little tara

Sunset at Waikiki Beach

In 2004, a friend and I managed to nab a package holiday to Hawaii for a song. I think we paid $590 each, and for that princely sum we got return flights from Sydney, 6 nights accommodation, return transfers and all taxes included. We were SO excited! We spent the week gorging on calorific cakes and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (which, in 2004, was still unavailable in Australia) and generally indulging in the kind of mindless hedonism that one finds in Hawaii. It was bliss. In a fit of tropical fever I bought a Hawaiian-print dress. I haven’t worn it since, but I still find it occasionally in the back of the cupboard and smile. One morning we tuned in to Nickelodeon and started watching what WE thought was a kiddie cartoon. Five minutes later an ‘octopussoir’ was emerging from under the skirt of Princess Clara and we both gawped, open-mouthed in shock, as it came to life and tried to eat the other characters. It was the first – but not the last – time I saw Drawn Together, possibly one of the most filthy cartoons in existence.

I only have one regret from that trip – the fact that we decided NOT to go and see Don Ho in concert. I knew that Tiny Bubbles and his other mega-cheese hits were part of Hawaii’s cultural history, but at the time we just didn’t see the point. Three years later, Don Ho died and I have to admit that I wish I’d gone when I had the chance!

 Anyway, here’s what I wrote to my friends just after coming back from the trip. Enjoy! 

I’ve just been to HAWAII and I want to tell you all about it!!!! My friend Emma and I went for a week and had a complete blast; I went down to Sydney to meet up with her, and we ran about doing last-minute essential things like buying American currency, travel insurance and Krispy Kreme dougnuts before finally having the excitement of checking in at the airport and having the airplane staff greet us with our first legitimate “Aloha!” (We’d been saying it to each other for the last, ooh, 6 months but it doesn’t really count when you’re in Australia because people just think you’re a bit weird…!)

The flight was pretty uneventful… we ate, we slept, we watched The Terminal (an experience that only reminded me of how much I still dislike Catherine Zeta Jones), and we arrived in Honolulu on the same day we left Sydney, only 10 hours earlier. Gotta love that ‘crossing the dateline’ thing – we got a whole extra day of holidays! 😉

Hmmm… what highlights can I tell you about? Well, we got greeted at the airport with bright purple leis (necklaces made of fresh flowers); there was the tropical (not too hot, not too cold) sunshine, pigs on a spit (very tasteful)… there was also the sudden realisation that half of the island is a military base and was crawling with navy boys on shore leave… Emma and I tried to hide but were trapped twice. The first time was okay because they seemed fairly uninterested in our pants (thank god) and actually just wanted to know if it was ‘true that people outside America hate Americans’… one of them was like, “really, you can tell me the truth, it’s just that I’m heading to Australia in two weeks time and I want to know if I have to pretend to be Canadian…” They were actually pretty funny. The other bunch that we met, however, were all about 19 years old and within thirty seconds of meeting them they were trying to persuade us to come to their rented penthouse hotel apartment and ‘party’. I was like, “Hmm, yes, very clever idea. Two girls, alone in a foreign place, and nobody knows where we are, heading to some penthouse to ‘party’ with some navy boys that we only just met… oooh yes please, because I’d love to make headlines and end up on the side of a milk carton!!!” Really I suppose they were just babies and wouldn’t have done us any harm, but you never know. All I could think was, “these guys are barely old enough to tie their own shoelaces but are being sent to Afghanistan on Tuesday, and are ambassadors of America to that country… god save us!”

What else did we get up to? Well, we spent a lot of time on the beach, where the water was really warm (and not in that dangerous ‘there’s a kid nearby and the warm water comes in patches’ sort of way!). The beach was a mere one minute and 9 seconds away from the front entrance of our hotel – how convenient! Another memorable moment would be being forced to get up in front of an audience of about 500 middle-aged Americans to dance the hula. It’s a lot harder than it looks – wiggle the hips, shake the shoulders, wave the arms about… I think we must have resembled a bunch of schizophrenic windmills! We went to Chinatown (lots of interesting plazas and markets and nooks and crannies), watched leis being made, ate $1.50 Yum Cha, put flowers in our hair, bought tacky souvenirs including a dancing hula doll, and we met an ex-tour guide (and now, it seems, homeless man) called Keith who was actually very nice; George Bush had been re-elected the day before and he apologised to us on behalf of America! Funny.

We ate at a dodgy bar called Coconut Willy’s, often frequented a 50’s style diner that was on the corner near our hotel (complete with booths, soda fountain, table juke boxes and Elvis memorabilia), and I challenged a man at a DVD stall in a market, whereby Emma and I both won and got free DVDs out of the whole thing!

We spent a lot of time pottering around the streets in Waikiki, poking into markets and strange-looking shops and walking along the waterfront enjoying the sea breezes. Altogether very pleasant.

We made a journey to the Ala Moana Shopping Centre (fifth biggest in the world, I believe) [NB from 2011 – this is undoubtedly no longer the case thanks to the malls in Dubai and elsewhere in the Middle East!] where we had lunch at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company (yes, of Forrest Gump spin-off fame… I got to eat a zillion prawns, yum yum) and avoided having to “Experience Jackie Chan’s Culinary Fury!!!” as the poster for his restaurant urged. We had dinner in a revolving restaurant to watch the sun go down, and Emma went a bit nutsy because there was no decent coffee to be found… having said that, though, one night we did find a real coffee shop and she got so excited that she drank two cups of the stuff and was up all night on a caffeine high!

I bought a bunch of tasteless, funny t-shirts… there was one that had a picture of a dog on it with the words ‘some days I just want to pee all over everything’; what with the Bush re-election, it sort of fitted my mood. I also bought a pink one that has I LOVE DORKS written on it…Emma bought the same shirts, which we justified by the fact that we live in different cities now! One of my favourite purchases, though, was a little badge that had a little stick man running across it with the words ‘sometimes I just like to run around in my underwear for no reason’. Useless purchases galore!

So anyway, suffice to say I had a wicked time (it was kind of nice to be unashamedly a tourist) and it was very hard to come home and have to go to work again.

…As a side note, I plan to eat a lot of veggies because I swear to god there were no vegetables to be found in Hawaii. I kept forgetting that it was an island in the middle of nowhere, and they don’t grow many veggies there, so it was meat, meat and more meat, and processed food galore. I asked for cheese with something I was eating and squirmed in horror as they squeezed a lurid yellow substance out of a canister onto my meal. Never again!

The rest of the email was about other stuff, so I’ll leave it there. It’s funny how something like this can jog the memory; loads of other snippets are coming to mind now! I remember visiting the Cheesecake Factory, and for the first time EVER I was given a beeper and told to come back for our table when it was finally available. When we eventually sat down (over an hour later!), we were delighted to find that our waiter, Eli, was dazzlingly handsome and friendly to boot. We spent our whole meal swooning every time he walked by!

 Our flight home was comfortable; I remember watching ‘The Notebook’ and exchanging glances with Emma every time Ryan Gosling appeared on screen. This was before he was THE Ryan Gosling, and he was HOT.

 Funnily enough, Josh and Alex, the two nice sailors that we met in Chinatown (not the ones who tried to entice us to their apartment) came to Brisbane and I managed to catch up with them. We spent a couple of days together, and on one of those days we went to Australia Zoo and cuddled wombats – awesome! I lost touch with them about a year after that; I sometimes wonder whatever happened to them. I hope they’re safe and well, wherever they are, and that they didn’t end up in Iraq or Afghanistan.

 And I suppose that ends the Hawaii chapter. I hope I get back there one day; I remember those balmy breezes with particular fondness on days like this when I’m freezing my ass off!

 Thanks for stopping by,

Tara.

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Tags: hawaii, old travel, travel