CerebralDebris

Going to try a new format for the trip blog with this update … individual section headers. The reason I’m doing this is because before I write each of these, I write myself a little outline to remind myself how the day went, and some of the notes are kind of amusing in themselves, and I want to include them here. So here we go with Thursday’s diary!

Up Late

Charlotte wakes up at something like four in the morning, but since it’s our honeymoon, she decides it would be criminal to wake my lazy ass up, and lets me sleep until about ten. For those keeping track, that’s about eleven hours of sleep, which in some countries legally qualifies you as dead. We decide that since we’re taking a day trip up to Oahu’s North Shore – surf country – we’ll get on the road ASAP and worry about breakfast on the way. Of course, ASAP includes me taking a shower and deciding I should shave my werewolf-like, five-day “beard” (quotes definitely applicable). Unfortunately, I’ve neglected to bring any shaving cream, so I decide to use hand moisturizer instead. The result? Only the BEST GODDAMN SHAVE of my LIFE! Seriously: everybody, start shaving with moisturizer right now. Sure, it’s prohibitively expensive and profoundly wasteful, but you can mow through serious growth at warp speed and not cut yourself at all.

Iced … Coffee?

Successfully shaven AND moisturized, we hit the road. We’re going to go to H1 again – this time heading westward, and connect up with 99 North, which we basically stay on right up until it becomes a choice of turning, or driving directly into the ocean. The drive will end up taking us about an hour, if you don’t count our various escapades. What escapades, you ask? Well, first we stop at “Pearl City Coffee Shop” which is in a strip mall in (surprise!) Pearl City … home of Pearl Harbor, the military base that the Japanese blew up, thus forcing the USA to enter World War II. Unfortunately, by “Coffee Shop,” the owners meant “Korean Restaurant” … we realize this when we get closer and see “home of the world famous ox-tail soup” printed under the sign, which is not a dish traditionally associated with coffee shops.

Disheartened by the lack of pastry and anything better than gas station coffee, we return to our car and continue down the road. What do we see next? Zippy’s! You might remember Zippy’s from the time when it didn’t poison us on our trip to the Japanese temple a few days ago. Zippy’s also, at some point in its history, seems to have absorbed a chain called “Napoleon’s Bakery” which serves donuts, pastries, and (we assume), coffee. We’re correct in our assessment about coffee, but it’s warm out, and I therefore would prefer iced coffee. I ask if they serve it, which leads to this exchange with our attendant, an elderly Asian woman with a shaky grasp of English:

“Iced … coffee?”

“Yes, iced coffee. Do you … do you have any?”

“We have hot coffee.”

“Okay.”

“We can put … ice? In your coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

This will eventually result in me getting approximately 68 ounces of boiling coffee and about four ice cubes with which to cool it down. So that doesn’t work, and Charlotte and I end up sitting i a hot car, wolfing down some kind of flaky pastry thing (hers has chocolate, mine blueberry) and washing it down with refreshing, magma-like coffee. Oh well. We return to route 99, and the rest of our trip is uneventful, if at times mildly confusing, since route 99 switches streets at random throughout the trip, sometimes involving hard turns onto completely new roads. Eventually, we arrive at the north shore, in the village of Haleiwa

Checking out the Town

Haleiwa is not Waikiki. There are no big hotels, no condos, no Louis Vuitton or Chanel shops. It basically started out as a small village, and for decades surfers have flocked there for the waves and stayed there to open up small restaurants, shops, and the like. The area is just beginning to really be developed, and there are some fairly aggressive anti-development campaigns happening. “Keep the country COUNTRY” is a common bumper sticker, and the general sentiment about town seems to be that no condos is good condos, so to speak. We cruise down the main drag noting places we want to stop later. There’s a famous shaved ice store, and I spy a little burger joint that seems promising. We continue on through, and reach the coast.

Surf’s Up d00d!

The surf here is amazing, and apparently we didn’t even catch it at a particularly great time of day. Nonetheless, cars are parked all the way down the road near the public beach, and there are plenty of surfers way out in the bay, catching waves that look (to my untrained eye) to be somewhere between four and six feet tall. That may not seem like much, but that shit will bowl you over and either crush you against rocks or drown you, if you’re not careful. It’s a LOT of water, moving at a high speed. They’ve closed down the beach to swimming, because of this, but it’s surfer heaven. Charlotte and I hang out on the beach, walking through the sand and taking in the sites. We also take a bunch of pictures, although unfortunately we’re way too far away to catch any action shots. Eventually we decide to move on – there’s more shore to explore, after all.

Botanical Gardener? I barely know ‘er …

We drive up the coast for a bit, coming over a hill to yet another majestic view — Hawaii’s got so many of these that you start to take them for granted after a while, which is sort of a shame. Fortunately, driving around through Honolulu’s industrial areas helps to remind you that jaw-dropping ocean vistas are, you know … pretty. So we’re looking at that, and then we look over to the right and we see a big stream with lots of flowering trees surrounding it, and a sign for botanical gardens. Without thinking about it much, I swing in to the driveway and we proceed inward. At first we figure we’ll just take a quick glance and then drive back out, but the gardens seem interesting enough that we park and pay the entrance fee. Soon we’re wandering through some pretty amazing foliage, all of it marked with ID tags and helpful placards. “You know, the only problem with this place is a serious lack of monkey,” I say to Charlotte, and she agrees. We eventually make our way to the end of the path, where there’s a waterfall that can be anything from a trickle to a torrent, based on the weather. We get something closer to the latter. You can see pics at my Flickr page! Eventually, all gardened out, we head back to the car, and return to town.

Ahi and Crab Burgers with Shaved Ice

We stop at the burger joint I mentioned earlier: the Grass Skirt Grill. It’s a tiny restaurant about eight feet wide by twenty five feet deep (not including the kitchen). They serve fish, burgers and fries. Also crab cakes. I get an ahi tuna burger and Charlotte gets a crab cake burger. We decide to split an order of garlic fries, which is a good thing because as it turns out, garlic fries are just about the tastiest thing man ever invented. Basically you make up a sauce of butter, white wine, and garlic, and then you dump it all over fresh french fries. It is good eating. Also, I think I’m going to gain a small child’s worth of weight on this honeymoon … gah! Anyway, we have no trouble finishing off our burgers and fries, and after thanking the friendly counterman, who I believe is the owner, we head off down the road for some shaved ice. Basically what this is, is a gigantic snow cone (only finer grained). I get mine with pina colada on one half, orange on the other half, and a scoop of vanilla ice cream just because I haven’t already consumed enough calories today. Charlotte gets some kind of crazy 3-flavor specialty blend, because she’s fancy like that. We pay 25 cents extra apiece to get special plastic holders, which turns out to be an awesome way to waste 25 cents, because they’re completely useless AND they make you look retarded. Charlotte throws hers away at the first available trash can. I soldier on with mine, assuming it will at some point come in handy. It doesn’t. Back at the car, we finish off our shaved ice, and begin the journey back to the hotel.

Back to the Hotel: Traffic

Charlotte and I have this awesome habit of trying to get back to Waikiki right in the middle of rush hour, every single day. This produces two problems, the first obvious: traffic. We get most of the way back to the hotel just fine, but then the H1 turns into stop-and-go, bumper-to-bumper traffic, which is truly not the way I want to spend my honeymoon, so we get off the highway in order to navigate surface streets. This leads to the second problem, which we’ve encountered previously: running parallel to the beach but about a mile inland is a main artery that serves basically all of Waikiki called Kapiolani Blvd. The problem is that from 3 PM to 5:30 PM, for traffic purposes, you CANNOT TURN LEFT at any point from its beginning to end. That means basically you have a choice between going all the way to the end, far overshooting your destination, and pulling a U-turn … or making a bunch of right turns in order to hopefully end up at a road which bisects Kapiolani and angles inward toward Waikiki, without becoming a dead end (this is harder than it sounds). We go for the latter approach, and eventually wind our way successfully to the hotel.

Bali on the Sea

After we relax for a bit and get changed, we decide to go across the street to the “Hilton Village” for dinner. The Hilton Village is basically a collection of hotel towers with a whole crapload of retail strung between them. It’s a lot like visiting an outdoor mall where everyone is wearing Hawaiian shirts and is either six, or sixty-five. We make our way to one of their restaurants that sounds interesting: Bali on the Sea. As it turns out, it’s essentially just an upscale Ameri-Euro cuisine hybrid, except it has some Indonesian-looking statues in it. Still, the meal is very tasty — we go for salad-based appetizers AND entrees because it’s surprisingly hard to get greens in this state, and we’re both craving them. The waiter makes fun of us for eating like birds, but in a pleasant way that doesn’t scream “this stuff is cheap and affecting my tip!” too badly. We decline dessert, but are unprepared for what comes next …

A Bird Pooped on My Chocolate Vagina!

Apparently Bali on the Sea has a tradition of giving chocolate truffles to their guests along with the check. They don’t bring these out on just any plate, though. No, they bring them out on top of a chocolate replica of Diamondhead Crater which looks startlingly like a chocolate vulva, and which is sitting on top of (I’m not making this up) a dish full of water and dry ice, pouring steam everywhere. I’ve never been presented with a chocolate vagina before, but surely this is the most elaborate such presentation on earth. We pay the check, eat our truffles, and get the vagina boxed up for further consumption (trying real hard to keep this clean, folks). As we’re walking home, a bird poops all over one corner of the box, causing me to go “Dude, a bird just shit all over the chocolate vagina!” at a volume louder than was probably necessary. We stop at a nearby coffee shop and obtain napkins with which to clean off the box. Fortunately, no poop made it inside, so we carry it home, careful to avoid that one corner. We soon hit the hay, ready for our final full day in Oahu, which will be full of museums, Vietnamese food, and our “anniversary of getting engaged” dinner.