Hip, Hip, Hawaii

By Tess Kamara

Life couldn’t get any better than this, I reflected, as we sat in a café in Waikiki, downtown Honolulu, drinking Mai Tais and watching the sun go down. I’d always dreamed of going to Hawaii but it remained a fantasy until a round of redundancies at work made me realise that time is short and I’d better get my skates on while I was still employed. My travelling companion Elizabeth and I saved hard and now, here we were. In fact the trip was surprisingly affordable; we travelled with Page and Moy and stayed in a local self-catering Ohana hotel. The ubiquitous Ohana chain is very popular with Americans who come over for weddings and graduation parties, or to visit relatives serving in the Pacific Fleet. Relatively cheap by Hawaiian standards, the self-catering rooms have a kitchenette with fridge, hob and microwave. Honolulu has ABC mini supermarkets on every corner, the equivalent of a 711 or Budgens, where you can pick up fresh food quite cheaply. The only thing to beware of is their ATMs; I thought I was being careful taking out small amounts every day, until I checked the small print and realised I was being charged $2.50 per transaction.

Prior to leaving I had tried to make contact with Mensa Hawaii to pick up some travel tips but at the time the website consisted of nothing more than a photograph of paradise with a caption of something like “Check back in on this work in progress. Gone surfing”. Elizabeth had more luck – through her church links we met up with a very hospitable family, who took us to Pearl Harbour and even invited us home for dinner.

Most fantasies turn out to be just that, but Hawaii doesn’t disappoint; it really is the paradise you imagine it to be. The wide avenues are lined with palm trees, the skies are clear blue and the sunshine is constant. We were told that on the rare occasion it rained, kids would run outside for the novelty of getting wet. The air is fragrant with the scent of wonderfully named flowers; bougainvillea, tiaré, plumeria, heliconia, hibiscus, white ginger. Brightly coloured zebra finches scratch around everywhere like exotic sparrows. The seas are crystalline and the beaches exceptional; pebble free, with soft white sand. All the beaches are public which means the posh waterfront hotels can’t cordon off their section. You can walk along them unhindered for miles, but you’ll need shoes as the sand is scorching underfoot by noon.

On our first full day we took a bus tour of Oahu, to get an overview of the island and note which places to check out further. If you take a bus trip in Hawaii, always bring a jacket; you may be sweltering outside but the buses are air-conditioned to the point of refrigeration. Our driver and guide was a young man from Connecticut who styled himself Cap’n Rob and who had come to Hawaii on holiday and fallen in love with the place. He was an enthusiastic fund of information which he sprinkled with cheeky anecdotes; he told us whenever he met an attractive girl he would claim to be native Hawaiian and say his name was Irili Wanalaya. All the coaches were equipped with a movie screen but it seems the only film they ever played was Blue Hawaii, starring Elvis as a poor boy in love with his rich employer’s daughter. As the film is ninety minutes long and it only takes an hour to get round Oahu, we kept getting turfed off the bus two thirds of the way through the film. We saw the same unfinished movie three or four times during the holiday but we could still sleep at night knowing that Elvis always gets the girl.

The first stop was Diamond Head, where you can walk up the inside of an extinct volcano from the inside in pitch darkness, and emerge at the top to a panoramic view of the whole chain of islands. Fortunately we had no time to test this out as we were off to Sea World where you can observe dolphins, sharks, turtles, sea lions and other marine life. It does have a certain educational value but I can’t help feeling uneasy at seeing these magnificent creatures in captivity when they should have the world’s oceans at their disposal. We headed north past the Polynesian Cultural Centre, which showcases seven different island races – Fijian, Hawaiian, Marquesan, Samoan, Tahitian, Tongan and Maori. We earmarked this stop for another day and then it was off to the Bodo cemetery and temple, a Japanese Buddhist burial ground.

Buddhists are more practical than reverential about death; there were no gravestones, just small plaques to mark the family plot and little metal canisters to put flowers in. In keeping with the minimalist style there would be just one or two buds or blossoms in each canister. A small moat ran round the whole site, filled with koi carp to represent good fortune. Cap’n Rob told us that on weekends it was usual for Japanese families to come up and have a picnic round the grave, setting out food for the deceased as was the Buddhist custom. It was not unheard for graves to be decorated, not with flowers, but with a beer and a sandwich. In keeping with Buddhist pragmatism, these would be consumed later by homeless people.

We made a stop-off for lunch at a restaurant attached to a golf course. The sport must be hugely popular because there were courses everywhere, so beautifully maintained that the grass didn’t look real, although Rob assured us it was. We finished the trip with a visit to the Dole pineapple factory. Like many working businesses, this has a side-line as a tourist attraction. You hop on the Pineapple Express and are driven round the plantation as a guide tells you the history of the pineapple in Hawaii. It is one of the state’s most important exports, along with macadamia nuts and coffee.

Honolulu is home to a fascinating mix of cultures. The tourist hotels are concentrated in a few miles along Waikiki beach, about twenty minutes’ drive from the airport and half an hour from Pearl Harbour. Within that area you see mainly Americans, Europeans and Japanese, but venture out of the tourist zone and you’ll find different pockets of ethnic populations – other Polynesian groups such as Samoans and Tahitians, as well as Chinese, Japanese, Indians and Filipinos. Very few people can claim to have 100 percent Hawaiian blood and many “true Hawaiians” are descended from Captain Cook’s sailors and their Polynesian wives. The word “Ohana” refers to the Hawaiian concept of extended family. Strangers are referred to as “cousin” (very handy if you forget someone’s name), then as they know you better they will refer to you as “brother” or “sister”. I suspect if we went back we would be known as “auntie”. Of course there were surfers of all nationalities everywhere; it seems as if half the population is walking around in long shorts with a surfboard under the arm. Hawaiian children look as though they were born to live in the ocean. You can see them everywhere, out at sea basking on promontories or diving like seals.

The Ramos family kindly invited us to lunch at their house in Aiea, a smart suburb of Honolulu, then drove us out to Pearl Harbour. The memorial is a poignant reminder of when 1400 sailors lost their lives when the USS Arizona was sunk in a Japanese attack in 1944. The monument itself is built on a platform directly above the ship, with viewing panels so you can look down at the remains of the watery grave. In the visitor centre you can pay your respects at a shrine to the deceased and watch a film narrating the events that culminated in the sinking of the ship. The narration is diplomatically worded to avoid causing offence to modern Japanese visitors.

Japanese tourists come to Hawaii in droves and can be seen mainly in the expensive shops or the exquisitely manicured golf courses dotted round the island. Shopping has been raised to an art form in Honolulu. They have everything from rows of stalls selling cheap tat to cavernous malls housing the world’s most expensive boutiques – Vuitton, Ferragamo, Macy’s and Chanel for starters. In the gigantic Royal Hawaiian Shopping Centre we trawled through three floors across four blocks looking for presents until we had to get out due to sensory overload. A better bet was the Ala Moana Center, a couple of miles away on the free shuttlebus or wiki-wiki. As well as the more expensive outlets there were reasonably priced chains like The Gap and Sears, lots of street entertainment and best of all, a food mall frequented by locals where you could get cheap noodles, curry, seafood specials and so on.

The food courts are huge and it seems that people eat out all the time. In the evening, outdoor restaurants were packed and there was often music and dancing laid on. As you would expect much of the food is Asian, with a strong leaning towards Japanese. We tended to favour Korean as it is a cuisine you don’t see much of at home and I became very fond of kimchi, a pickled spiced cabbage you can find in Asian supermarkets in the UK. One of the things that tickled me about the Hawaiian diet is their absolute love of Spam, a throwback from World War II when the Americans brought it over. While tourists flock to the food malls, locals get their snacks from “hole in the wall” cafés selling Spam fritters, Spam and eggs, fried Spam with taro chips, and even Spam sushi. They even send themselves up about it: we saw tourist ads welcoming you to the “land of Spam” and showing a happy smiling Hawaiian family in flowered shirts, gazing in delight at a tin of the stuff as though it were a winning lottery ticket.

We spent our final free day at the Polynesian Cultural Centre on the North Shore. The North Shore itself is pretty spectacular, especially in winter when the temperature drops as low as seventy degrees and the waves get up to fifty feet. It attracts diehard surfers from all over the world who have unofficial competitions rather like raves – they’re not publicised but word gets out when the waves are right. The area is home to giant green turtles that come ashore to rest and bask in the sun. It’s not unusual to see a turtle lying inert a few feet away from sunbathers. We took pictures but it’s illegal to touch them – interfering with wildlife carries a fine or possible prison sentence.

The Polynesian Cultural Centre consists of seven reproduced Polynesian villages dotted about a lake, populated by locals in national costume who demonstrate their culture’s distinct arts and crafts. The villagers are actually students from the nearby Brigham Young University, who come from all over the Pacific islands and pay their way by putting in hours at the Centre. Visitors make their way around the villages experiencing different displays and presentations. I was particularly taken by the New Zealander showing us how to do a haka; with his blonde hair he looked about as Maori as Wills and Harry. There was also a Samoan with very impressive linguistic skills. He was giving a talk on Samoan history in perfect English when a German asked him to re-word something as he hadn’t understood. The Samoan man replied in German, then a French woman asked him something and he responded in French. It became a game, with the audience throwing questions at him in different languages without catching him out once.

Tattooing originated in Polynesia and I took the opportunity to acquire an ornate temporary “tattoo” although I didn’t say to the massive Tongan who put it on that he was actually applying a stencil. In the afternoon there was a pageant on the lake consisting of a parade of boats and rafts carrying dancers and musicians from the various cultures. The dance and costumes highlighted the fact that many island cultures are quite individual and distinct from each other. Hawaiian dance, for example, is quite slow and graceful in keeping with the tall, stately stature of the original inhabitants. The hip-shaking “hula” you see in the movies is actually Tahitian. When darkness descended we went to an outdoor theatre for a dinner and show. After a huge meal and an enjoyable musical evening, we came away experts on the subtle differences between the Fijian sarong and the Samoan pareo.

You can’t leave Hawaii without visiting the Hilo Hattie gift shop, named after a famous Hawaiian singer, actress and all-round national treasure. This huge emporium sells every type of Hawaiian themed gift from flowered shirts to grass skirts to sweets like chocolate covered macadamia nuts. After getting presents for everyone, I bought myself some tiaré perfume in the hope that I could bring home something of the wonderful fragrance of this beautiful island.

First published in VISA 116 (August 2014)