CerebralDebris

I wasn’t able to do an update on tuesday due to HAMS … not the cured pork legs, but rather Huge-Ass Margarita Syndrome. Anyway, tonight’s update covers both Monday the second, and Tuesday the third. I’ll try to keep it to a reasonable length. Note: pics from Monday are up on my Flickr page. Pics from Tuesday are coming later tonight.

We wake up early on Tuesday. The good thing about having our internal clocks still somewhat set to New York time is that 8:30 AM here feels super-late. This also means we’re going to bed at like 9:30 or 10:00 every night, which helps to bring us a sense of solidarity with the nine hundred million old people that spend time in Waikiki. We hit the Peet’s Coffee downstairs, which is basically a Starbucks only with DRASTICALLY superior cheese danishes. Coffee and danish ingested, we decide it’s time we rented a car. We want to get to the eastern side of the island to see a replica of a Japanese temple.

We wander aimlessly around Waikiki for a bit looking for car rental places and not finding any. Charlotte asks a friendly dude handing out fliers for a gun range — as far as we can tell, all the Japanese tourists are here to get married and/or riddle shit with bullets — and he happily directs us to a car rental place “over near Denny’s” where we pick up our ride: a Geo Tracker with no AC, manual windows, and a tape deck that has a tape stuck in it which won’t play or eject. Also it has no back window. We ride in style.

The first thing we do in the Tracker is get lost as shit while trying to find our way to the coast highway. We end up winding our way through a residential neighborhood somewhere near the base of Diamondhead Crater before finally finding our way to route 72. We follow this all the way around the south-eastern tip of the island, which has many amazing views. We stop at a few scenic lookout spots to take pictures of waves crashing up against eroded sandstone, and of one or two of Oahu’s many extinct volcanoes. The coast road is an amazing drive; if you end up in Oahu, rent a car and follow it.

Eventually we end up in a medium-sized town (big enough for a mall, not big enough for high-rise hotels), and decide it’s time for lunch. After a few minutes, we find a place called Zippy’s that looks like it’ll get the job done. Once inside, we realize that we’ve entered the lesser known and possibly lower-quality cousin of Denny’s. The most exciting thing about Zippy’s is that they have a picture of spaghetti on the menu, and it’s covered in a sauce that can only really be described as “horrifying” … needless to stay, Charlotte and I stick with the safer options: she gets a burger, I get a cold turkey sandwich. Neither poisons us, so I guess that’s a plus. Zippy’s: It probably won’t poison you.

After lunch, we detour away from our progression toward the temple in order to visit a small garden Charlotte’s read about. This turns out to be very cool. The gardens surround a big pond, and they’re entirely empty except for us, about ten thousand tiny lizards, and three free-range chickens that run away whenever we get close. There is an amazing variety of flora about, not to mention various ponds and streams full of koi, crayfish, turtles, and other animals. We take a bunch of pictures, feed some left-over lemon-poppy cake to the fish (a school of them so large that they make the surface of the water seem to boil), and head on back to the coast road in search of our temple.

We find it not soon after, winding our way through a cemetery, at the back of which is our destination. The temple’s pretty amazing. The whole thing was built in the 60s and is a replica of an 11th-century temple in Japan. This one (and probably the original, for that matter) was built without using any nails, and considering the complexity, that’s pretty remarkable. There’s a giant bell outside that you can ring, and a small gazebo, and many more koi ponds. Inside is a nine-foot tall golden buddha, and just down the path is a small gift shop surrounded by birds, ducks, black geese, more koi and turtles, and a single cat who looks mildly bewildered by all the activity. Charlotte and I wander through some nearby bamboo patches, and then head for the car just as the rain starts. We drive home by using a tunnel to cut under the central spine of the island, rather than going around, and eventually make our way back to our hotel.

After relaxing in our room for a bit, we head down to Rum Fire again for a pre-dinner cocktail. Charlotte gets a mai tai, and I try something with campari and lemon. Both are good, and we hang out for a while listening to the live band play covers of banal modern pop-rock. The bartender, who looks kind of like Iron Chef French – Hiroyuki Sakai – prints up our tab, and we head to dinner at Cha Cha Cha’s, a dive-y joint down the street which serves an odd mix of Caribbean and southwestern cuisine. Also, they serve margaritas, which we soon discover do not come in a standard margarita glass, but are rather just served in a pint glass. Christ. They don’t skimp on the tequila either, and after a fairly delicious dinner of jerk chicken, mahi mahi, rice, beans, and so forth, Charlotte and I head off, sleepy and fuzzy-headed from the margaritas, and rapidly crash for the night.

The next morning, we do a repeat stop at Peet’s for coffee, then head back up to the room, pack up our stuff, check out, move on to our second hotel, and check in. Once settled, we jump in the car and head back to the coast road. We’re going snorkeling! Our plan is to hit one of Oahu’s most famous snorkeling spots, which is located just before one of the scenic overlooks that we took pictures from the day before. The plan goes flawlessly right up to the point where we crest a hill, see our destination, and note the large sign which says “closed on Tuesdays” … turns out this is mentioned in the book, but we totally overlooked it. So we rapidly shift plans, and continue heading along the coast toward something called the “Sea Life Park” which may or may not be an aquarium.

Turns out it may — we pull in, park, and head for the ticket booth, where the attendant tells us that the dolphin show is starting in five minutes. This will end up being the highlight of the visit, as we get to see a bunch of dolphins performing tricks, including the world’s only known “wolphin,” the daughter of a bottle-nose dolphin and a “false killer whale” (a small type of whale that kind of looks like an orca). Apparently this was a legitimate mating and not some horrible genetic experiment come to life, and no one at the aquarium was expecting the wolphin to be viable. Yet there she was, 24 years old and performing many a flip for the crowd to exclaim over. Pretty neat. I took a lot of great high-shutter-speed photos, most of which will be available at my flickr page very shortly.

After the dolphin show ends, Charlotte and I wander the rest of the aquarium. It’s small, kind of dirty, and not particularly inspiring. I think part of the reason for this is because the majority of the place is used as an actual oceanic research center; the aquarium part serves mostly to help pay the bills. We do see some seals, turtles and rays, and a dive in the main reef tank feeding various fish, so that’s pretty cool, but we don’t stick around for too long, as we’re getting hungry and lunch at the Kona Brewing Company beckons. It’s a short drive away, and by far the most difficult part of getting there is figuring out where the hell it’s located within a rat’s-warren of a strip mall. We do eventually find it, though.

For lunch we have delicious salads with seared fish, and a selection of the brewing company’s beers. Charlotte gets a pale ale, and I try a sampler which includes a golden ale, a malty red ale (delicious!), a coffee porter (Charlotte’s fav), and an excellent IPA. Our waitress also lets us try the barley wine. We finish up by going to an ice cream place, where Charlotte gets a chocolate mochi thingy, and I get a double-chocolate-chip cone. Yum!

We head back to the hotel to regroup, relax, and reflect on our next moves. There’s a man-made lagoon across the street which I want to go see, so we decide to grab our swimming stuff and head over that way. We soon learn a valuable lesson: all of Hawaii stops swimming as of 4:30 PM. Seriously, the entire ocean empties out. The lagoon is completely unoccupied, including the place where you can rent paddle boats. Doesn’t matter anyway: a cold wind is coming in, and it’s raining again, which it’s been doing off and on all day. We wander through the Hilton Hawaiian Village instead, which resembles the rest of Waikiki in that it’s mostly dedicated to parting you with your money. There’s an outdoor bar, but we decline to stop as it’s severely crowded and I can’t see any drinks with umbrellas in them. Dammit!

Finally we give up, go back to the hotel, and get dressed for dinner (which basically involves switching shorts for jeans). We then head off to Hiroshi, which is a “Eurasian Fusion” restaurant not far from where we are. They have a tapas menu along with larger plates. After getting lost trying to find the entrance to their parking lot, we finally make it into the restaurant, where we are treated to an extremely tasty dinner. We order hamachi sashimi, broiled squid, Portugese sausage potstickers with kimchi foam (unbelievably good), some kind of fish cooked with baby bok choi and tomatoes, and crab-based, bouiliabase-like soup with shitake mushrooms and cilantro foam. Satisfied, we head off to the hotel. Charlotte is chilly and so she crawls under the covers and promptly passes out (it’s about 9:30 in the evening). I write up most of this entry you’re currently reading, then fall asleep briefly at the keyboard and decide that’s my cue to go to bed as well. Monday and Tuesday have passed. Wednesday will bring another attempt at snorkeling, and we want to get an early start.