breezes by large windows and doors. The rooms give a good history of the Queen, the King, and their son, who died young. That was not unusual, Hawaiian natives were dropping like flies as they confronted Western-introduced diseases; genetic weakness after centuries of ali’i intermarriage did not help.
Cab south to the Honolulu Museum of Art. This surprised us. We expected a small regional museum with some decent Hawaiian pieces. Instead we got a Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue building (National Academy of Sciences, Rockefeller Center, chapel at University of Chicago), Mediterranean in style, with tons of open courtyards juggling preservation of the collection with Hawaii’s comfortable climate. Collection is Western comprehensive, lots of secondary work by major painters, but excellent canvases by Carlo Crivelli, Whistler, and Sargent. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean collections understandably good. The Hawaiian paintings had an 1860’s oil of the view from our hotel room. One of the Castle & Cooke heiresses to the sugar and shipping corporation was the original money behind the museum, which sits on the site of her former town residence. Lunch in the café, outdoors between the original building and an addition, was quite good; shrimp burger and a salmon Hawaiian Nicoise salad. Temporary shows brilliant, 1950’s prints by Japanese artist Onchi Koshiro, photos of cool breeze block buildings of Honolulu from the same decade, and a retrospective of local ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu (who once lived with fiber artist Lenore Tawney in Manhattan).
South and west of the Museum, and Chinatown, is Kaka’ako. Once an industrial area, this has been gentrified into Honolulu’s answer to D.C.’s 14th Street. Lots of new condos in old buildings, restaurants, a little funky retail. The SALT development I’d been pointed to as a center was full of people prepping for tryouts for the Honolulu Marathon, which wouldn’t take place until autumn. Glad we saw, you don’t need to. Got the W bus back to the Marriott, where we ventured into the adult pool. Eh, we are so not resort people. Dinner down the block at OMG (Oahu Mexican Grill). Again, exceeded expectations – loaded fries, garlic shrimp, in a bar that could have been trashy, but was laid back and fun. Was it time for us to put our East Coast attitude behind us?
Sunday, March 1
Laundry day! We took a walk along the canal behind Waikiki, which intercepts multiple rivers/creeks that once made the neighborhood a center for royal fishing. Diversion to the canal makes the concrete high-rise hotels possible. Fun birds, free-range chickens, and weeds-gone-wild in the waterway. Back to move clothes into the dryers, which we discovered were free. Got on the W bus again, this time westbound to Ala Moana Center. This is the world’s largest open air shopping mall: we found it too muggy to be completely pleasant, but still amazing. It reminded us a little of Tysons, or Houston’s Galleria, but with better architecture. Interface between bus terminal and shopping seamless, food court amazing. Lunch from various vendors, ramen soup with shoyu and chicken, Korean seaweed soup, a vegetarian plate. The Reyn Spooner here is the company’s anchor. FoodLand is a supermarket that is better than anything in D.C., or even (dare I say it) Houston’s HEB. The poke bar is always mobbed with folks getting meals to go; when we’d asked a shop clerk where she recommended for poke, this was it.
We rode the 46 bus to the end at Kapiolani Park, where we caught a performance of the Royal Hawaiian Band in the gazebo. The Waikiki Aquarium is fantastic. It has tanks both inside and outdoors, with fish, jellyfish, coral, and seahorses that we had never seen before. A pretty walk back to the hotel along the beach, refreshing with a shave ice at the end. “The Weasley” combined mango and Aperol syrups, cool. We’d spotted the Denny’s near the Park earlier, went back for chicken fried steak and a turkey club. Why Denny’s? We’d tried all the major Hawaiian food groups, and wanted to give our credit cards a break and eat some regular American food.
Monday, March 2
Mormon missionaries have been part of Hawaii since before it was a U.S. territory. I’d mentioned them above when our North Shore tour went through La’ie, where their principal Island temple is located. The Church has made extensive efforts in the other Polynesian islands, and many of their converts attend a local branch of Brigham Young University. The Polynesian Cultural Center provides those students a chance to subsidize their tuition and represent their cultures to tourists, and the Church a chance to show itself well to non-LDS members. They also mount the best luau and dinner show on Oahu. It’s not close to any part of Honolulu, so Michael arranged for them to pick us up at the Marriott and get us back. A morning shuttle got us to the Center by lunch time, where they have a sit-down restaurant and food trucks to capture every tourist dollar. It was fun, we got a calamari burger, Korean bbq plate, and mango slurpee, then shopped in their marketplace. Many of the items were unique to the Center, and all were sold at prices well below what we saw in Honolulu. After the shops, the Center is set up similar to DisneyWorld’s World Showcase, with each major Polynesian group in its own “village”. Unlike Disney, this really is about education; the shows involve people from those countries demonstrating skills they might have used at home. Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, Easter Island, Tahiti, Hawaii, and Samoa each get to tell their own stories. There was lots of passive learning at museum-quality panels, and active learning as you played a New Zealand stick game, or tasted freshly-pounded poi. We were impressed, and after touring all the spaces around the lagoon, exhausted. A couple of kind women from Tonga let us rest in the theater where they pound bark into tapa cloth; we ended up having a great conversation about their lives as students at BYU. We took the “canoe ride” up the lagoon to the hall where they hold the luau. Two massive pigs had been roasted, mock pina coladas (Mormons, remember) were served in pineapples, and a giant buffet had anything you might have wanted to eat from the Islands. The dinner show was loosely themed around the life of Lili’uokalani, but was mainly an excuse for folks who had not paid for the main show to see flowing sarongs and men with battle clubs. The main show took place in a theater across the courtyard; “Hu: The Breath of Life” gives all the cultures a chance to perform specialties. The story is “baby grows to be a man while traveling”, but the performances are incredible. Hula, lighting, costumes, fire sword dancing, explosive volcanoes and typhoons. This is not a show that can travel, we were glad we were able to see it. When the theater empties, everyone heads to their respective rentals/shuttles for transport back to Waikiki. This was a long day, not cheap, but unique and completely worthwhile.
Tuesday, March 3
We got up early to pack, have a goodbye omelet at the buffet, and rendezvous with Roberts Transportation to get us to Inouye Airport. We were their only passengers, and pre-rush, were there in half an hour. This was the first time we saw the freeways work. An easy flight on Hawaiian to the Big Island, with good views over Molokai, Lanai, and Maui. The airport at Kona is cool, almost no walls and open to the sky. Enough fences to provide security, but a sense of flight being an outside activity that I don’t remember experiencing.
Before we dive into the lava fields of Hawaii, a recap of Oahu:
The geography is amazing, with the wet-dry side dichotomy controlling what can be done where. Honolulu, the only city in the state, is here because Pearl Harbor is the only great natural harbor in the Islands. The architecture is forgettable, although there are some cool Deco/Modern mixes. The beaches, what most people come here for, are gorgeous, especially on the North Shore. The disparity between rich and poor is obvious, and heart-wrenching. The concentration of jobs at military bases (Schofield, Pearl Harbor, Hickam) means that rush hour is going to be bad no matter how you slice it. There are way too many bad tattoos, piercings, and sunburned complexions, but in a world dominated by Mainlanders I suspect it’s hard for each person to stand out, and that is a way. If you can only make it to one island of Hawaii, come here, it offers everything except calm. We loved it.
Back in Kona, the kind gentleman at the Alamo Rental counter recommended Pine Tree Inn for lunch, a great tip. An interesting tortilla soup with tortellini (maybe they thought one belonged in the other because of the spelling?), tuna sandwich, and Korean chicken plate.
We had time to kill before we checked in at the Marriott, so stopped at the Kaiser branch in Kona. I had to give blood for a checkup, and we wanted to try out how our Kaiser insurance would work here. As my doctor warned, the systems are totally separate; you need to make arrangements for care in one jurisdiction before you travel to another. I suspect this is a legacy of the current company having merged in so many others (D.C. was once an entity called Group Health). I showed up at the Lab desk, gave the receptionist my Kaiser card and driver’s license, and told her I was there to give blood. Then came confusion. Her “aloha” spirit would not let her say that she could not help me, and instead she sent us into a series of partial answers (“call this number”, “you’ll need to get state authorization”) that wasted half an hour. I finally confronted her, with a smile, “Let’s be honest, your computers don’t talk to each other, you can’t access my records, and unless I go into cardiac arrest on your floor I’m not going to get any care, am I?” She blushed and apologized, but yeah, that’s the situation. Good to know for our retirement/travel planning, so not time wasted.
The Marriott Waikoloa is just north of Kailua-Kona. “Kona”, which is how almost everyone refers to the town/coast/airport, just means “west” in Hawaiian. It gets confusing, there are Konas on every island. And some Kailuas, also, which means “twice”. We drove north on 99, the main coast road, here called Queen Ka’ahumana Highway, through amazing fields of black lava rock interspersed with spiky grass thickets attempting to break it down into something more like soil. Give them a few centuries.
In 1965 Laurance Rockefeller turned a chunk of Parker Ranch land into a resort. Developers from Boise Cascade joined him, convinced they could make more money out of lava fields with Pacific beaches from tourists than cattle. The result is a series of resorts with a distinct 1970’s vibe sharing two outdoor shopping malls and several golf courses. Each resort only needed to provide minimal restaurants/services; those were shared in the malls. They were once more exclusive and luxurious than they are now (valet parking, for example, was merged back into regular parking at our resort). Our first thought when turning into the Marriott Waikoloa Beach Resort was “the 1980’s called, they want their hotel back”. Public spaces wide open to the sea, check in not quite functioning the way contemporary hotels do, lots of quirks like inoperable wi-fi and a bar level separated from the main restaurant, but operating together. Hated it at first, but they worked things out, especially when we turned out not to be the only guests who could not connect to wi-fi. It was “taco night” in the restaurant for dinner, even the jalapenos were bland. Good beaches and pool. A perfectly functional resort, in the middle of what turned out to be historically important preserved sites, that was an unlit fifteen-minute walk from dining/shopping. We’ve stayed in worse, but aren’t recommending anyone search this out.
Wednesday, March 4
The Marriott Waikoloa did not come with breakfast. We made do with a massive breakfast burrito, pre-cut papaya, and a croissant from the bar. It was not the same. Walked to the further mall, Queen’s Marketplace, to meet Deborah from Hawaii Forest and Trail. The most important thing we wanted to see was Volcanoes National Park, and Michael did not want to drive there, so we treated ourselves to the luxury of someone else showing us around. Glad we did. The Park is large, a good chunk of the Big Island, and far from Waikoloa. The other folks from the resort were fun, the drive beautiful, and Deborah a fantastic guide to the Park and Hilo. There are two big volcanoes on Hawaii, so in addition to the coast road there is Saddle Road, recently renamed Daniel Inouye Highway, crossing the valley between. Deborah lectured as she drove on climate, ecology, and the plant and landforms of the leeward (dry, usually desert, ranching, coffee) and windward (storms, cocoa, vanilla, rainforest) sides of Hawaii. She taught us to spot feral goats, sheep, mongoose, pigs, and hawks. There used to be donkeys, but after a successful campaign to save them from being hit by rental cars (“Save Our Asses”, how could that not have been a t-shirt?), they’d been airlifted to the mainland. Plant spotting: ohia trees, sugar, various invasives, including the grasses I’d noticed colonizing the lava fields yesterday, which turns out had been brought as an ornamental for a botanist’s front lawn and escaped. Amazing what a lack of natural predators will do.
Volcanoes National Park used to be a classic, placid piece of the Park System. It had been so long since Kilauea had erupted that the Park Service built Crater Rim Drive around it, so folks could get up close and personal with lava in the crater. There was a major hotel complex and visitors center where you could watch lava at night before turning in to your cabin. Like at Old Faithful Village in Yellowstone. Then, in 2018, Pele took it all back. The relatively small crater collapsed in on itself, its diameter doubled, lava flowed into the Park, and much of that infrastructure disappeared. It has since settled back into something more stable, but this remains the most active volcano in the U.S.
The Park is unexpectedly lush, only looking “satanic” at the crater proper. Deborah took us to the Devastation Trail parking lot, and led us on the former Crater Rim Trail to the crater. You’re walking on a blacktop-paved two-lane road, but ashes of subsequent releases crunch beneath your feet. What look like birdnests are clumps of tephra, like hailstones but made out of windblown lava, decorating the trees. Deborah pulled up samples of Pele’s hair, uncooked spaghetti made of glass, for us to pass around. Tephra comes in many forms, and Pele revels in how many ways she can transform lava. It was tres cool. The crater itself is a smoky pit; it’s hard to distinguish the lava in daylight, like gloppy asphalt, but easy to see the vents sending up steam. Looking across the crater you see layers, like we would expect to be sedimentary rock, but here are formed by subsequent lava flows. Even lava fields from just a few decades back already sport plant life. The Hawaiian Island chain is thought to have been caused by two related “hot spots”, thin parts of the earth’s crust that sit still as the Pacific Plate moves northwest above it. So, Kauai, “the Garden Isle”, is the oldest of the majors; it can be gardened because thousands more years have allowed more breakdown of volcanic stone and ash into soil. There are more related islands further west, but those have begun eroding to the point that some are just atolls around the old crater, a few only visible as coral has used the former peak as a foundation for growth. Hawaii, the easternmost island, is the youngest, still being built as Kilauea chooses to erupt.
The Na’huku/Thurston Lava Tube is a classic tourist site. Lava came up, flowed, the edges cooled before the center (like ice on a lake), and the central lava kept flowing out, leaving behind a long cave. There are many of these on the islands, but Thurston is the easiest to access. Hawaii Forest and Trail supplied us with flashlights for the hike down, thru, and up; useful for avoiding puddles on the cave bottom. Roots of ohia trees emerge from the cave roof, like living stalactites.
The tour company has a variety of places to break for lunch; weather on the windward side is changeable enough that Deborah was regularly checking to see where she wanted to take us. We ended up on our own lava field, from a 1974 flow. From the rear of the van came towels for us to sit, good box lunches with sub sandwiches and salad, tea, and soda. One of the more memorable places we’ve eaten. We were back on Highway 11 to Hilo, for a quick stop at Rainbow Falls. It was too cloudy for rainbows, but the falls are pretty cool, and easy for even old folks to walk to.
We had a quick turn around Hilo, the second biggest city (town?) in the state, then fifteen miles west through OK Farms to the Lavaloa Chocolate Farm. This is the only chocolate-producing part of the U.S. They’ve got six feet of soil, based on ash from an ancient Mauna Loa eruption that has had time to evolve. In addition to cacao, they also grow lychee, macadamia, oranges, kukui nuts (you see them in leis, they also worked a bit like candles for Polynesians), and coffee. Got to walk through the cacao fields, the drying sheds, and up to the big house for a video on how chocolate is made, with tasting samples. All, of course, to prep us for the gift shop, where we purchased some of the best raw chocolate bars (rather than filled with nuts or sweets) that we’ve ever had.
Back west on Saddle Road into the sunset to Waikoloa, where we said goodbye to the friendly and informed Ms Deborah. Dinner at the mall’s food court; they had an L&L, where I got the loco moco (hamburger on rice with gravy and fried egg) plate lunch (served with side of mac salad), and Michael Japanese ramen with oxtail, and a salad. There is a small grocery there in an ABC store, we picked up breakfast for the rest of the week and walked back through lava and golf courses to the Marriott.
Thursday, March 5
Today we stayed on the Kona side. There are many microclimates here, helped by higher elevations getting rain due to capturing moisture from the ocean. Michael wanted to see coffee growing, so we toured the Greenwell Coffee Plantation. The tour is free, samples plentiful, process interesting. We saw the massive fermentation sheds, de-parchmenting (removing paper-like hulls), drying, sorting, and roasting. They also grow bananas, black pepper, pineapple, and vanilla. Great guide, and good coffee. Lunch at Randy’s Huli Chicken & Ribs, a roadside stand where you order in the cook tent and eat at picnic tables outside. Excellent rotisserie chicken, ribs, pulled pork, brisket, served plate-lunch style with corn and mac salad. Not our Texas bbq, but a worthy contender.
St. Benedict’s Painted Church required crazy driving up a mountain road. The hillside was lush, the church remote, a Steamboat-Gothic wooden structure where a Belgian priest had filled the interior with Bible stories and a star-filled, palm-fringed ceiling. I’d expected something naive, as we’d seen in California and Texas mission churches, but this was better, almost Puvis de Chavannes Art Nouveau. A couple was having their wedding rehearsal when we drove up, so we spent time in the adjacent cemetery. The ground is so rocky and unforgiving that burials are almost New Orleans like, shallow graves topped with heavy stone slabs to protect the remains.
South to Pu’uhonoa o Honaunau. In addition to the Arizona Memorial on Oahu, and Volcanoes, the Park Service preserves four sites of historic importance on the Big Island. Pu’uhonoa tells the story of Polynesian life and taboos at a restored temple/he’iau, royal complex, fish ponds, and village. The interpretation at the Visitors Center is quite good: I had studied up on Hawaiian culture before our trip, but this storytelling meant I hadn’t needed to. The fish ponds fed the village under guidance from the ali’I, the nobility, and also the priests, kahunas, who maintained the temple. The ali’I controlled society through a system of kapus (where we get the word taboo). Most of these were stable, but they could be changed at the drop of a hat (lei?). When George Vancouver left cattle on the Big Island, Kamehameha had the kahunas declare them kapu, so only the King got beef. Violation of most kapu (walking in the shadow of the king, a woman pounding poi, kicking a cow off the field that was just barely feeding your family) meant death. The only appeal was flight to a he’iau (pronounced “hey yow”, like a caption on the Batman TV show). Which wasn’t easy. They were deliberately placed near rocky coasts and surrounded with massive stone walls. So, if your hand accidentally touched the king’s shadow, you had to run miles to the closest he’iau, and either swim massive waves through razor-edged rocks, or rock-climb the walls. If you made it, the kahunas would bring you back to life, enroll you in a years-long program of rehabilitation, and possibly cleanse your guilt so you could return to society. Not a good bet, but the only one you had short of surrendering your life where you had broken kapu. The site is beautiful, the story painful but inspiring, I’m glad the Park Service is telling it.
Drove uphill to Hololua, which is billed as an artists’ community in the foothills above Kona. Going from coast to uplands took us from brilliant sunshine to showers, and on a rainy Thursday afternoon a lot of the galleries and shops were closed. We checked out a couple, bought some dishtowels, and headed back north. If it had been good weather there would not have been enough parking on the narrow road through town. Skip it, the ecology of going up and down the mountain was the best part.
There is a small Foodland, the supermarket we loved in Honolulu, in the Mauna Lei Resort north of ours. We picked up dinner to eat back at the hotel: noodle salad, meatballs, Hawaiian salad, coconut water. Our after-dinner walk was among the pools and restored fish ponds at our resort, up to the gates of the public beach.
Friday, March 6
We took Saddle Road to Hilo, where we got coffee and a muffin in a café next to the Lyman Museum. I had hoped these were the same Lymans as the Boston China traders who built a mansion in Waltham; I was raised in one of their outbuildings that my grandparents bought. Unfortunately, there seems to be no connection; these are from New Haven. They were among the first missionaries to Big Island, and like those on Oahu, married into trader and ali’i families to control most of the windward coast. The guide gave access to the family home, which was crazy altered by Hilo Women’s Club when they inherited it. Cool to see an original space, though. The Museum proper is small but brilliant: similar topics/collections to the Bishop, told well. Interesting display on fish that start life male, but transition female as they become older and wiser. Isn’t THAT a commentary – smile? Drove to a former industrial park that has converted to restaurants and shops; Tetsumen Tonkatsu Ramen was some of the best Japanese food we’ve had outside Japan: garlic ramen, thicker egg drop ramen. Big Island Candies across the street is famous for its cookies, chocolates, and chocolate-dipped cookies.
Back downtown, the Mokupapapa Discovery Center presents the hundreds of islands west of the state’s Big Eight. Who knew these were even there? They extend past Midway, a distance equivalent to Manhattan to Omaha. Most of them are too small to support people, but have vibrant reefs and are important fisheries. Michael got to do his Moana impersonation on a model outrigger, and Dan appreciated the aquarium. The Center is in a former 1920’s hardware and optical store, with good views of Hilo Harbor.
The Mauna Loa Macadamia Plantation gave us views of the trees, then windbreak trees, and of course a store. North on the Hamakua Coast to Akaka and Kahuna Falls. These are amazing, but require a half-mile trail with lots of stairs and ramps. Back to Waikoloa along the coast road, lots of bridges over gulches where streams met the ocean, rainforest, and fog, but no scenic pullouts. Beautiful in a New-England-pine-tree-tunnel way. Dinner at the Marriott, a poke bowl, fried seafood platter, and mai tai, watching the sun set behind the palms.
Saturday, March 7
Just up the coast to Pu’ukoholo He’iau, another Park Service reservation. This site is pivotal to Hawaiian history. Kamehameha’s aunt had gotten a revelation from a kahuna that to conquer all the islands, as prophesied, he needed to build a he’iau at this site. Which was problematic, as there were already two temples here, one to the god of sharks and another that had squatter’s rights. Westerners would have just broken kapu and re-used the old temple, but not Kamehameha. He got around proscriptions by having a human chain stretch from the site east across the island, where they relayed stones from one coast to the other. Completing the temple, he went on to conquer all but one island, which he later received through negotiation. All three of the temples are still in place, although the shark’s is now under water. A video tells the story dramatically and well. You can hike to the bases of the he’iau, but it is kapu to climb them. I can just imagine the Hawaiian activists, Park Service lawyers, and representatives of Patsy Mink and Daniel Inouye in a basement of the Rayburn Building trying to wrestle THAT accommodation. The preservation and reconstruction is impressive, and the site, again, as gorgeous as most in Hawaii, with a spirit that forces reflection.
East on Belt Road to Pa’auilo, home of the Hawaiian Vanilla Company. Vanilla requires very specific conditions to prosper; this is the only place in the States where it is successful. The drive up dramatic, the shop sufficient, but to make this worth it you should book the vanilla-themed lunch they are famous for.
Back to Waimea, the company town in the north-central part of the Big Island that was headquarters for the Parker Ranch. John Parker married Kamehameha’s granddaughter, helped him in his wars, and was rewarded with great tracts of land and permission to ranch the cattle. It turned into a spread worthy of Texas; the area where our resort sits was an unproductive part of his holdings. The ranch is now a preservation trust, and Waimea one of the bigger towns on the island. We asked at the Fish and Hog, one of their notable restaurants, and were surprised when they seated us right away. There were lots of groups waiting for their reservations, but a two-top had just canceled, and we were the lucky recipients. Great service, excellent food: a Bloody Mary, poke bowl, salad, and blackened fish tacos.
Onto the scenic Kohala Mountain Road, which runs up the north peninsula of the Island, great weather, dramatic views, but not designed for pullouts. Hawi is a sweet town at the Island’s tip, we shopped, checked out cafés, and enjoyed views of Maui. Back on the coast road south to the Marriott, where we took a nap, swam in the pool, and did laundry. Marriott hadn’t advertised it, but not only did this resort have free laundry, they even provided free soap! Dinner at Queen’s Marketplace, one of the resort’s malls, for a seafood platter at L&L and salad from Michael’s favorite Japanese place.
Sunday, March 8
There’s a Matsuyama just south of Kona Airport, a combined Texaco/Japanese market. It sells tons of prepared foods, almost as good as a Tokyo 7-11 or Lawson’s. We got supplies for a picnic: ahi bombs, Spam & egg sandwich, broccoli crab salad, kale salad, adzuki bean cookies, and banana cream pie. It seemed to be famous; guides and drivers kept mentioning it. Deservedly. We drove up to the Kona Cloud Sanctuary and ate on a giant branch while waiting for our tour.
A rain forest is one where the forest is exposed to regular rain, generally with a high canopy capturing most of the light. A cloud forest is similar, but the moisture comes from being on the side of a mountain, in almost continuous cloud cover. There are not a lot of the latter on the planet, and many of the ones in Hawaii have been destroyed. An agronomist and lecturer at the University of Hawaii, Norman Bezona, took a chunk of Parker Ranch and brought back the cloud forest. His family now runs tours to keep it alive. We got one of his great-grandnieces, Sierra, who took us on a hike through a fascinating world. Ohia, Norfolk Island and Cook Island pines, mushrooms, orchids, Buddha’s Belly bamboo, koa, kui nut, the spikeless native palm. She showed us to touch a eucalyptus tree, which has very thin bark, so you can feel the coolness of the water below ground being pulled up into the tree. Lots of bird song, but no sightings. The path was a former cattle trail, and the provided walking sticks definitely necessary. Tiring, intense, and great.
Downtown Kailua Kona is even smaller than Hilo. The two big cultural sites, the Moku’alkaua Church and Hulihe’e Palace, were both closed, and that was okay. We’ve been to plenty of Congregational churches, and had already seen two Logan-Circle-esque Hawaiian palaces, so we walked around outside and were good with that. Kailua Kona reminded us of Rehoboth/Ocean City, not really tawdry, but nothing to stick around for. And parking was hell, so we opened up a space for someone else.
Back at the Marriott we shared a pina colada by the pool, then walked over to the King’s Shops for dinner at A-Bays. Mainlanders cannot pronounce Anaeho’omalu Bay, the body of water the resorts are on, so they shortened it. A-Bay had decent bar food: fish cakes and sandwich, shrimp eggrolls with a soy-wasabi sauce. Served on an open patio with a steel guitar player, which made it special.
Monday, March 9
One of the concessions Rockefeller and Boise Cascade made to the rising Hawaiian Renaissance was preservation of native trails and petroglyphs on the site. They did this well, from a development perspective, using chunks of petroglyphs in parking lot islands and theming pools to look like fish ponds. There was real preservation as well, though. The largest Hawaiian petroglyph field was a short walk from our front door. Down the entrance drive, right on the King’s Trail, a path the ali’i used to connect the coast, through lava beds. No one is really sure who made the petroglyphs, why, or even when. We were able to jump across rocks to get a closer look, and observe the kapu signs to make sure we didn’t damage or violate anything. The markings are carved fairly deep, which the lava rock allows, much deeper than we’d seen in Utah and Arizona. Pretty cool. The walk out was easier, we were maybe fifteen feet from one of the golf courses, so headed back that way. It must be mind-bending to be an archaeologist studying these and deal with the juxtaposition.
We’d seen ads for KTA, a different supermarket chain, and stopped in Waikoloa Village to check it out. The Village seems to be a 1980’s development for regular residents, inland from the resorts. If the resorts are Chevy Chase, the Village is Takoma. The shopping was well integrated into the housing, the climate allowing it all to be open air and interconnected. KTA was good, it had more of our standard brands and less prepared foods, but was still better than our Safeway or Harris Teeter. Went back to Matsuyama for lunch: sumi salad, mac salad, a Korean bento, chocolate cream pie. The pies are amazing. Michael had spotted picnic tables behind the store, so we joined the construction workers and ate there.
Kaloko-Honokohau National Park is about how daily life worked pre-Cook. Hawaiians divided land by anupuaha, pie-shaped wedges that ran from mountain peak to the ocean. The Park is the ocean-end of two of these, with a massive fish pond in the middle. We checked out the visitors’ center, and walked the trail nearby, where raised stone beds allowed the development of soil to grow sweet potatoes. That trail was too hot to continue, the kind Ranger suggested we drive to a different entrance to the south and leave our car in the marina, where a trail entrance led back into the Park. Genius. Turns out that entrance was the one most people use, because most people were here for the beach and swimming. We checked out the fish pond, fish traps, and a monk seal that had found its way ashore.
I’ve not defined “fish pond” yet. These were not wading pools filled with koi. Hawaiians would start with a natural bay, if they had one, and enclose it with volcanic rocks. One or more openings would be left to allow the ocean in, and that could be blocked. If conditions were right you would let the ocean in, trap as many of the right kind of fish, let the rest out, and fatten up the ones you wanted. These were massive protein factories: in a land without mammals, they were pivotal to a functioning society. Anaeho’omalu Bay had several of these, but the one at Kaloko-Honokohau was much larger, with specialized areas within the pond for catching, sorting, fattening, and processing fish. This Park is known as a place to spot sea turtles, but they were not present. We were happy to have seen the monk seal.
We got food court sushi, bulgogi, kimchi, and seaweed salad for dinner at Queen’s Marketplace, then settled down at their gazebo for the weekly hula show. At 6PM every Monday the Beamer-Solomon Halau ‘O Po’ohala holds a show of their students. It’s free, and we’re sure it’s there to draw folks to the mall, but it worked for us. Fun to see dancers in their teens, and in their 60’s, all keeping the tradition alive.
Tuesday, March 10
We had a full day to hang out somewhere before our evening flight. We packed, checked out, and left our bags. Took a walk to the resort’s pool and fish ponds, and got lunch at Foster’s Kitchen in the King’s Shops. A simple burger and roast chicken, we liked it more than A-Bay’s. As we were walking the mall a tour operator pulled us into her store; she had the Park Service video up showing the currently erupting Kilauea. We had missed it by days, which was okay by us, as it led to chaos for folks who needed to leave the Park. Or fly out of Hilo’s airport. We hung out at the Marriott pool until afternoon, got our bags, drove to Matsuyama for a final snack, and hit the Kona airport. Michael returned the car while I got us checked in. Kona is a very laid-back airport; they let me get as far as putting our bags on the conveyor before requiring Michael be present to be identified. Can’t believe I’m saying this, but they were lovely people who helped us at every step of the check-in process. Yes, employees of United. I was going to miss aloha. We ate before security, not knowing if our food would be allowed through. We would probably have been okay as long as we bought drinks inside. Glad we stopped at Matsuyama, even for airport food, it was expensive at the gates. We had a bit of a wait, but it was like waiting in a park, not a terminal. Walked up the stairs to the plane, and a few hours later were changing flights in Denver.
Wednesday, March 11
We landed at Dulles without drama, just losing the day. Bags showed, taxi home to Boston House.
Big Island recap: An entirely different geography than any we have seen before, with the volcanoes, lava fields, and micro-climates. Excellent interpretation of life before Captain Cook, without a lot of the layers/baggage on Oahu. The guided tours were useful and informative; I’m not usually a fan, but they definitely got us places and showed us things we would not have known to appreciate. The Big Island is like Wyoming to Honolulu’s Baltimore: rural, with less urbanity but amazingly laidback people and dramatic nature. We can’t compare to the islands we missed, but we definitely got what we wanted out of the state from Oahu and the Big Island.
In summary
We were lucky to see the Islands when we did. In addition to evading eruption debris from Kilauea, our pilot was racing ahead of what we now know was a catastrophic Kona low, which had already started in on the westernmost islands. All those beautiful indoor-outdoor spaces? Not sure how they handle the heavy storms; maybe people hunker down like D.C. facing a blizzard. Video of the floods in places we were in the week before is heartbreaking. One of the towers at our Marriott in Waikiki is now housing folks displaced by the floods.
The topography is crazy, and cool. Each has one or two central mountains, coastal plains, and a peripheral road providing access. Driving up or down a mountain, or from windward to leeward side, can switch your climate in minutes, from desert to rainforest and back again.
Lots of Hawaiian plants and animals are invasives, that’s the nature of being a remote place that got exposed to the rest of the world in a few short decades. We loved the chickens and goats roaming free. The feral and house cats can all become curry.
The people are both friendly and intelligent. Yes, “island time” is a thing, and you can wait longer than you need to for a coffee, or a shave ice, or a green light. No one honks; that was pointed out to us on a tour, and we realized it was true walking through Scott Circle the day we returned and had to react to impatient drivers.
Hawaiians started with a unique Polynesian culture, and successfully grafted to that the cultures of New England, China, Japan, Portugal, the Philippines, and the American military. It’s an amazing society that gives more to America than it takes. And yes, I’m considering the cost of “interstate highways” that don’t cross a county line, much less a state one.
There is almost no soil. You don’t realize how important that is until you see the consequences. It takes a long time for plants to turn cooled lava into anything that can support life, and longer to create more than a couple of inches in depth. I’d expected that there would be endless fresh vegetables and fruit, but no. Fruit is easier, because a lot of it is tree-based, so you don’t have to re-grow the plant structure every year. Veg, though, almost always comes in on a ship from California. As a consequence, the cuisine is a series of carbo bombs: sushi, noodles, sandwiches, with a lot of meat (ranching can use the thin soil for grazing), and expensive salads. Seafood is plentiful and amazing, fortunately. When in doubt, always order the fish.
The transport infrastructure is less than we would expect, but that may be in part intentional. Rush hours in Honolulu are horrible, but Hawaiians seem to prefer some congestion in exchange for not paving valuable valleys or wiping out endangered species. And they’re not honking at each other as they wait.
All beaches are public, which is a joy. You can’t camp on the beach, in an attempt to deter homeless encampments, but you can always fish, so if you see what seems a permanent tent with a lone fishing pole up front, that’s why.
We loved it. If you can afford it, go. But if all you want is a pleasant beach and a kid to bring you blender drinks, you can get it easier in the Outer Banks, or Florida, or the Caribbean.
