exploring Waikiki | Tales from the Hutt

“Damn… I hope that’s Joe! I’ve never actually gotten to drive in a Charger before!” I said, after looking over the railing from the penthouse. Below us was a silver Dodge Charger, that we believedthe belonged to a friend of Beate named Joe; a marine who she had “befriended” a few nights before. “Ohh yeah, that’s definitely Joe!” B chimed in, “You guys go down, I’ll meet you there!”. And so with a bound down the stairs, all three of us met up with Joe, jumped in the car, and started out on our exploration of the North Shore of Oahu.

Or… we tried to. Unfortunately for us the road layout of Waikiki isn’t really the most simple thing to understand, even for someone like Joe who’s lived on Oahu for the last four or five years. Wrong turns, one-way streets, and a complete lack of any on-ramps to the highway we wanted kept us trapped in the city for nearly an hour, simply driving back and forth trying to find a way onto the highway. Finally Joe got fed up with the whole situation, and simply got onto the highway going the wrong direction – in his words “screw it guys. This island’s small, we’ll just take the tour the other way around!” Heh… upside of it taking less than three hours to drive all the way around the island, right?

Once we did get onto the highway we made pretty good time, just cruising and chatting, and spending a lot of time simply staring open-mouthed at the views as they flew by. Oahu was the opposite of New Zealand – instead of rolling plains there were lush jungle mountains. These mountains were unbelievable – instead of the usual slope-sided mountains of the mainland USA, or the rocky-sided mountains of New Zealand, Oahu had jagged precipices, seemingly torn out of the ocean only a few hours before and still covered in jungle and wildlife. It reminded me most closely of the mountains in Venezuela – though the Hawaiian ones were much more jagged, they both had the same “there is a lot of living stuff on these mountains” feel to them.

As we dove farther into the island we saw more and more mountains and cliffs, and we stopped in to see them a bit closer on a few occasions. Each time we parked a ranger or other docent would quickly walk up to us, asking for either a parking pass or the $5 parking fee. Thankfully, Joe is officially a resident of Hawaii, and thus is exempt from this rule – a quick flash of the “badge”, aka the state ID, and we were good to go. I liked that about the Hawaiian tourist infrastructure… it seemed that almost everything was discounted or waived for actual residents.

After about an hour of driving, more like three hours total, thanks to the sightseeing, the highway shot out of a small pass and into the plains that separate the mountains from the ocean. Here we were neck-deep in actual jungle, and unfortunately couldn’t really see anything interesting… so we just kept pressing on towards the legendary surf beaches of the North Shore.

And these beaches… they’re legendary for a reason. The day we went out was actually fairly stormy, and so the waves were being whipped up into a series of smaller swells, all crashing into the shore at random. I didn’t know this myself, but Craig explained that surf-waves usually come in swells of three to five clean and separate waves, followed by a short calm spell, and then repeated throughout the day. Today, the waves were coming randomly and churning the surf into a froth… awesome to watch, but from what I learned horrid for actual surfing.

We bopped between a few beaches known as “the pipeline”, watching the waves and even getting a bit of sea-side bouldering in before hunger started eating away at us too loudly to ignore. And so we went… to a trailer! That’s right, to the “World famous shrimp trailer” located… somewhere on Oahu. I don’t really understand it completely, but the shrimp place was this cool little trailer with a few dozen picnic tables spread outside the front. It didn’t look like much, although I was impressed with the amount of graffiti and tagging on the trailer itself, but when we finally got the food… well, I understood exactly why everyone wanted to come here so badly. It was, in a word, magically delicious. So much more so than anything lucky-charms has ever created.

After we finished eating and analyzing the artwork on the trailer (yes, that took a while) we moved onwards to our next great destination – a bar! We had actually already hit one bar on the drive up to the North Shore, but back there we had only stopped for a quick beer. This time, since we had more time and were on the way back, we decided to relax and chill for a bit and sample the local cuisine. We ordered up a place of BBQ quesadillas (nothing against the shrimp place, we were just super-hungry) that was made with a type of BBQ pork unique to the Hawaiian islands called Kalua. It was, in a word, amazing. There really isn’t any other way to describe it.

To go with the quesadillas everyone ordered up the usual round of Hawaiian beers… except for me, who ordered up what was quite possibly the girliest drink I’ve ever ordered, second only to a pink cotton-candy cosmopolitan that I ordered a few years back at a TGI Fridays. This was a paradise-plum margarita… and it was supreme. Seriously, I would have killed someone just to get the recipe if I hadn’t been in such a haze of happiness while drinking that thing.

Soon enough our drinks were empty and the plate pillaged of its meats, and so we walked back to the car to finish up the drive into civilization. It was excellent, for my part, and Craig and I spent the whole time relaxing and chatting about his previous jobs. You see, Craig used to be a sommelier at some of New Yorks fanciest restaurants, and I wanted to pick his brain about what that kind of life was actually like. From some of his quick stories, Craig had served people like Bill Clinton and chatted with Donald Trump… thus I was rather excited about hearing stories about that sort of world.

It was quite interesting, and paired a lot more science into the food than I would have expected – primarily on understanding how a wine would pair with a particular dish. For example, when serving asparagus one needs to pair a very sweet wine, one that hasn’t fermented as long and thus retains more original sugars, in order to offset the free radicals (ions that don’t have a partner atom) in the food. Yes… they actually have to know chemistry. Sorry folks, your high school teachers were not lying to you when they said you’d need this stuff in the future.

Anyways, Craig and I had a jolly time in the back seat of the car as it raced back towards Honolulu, but the atmosphere up front was starting to feel a bit awkward. Possibly only to us, but B and Joe seemed to be playing the rather silent types up there… we spent about a minute worrying if they had run into that part of a relationship where you don’t really have anything else to say to someone, since you don’t have a very long history together, but then we remembered that they’re both big kids and can deal with themselves. So we went back to blabbering about wines and how best to pair blended red peppers with a rice dish.

Waikiki Backpackers hostel

My first goal after I had booked my plane ticket through Honolulu was to set up somewhere to sleep while I was there. Thankfully at this point I had gotten fairly good at searching for Hostels (thanks Nelson and Motueka!), and so I jumped online, and had found a cheap and highly rated backpackers within less than half an hour. I booked through for seven nights, set up a pickup at the airport, and went on my way without a worry.

Once I got to Honolulu and had dragged my pack through customs, I called up the shuttle service and let them know where I needed a pickup from. Meeting the shuttle went smooth, and before I knew it I was standing outside of a semi-swank hotel, wondering where exactly the hostel was. (Ed Note: Ben used “Hostel” and “Backpackers” interchangeably here – they do actually mean the same, its just that Backpackers seems to be a more Kiwi / Aussie term). I called them up, and found out that the Hotel WAS the hostel – they simply booked out the hotels spare rooms as needed, forming a rather impressive symbiotic relationship with the hotels in the area. Because of this, I found myself sleeping on a queen sized bed in a hotel in Hawaii, barely two blocks from the beach.

The main lounge of the Hostel was, unfortunately, in a hotel next to the one that my room was located in… meaning that I needed to find someone to sign me in every time I wanted to get up there. And I wanted to go to the Penthouse, as well called it, a lot – they had free breakfast every morning, free WiFi all the time, and on Tuesday and Saturday they had “free beer night”. Granted the beer wasn’t the fanciest stuff out there, but it was in fact beer, and it was in fact free. Those two traits caused it to be quite excellent, in the opinion of this traveler.

The best part about this backpackers though, even above the free beer, was the people. Immediately I was drawn to a small group in the lounge area – they just had this energy that meant that I couldn’t resist just walking up and introducing myself. These people ended up being my constant adventure partners, and are still amazing friends that I keep in touch with regularly. The backpackers here simply brought people together; people with similar energy and vibrancy – travelers who all share the same thirst for adventure and excitement.

Wandering Waikiki

My first few days in Hawaii were relaxed. After my long roadtrip of constant movement, with the looming threat of returning too late to catch my flight, I really appreciated the change of pace. And if you want someone to relax, Waikiki is the ultimate place to be. The stereotypical Hawaiian beaches are here, and pretty much any “touristy” activity can be found within a ten minute walk from the center of town.

I started my adventures the same way I start in any city that I’ve never been to – I walked. I took the advice of one of my Uncles, and picked a hotdog stand as my destination. The place was called “Hanks Haute Dogs”, and it had been rated one of the ultimate places to go on O’ahu, so I felt pretty safe choosing it as my first official lunch on the island. The walk was a bit more than 3 miles away, which gave me a long time to check out the feel of the city… and listen to a few tunes that I had gotten stuck in my head during the long New Zealand drives.

After devouring the second best hot dog I’ve ever eaten (Sorry Hanks, but Spikes is still clearly superior) I wandered around the area a bit more, and then turned back towards the main beach by my hostel. On the way though, I found myself watching a spray-artist working on a full-wall mural for a car dealership. The mural depicted the creation of the Hawaiian island chain, according to the mythology of the native Hawaiians. It was amazing, and even though it wasn’t 100% complete I could see the amazing skill that the artist was putting into the work – it honestly rivaled or exceeded many of the “professional arteests” that I’ve met in my travels. We chatted for a few minutes as he waited for one of the layers to dry, and he pointed me in the direction of a few other areas in Waikiki that had amazing “urban artwork”, which I of course went and photographed.

Overall I spent nearly two and a half days just wandering around Waikiki itself. I spent time sitting and reading on the beaches, watching volleyball matches, and staring gape-jawed as surfers carved waves bigger than any I’d ever seen (Ed Note: Heh. The biggest waves he’s seen SO FAR. See Ben’s post on the North Shore exploration for descriptions and pictures of “real” Hawaiian waves). The place was so laid back, and yet so hectic at the same time, that I found myself having trouble sitting still long enough to finish an entire chapter of my book at any one sitting… I guess its the danger of a nearly pure tourist city.

And that brings up the comments on the people that I met and saw while walking around this tourist city. The people here ranged from gaggles of Japanese middleschoolers to busloads of venerable Americans, all decked out in the latest “theft-proof” tourist gear. The sheer number of orange women I saw around was staggering, and honestly a bit confusing to me – I mean, if you’re coming to Hawaii, why go into a spray-tan booth ahead of time? Why not just wear a wee bit of sun screen and get a natural tan while your on one of the sunniest islands in the world? <shrug> I’ll never understand some people.

And of course, to contrast all of the tourists were the native Hawaiians, though by that I don’t necessarily mean the true “natives”… instead I simply mean “people who live in Hawaii”. These people were generally easily identifiable by their annoyance at the tourists getting in their way, the smooth way that they navigated the city, and by the impossible amount of ink that they had embedded in their skin. Not to make broad generalizations, but the amount of tattooing that I saw in this city was astounding to me – not often single large pieces like Kitty or Oliva have, but dozens of smaller pieces covering their bodies. The most prevelant piece of tattooing that I saw was the Hawaiian island chain in its complete glory – I guess its a mark of “islander pride” to have that inked onto your stomach.

The restaurants ran the same broad spectrum as the people, and I ate at more than a few very interesting places, that almost always seemed to have a mirroring “American” restaurant located right across the street. For every Da Big Kahuna or Hanks Haute Dogs local dig, there seemed to be at least one Dennys or Chile’s, and while I didn’t personally recognize them, I’m sure many of the other Asian restaurants that I saw were, in fact, chains from Japan or China.

But even with the number of “stupid tourists” and chain restaurants, I found Waikiki to be a stellarly relaxing city, and it was almost definitely the best way for me to ease my way back into an “American Lifestyle” in a real city, instead of the suburb of Christchurch.