Wanderung 33

To complete Plan B, we had to get ourselves and our luggage over to the Explorer of the Seas, which had finally docked at Pier 2 in Honolulu. The RCL website fortunately showed the exact current location of the ship, as there was some ambiguity about which pier it would use. Having it directly located on the image of the Honolulu waterfront helped us plan our approach exactly, and we decided to get another all-day pass on The Bus to get over to the pier, and hopefully have some time to do another bus excursion afterwards. Needless to say, things did not go exactly as planned! But first we had breakfast at "Eggs n' Things" a very popular breakfast place, so we had to wait for a table. It was worth it, however, since the omelets were big and delicious.

Our first diversion came when The Bus driver refused to let us bring our suitcases on board, which surprised me a bit as on a previous trip to Honolulu the bus driver had allowed us to take small wheeled luggage along, and backpacks, strollers, and motorized wheelchairs and such all were allowed. We backtracked to the major street in front of our hotel and just hailed a cab there, which was fast and convenient but set us back by $20 or so.

We arrived at the Explorer of the Seas right around 10 a.m., and slowly worked our way through the strict port security screening, then through the even stricter Royal Caribbean "wine-bottle" screening. We each had 1 bottle of wine in our carry-on luggage, and they went ballistic over that. Finally they called up to the ship's officers to check that we were truly allowed 1 bottle of wine apiece in our carry-ons. To top it all off, they X-rayed our suitcases and found two pseudo-wine bottles with gadgets inside them which we were bringing along as gifts for our Aussie friends! J`accuse!! The security staff were licking their chops at the thought of confiscating our contraband. We vainly tried to explain that those were fake wine bottles with implements inside, but security finally made me take one out of our luggage, unwrap it, and then take it apart to show the little corkscrews inside and prove it wasn't a real wine bottle! 'Twas truly "Much Ado About Nothing". Sigh.

Escaping with our now-unwrapped fake wine bottle, we were allowed to board the ship at last, have our ship-ID pictures taken, receive our ship identity cards, get our personalized life jacket briefing, and at long last go to our stateroom to unpack. Phew!

By then it was almost Noon, so we hied ourselves up to the buffet for lunch. We were surprisingly tired after lunch, possibly some form of nervous exhaustion, and gave up our plans of taking The Bus for a tour of some new part of Oahu.

Instead, we just walked down the pier to the street and turned left to get to the Aloha Tower shopping area. We had to cross over a bridge from where we could look into the harbor water. We were surprised that there still were a lot of pretty fish swimming around. My favorite was the "Humuhumunukunukuapua'a" which is a mouthful in any language, and there is a special song taught to Hawaiian children so that they can pronounce it correctly. But I suspect the ancient Hawaiian fishermen simply looked at it after they caught one and said, "Dinner!"

But when we got to the Aloha Tower, we found that things had changed in the last 20 years, and although the Aloha Tower center was still there, almost ALL the boutique shops we had seen last time were gone and the storefronts vacant. The entire upper level of the 2-story complex appeared to be dedicated to residences for college students, and some of the lower level stores had been converted to classrooms, bookstores, and possibly classrooms. The other stores remaining on the lower level were several bars and a micro-brewery, which fit with the college students perfectly, I imagine.

We were pleasantly surprised, however, that the big Mexican square-rigged sailing ship moored at the end of the pier was, in fact, open for touring by the public. We went on board for a quick look around, and we're very impressed by the excellent condition of the ship. That was partly explained by the free manual labor available from the sailing cadets, as this ship was used for training by the Mexican Navy. They were just returning from an around-the-world training trip, which must have been an epic adventure for the cadets.

Despite taking time out to drink ice water and cold beer, we were quickly tiring in the heat and retraced our steps to Pier 2 to chill out (literally) in our stateroom until it was time for supper.

Supper was quite fun as we were seated with a rather jovial set of two other couples. So we chatted over our meal courses, and then we split off to see the hula dancing folklore performance from 8:30-9:30. It was a performance by a hula dancing school, so we saw dances from a set of 9 young dancers (7-12 years old?) and a set of 5 older teenager hula dancers. They performed the hula very well and were extremely synchronized in their graceful movements, so it was a pleasure to watch.

But after that we were totally beat and retired to our stateroom to collapse for the night after a last look over to the Mexican sailing ship that was all lit up.