Make Mine a Mai Tai

Driving
The next day we rented a Taurus and circled the island. It was about 90 degrees F and of course humid, so the air conditioning in the car was wonderful. After ascending Pali Highway through lush forest, we made our first stop at Nuuanu Pali, a magnificent panorama from atop a jagged cliff. It was here that Kamehameha the Great vanquished the Oahuans in a fierce battle in 1795. Thousands of the defeated fell to their deaths on the rocks below.

Then we traveled along the coastal highway, by little towns and deserted beaches. Every once in a while the billowy white clouds would sprinkle lightly, then the sun would shine a moment later. Typical tropical weather. At Kaaawa Beach Park, in fearless pursuit of the perfect picture, I waded into the surf up to my waist just a few yards from where local fisherman were snaring octopi. I wanted a shot of Eddie with the sea in the foreground for perspective, and I got it.

Tongue
Hawaiian has just 12 letters. Five vowels, pronounced as in English:a e i o u
Seven consonants:
h k l m n p w
Every syllable ends in a vowel, every vowel is pronounced, and the accent is almost always on the penultimate syllable, as in Spanish.

We rested for an hour on Sunset Beach, the famous surfing locale where waves in winter reach heights of 30 feet. I didn't stand in the water for a photograph here; the undertow in fall and winter is severe, and the lifeguard had posted a No Swimming sign.

About 20 minutes away was Waimea Valley, nestling a cultivated forest and a waterfall. Donning our rucksacks, sunglasses, and straw hats, we climbed aboard and rode the park tram up to the waterfall, where cliff divers put on a show. Then we set off on a rambling, leisurely hike back to the bottom of the valley, stopping often to inspect bizarre flowers and plants and to admire the views. We veered off the paved path to climb stone staircases into the hills. Unbeknownst to us, we were being devoured by insects, but such is nature. We had frightening red bites on our legs for days.

Eddie and Craig spent a week on Oahu in September 1994. Eddie had been to Hawaii numerous times before with friends and relatives. It was Craig's first visit. The vacation was equal parts exploration, history, and relaxation. Shortly after, Craig wrote the following travelogue in order to share the trip with distant family and friends. He and Eddie invite you to read it.

Aloha Eddie and I arrived Thursday at noon and shuttled to our hotel, the Sheraton Waikiki. It's the only place to stay, Eddie assured me, located as it was on one end of the beach with picture-postcard views. The place teems with Japanese, as does all of Hawaii.			2255 Kalakaua Ave. Honolulu, HI 96815-2579 (808) 922-4422
My grandmother told me a funny story about her stay in Hawaii. It seems my grandfather wanted a photo of the sunset, so he waited on the beach while my grandmother took the room key and went to dress for dinner. She had the misfortune to share an elevator with a dozen suited Japanese businessmen. When a man got off on the second floor, he bowed to each remaining man, who each bowed in return. The same things happened on the third floor, then the fourth, then the sixth. Each man's exit was an occasion for a round of ceremonial bowing, with the elevator door held open to permit it. At one point my grandmother got off early and waited for another elevator. When she finally reached the room, my grandfather was waiting outside the door, the sunset photo already taken, wondering where in the heck she'd been.
Our lanai, as it's called, overlooked Waikiki Beach, that famous strip of sand and sky-blue water seen on a million postcards. Diamond Head rose majestically in the distance. We relaxed in the chairs in the late afternoon, watching bathers and surfers in the long white waves, and in the evenings before going to bed, basking in the light of the moon and the dazzling hotels. One night we watched a lightning storm travel across the sky and sheets of warm rain pummel the trembling palm trees. Goethe said that one tires of any view after 15 minutes, and perhaps that's true when nothing but the imperceptible crawl of nature is going on. But we never tired of the sea and its surfers and catamarans, the beach and its sunbathers, the swift clouds moving over Diamond Head, and the strip of sparkling hotels.			Our 6th floor lanai offered this splendid view of Waikiki Beach and Diamond Head. We snapped the photo minutes after our arrival. Two enlargements adorn different rooms of our apartment now. While gazing at them, we can almost hear Hawaiian music playing.
We floated lazily on inflatable rafts the first afternoon. The water of Waikiki Beach is remarkably shallow, so although we floated a hundred or so yards from shore, we were still in only about 12 feet of water. The waves break 150 yards from shore, then again at 75 yards. By the time they reach most of the bathers, they've diminished to gentle rolls. The water was warm and clear. Once or twice we had to make way for a brightly colored catamaran to beach herself and rotate the human cargo, but other than that we were without a care in the world, lapsing into the dreamy abstractedness of vacation.			Eddie floats in the waters off Waikiki Beach. It didn't take him long to encounter the sea turtle he has seen on every visit. Just as Eddie was dozing off on the raft, a scaly green head emerged nearby and just about scared Eddie out of his swim trunks.

City Tour Our city tour the next morning whisked us off to Pearl Harbor. Our guide enlivened the journey with local trivia. For instance:
Why are homes built two or three feet off the ground? Not for floods but for natural, mountain-sent air conditioning.
Is the dilapidated state of some homes the result of Pacific storms? No, those homes have been the feast of termites, which plague every wooden structure.
Why are there no seagulls? The water is too warm for them, and besides Hawaii is just too remote.
Where are all the billboards you'd expect to see in the world's 11th largest city? A state ordinance seeking to preserve the beautiful views prohibits them.
Why don't the soda vending machines say what's in them? Any soda vending machine in public view can't carry advertisements but instead must display a big flower picture or some other Hawaiian art. You tell whether it's Coke or Pepsi by the color of the machine's base: Red for Coke, Blue for Pepsi.
The Pearl Harbor visit begins with a 30-minute film documentary telling the story of the harbor and the bombing. So many young, smiling men, swabbing the decks, tipping their hat to the camera, chasing footballs on the beach. Then a chilling radio transmission on the morning of 7 Dec. 1941: An outpost on the north shore spots dozens of incoming planes, but mistaking them for the U.S. planes from California expected that day, the radioman tells the still-sleeping harbor, "It's nothing to worry about." Fifteen minutes later the harbor is under attack, ship after ship ablaze. The Omaha goes under. The Tennessee goes under. The Utah goes under. And the Arizona, her bunkers full of sleeping sailors and marines, blows nearly in half when her stores of ammunition are ignited.
Most of the men were asleep when it began, a fact both comforting and terrifying. Some might not have fully grasped what was happening and so died peacefully. Then again, they were defenseless, utterly vulnerable, and most were probably in that state of hyperalterness that comes from a violent awakening. (Was it nice that L.A.'s Biggish One, in 1994, hit at 4:30 in the morning? Yes, from the standpoint that most people were in comfy beds rather than on the freeways or at the office, but getting a 6.8 wake-up call and running screaming naked out of your room is no day in the park, let me tell you.)
The filmmakers do a fine job of conveying the disaster and loss, the disillusionment and resolve in the wake of America's first and only WWII attack. But during the last few minutes the spell is broken, for having remembered how the war began for us, we inevitably remember the rest. Japan bombed our harbor, yes, but a few years later we would obliterate two of her cities. Millions more dead on all sides would follow the 2,403 of Pearl Harbor. I believe it was an error of judgment to include later war footage in the film. Against the battles in the Pacific, the liberation of Auschwitz, and the massive bombings of London and Berlin, a sunken battleship in Hawaii seems trivial.
Back on the big-windowed tour bus we went by the governor's house, a few old churches, the city hall, Chinatown, and the Iolani Palace, the only royal palace on American soil. Therein resided and ruled Queen Lili'uokalani. Outside, there stands a giant banyan tree, one of the world's largest. Banyan limbs send down shoots to the ground, even the limbs 20 feet high. Younger shoots stab down from the branches like stalactites, while older ones are already embedded in the earth. It's monstrous, like something out of science fiction.

Hanauma Bay That afternoon we rode one of the clean, efficient Honolulu buses out to Hanauma Bay, the world's largest natural fish reserve. It was in From Here to Eternity and Blue Hawaii. At one time the bay was a volcanic crater, but the sea eventually crashed through its walls and filled it. Now it's a gorgeous blue bay where tropical fish thrive. We donned our snorkeling gear immediately and set out to explore the last earthbound frontier, albeit a shallow portion thereof. I've snorkeled off Catalina Island before, where the water's cold and the fish scarce, so I wasn't prepared for the bay. The water was warm as a bath, crystal-clear, and teeming with life. Just standing hip-deep, Eddie and I were surrounded by a school of shimmering silver fish. They're conditioned to expect food near human legs, since waders often toss peas and fish pellets to them.			That's Gratitude for You! Queen Lili'uokalani was bloodlessly overthrown by the U.S. in 1893. Some malcontent Hawaiians consider the overthrow illegal and pine for Hawaiian nationhood.Oh, we're sorry. We'll take back our roads and electricity and hospitals and cable TV, and you can go back to throwing one another off cliffs.
We drifted up and down the reef, excited by the sea life yet relaxed by the gentle rolling waves. In a few minutes we had exhausted our disposable underwater camera. We haven't seen the photographs yet, and of course we hope they at least come close to what we saw: the flat little yellow fish that looked like flower petals, the green trumpet fish, the enormous rainbow parrot fish, and so many others. The feeling of bobbing in the water, of undulating slowly side to side, stayed long in our sense-memory. We felt the waves late into the evening and went to sleep in the hotel as if on a boat.

Pineapples and Sunset
Highway 99 dissects the island north to south, and on it we passed field after field of pineapples rolling on like prickly seas to the distant mountains. Oahu formed when the effluence of two volcanoes flowed together (the last eruption was 10,000 years ago), and from the pineapple fields both mountains are visible. They're too huge and far to be dimensional; they look like paintings.

We stopped in the middle of the fields at the Dole plantation, where various pineapples are displayed. On the lanai overlooking the crops, we ate chunks of succulent fresh pineapple almost unbearably sweet and juicy. Afterward, naturally, our mouths were raw from the juice, but it was worth it. (We didn't know about the custom, which is to sprinkle salt on the fresh fruit to cut the acidity.) We'd forgotten how much we loved pineapple, so strange, so puzzling, so exotic.

We wanted to have at least one exceptional sunset photo, so rather than return to Waikiki in the late afternoon, we drove up the western coast to Waianae, a truly Hawaiian town, by which I mean populated almost entirely by locals. We parked at a beach, beside a picnic grounds. Kapuni Point was just up the coast, right where the sun would vanish. The sunset was glorious. With the sun behind it, a rock at the base of the point looked like the gaping mouth of a sea turtle.

Diamond Head Diamond Head is a landmark in the purest sense of the word: The ancient Polynesians searched for it when crossing to Oahu for their festivities and conferences (Oahu means gathering place), and it remains in the vernacular as a reference for all directions in the south. If something is toward Diamond Head and seaside, for example, it's position is described as "Diamond Head Makai (ocean)." To get there, you might be directed to "go Diamond Head three miles."
It suprised us to learn that Diamond Head is a military installation. Inside the crater walls, miles of track for transporting ammunition wind through reinforced bunkers. A half-dozen turrets squat atop the sea-facing walls, and on the crater bottom are a few boxy military buildings and a heliport, known as Fort Ruger.
We hiked in through a breezy tunnel barely two lanes wide and watched as Army and Red Cross personnel assembled on a lawn for a recognition ceremony. From what we could make out over the loudspeaker, awards were being given for valorous service during some natural disaster, possibly Hurricane Iniki. Next year they should award them for having stood through this ceremony in full dress at noon in 90-degree heat!
We passed around a cluster of camouflaged jeeps and vans and took the hiking trail. Diamond head rises about 800 feet from sea level, but from the bottom of the crater the hike is 575 feet. We started on a concrete path through eight-foot dry grass. The path gave way to dirt, and the dirt to an ankle-twisting rainwater channel strewn with rocks. From there we faced every kind of step: erratic stone ones joining steep switchbacks, a straight 74-step flight of metal stairs, and finally, at the end of a narrow, pitch-dark tunnel, a spiral staircase rising two floors through an abandoned bunker.			Here's Craig atop Diamond Head, after a grueling 575-foot hike. A sign at the foot of the hike estimated an hour to reach the summit, but Craig and Eddie accomplished it in 25 minutes, so eager were they to enjoy the view.
We reached a dismantled gun turret with a long, foot-high window overlooking the Pacific and Waikiki. You could imagine sentinels there during World War II, guarding Oahu from further attack. Eddie and I swigged from our water bottles and, breathless, leaned against the cool brick wall. We hadn't achieved the summit yet, but we took advantage of the shade to rest. After a minute we climbed out of the turret and clambered up the final steps and switchbacks leading to a concrete platform perched on the crater's edge. We had a glorious view of Waikiki, the Pacific, the southern town of Kahala, and the Koolau Mountain Range. The grueling hike had been worth it!

Witch's Brew
Our way on weekends and holidays is to rise early and set about our plans with nary a moment's rest, and so by our last full day of vacation we had seen every place we wanted to, gone everywhere we intended to, and done everything we planned to. We decided to return to Hanauma Bay and pass the day relaxing and snorkeling.

This time we swam for a while with a sea turtle and hiked to the mouth of the bay, to a tumultuous cove known as The Witch's Brew. The ocean on its way into the bay crashes magnificently against the outcropping of lava rocks there. We stood in our reef socks at a safe distance and were hypnotized by the churning water. Waves usually have a rhythm: recess, approach, recess, approach. The waves here were a chaos of peaks and dips, a sunny microcosm of the Pacific at its stormy worst. The water moved more up and down than in and out. We could have stood there all day, transfixed, showered now and then by a frothy wall of water, our ears filled with the roar.

Alas! All things must come to an end. We had to leave The Witch's Brew as certainly as we had to leave Hawaii. We flew home the following afternoon, sporting gorgeous tans, bug bites, and macadamia nut gifts of all varieties.