Wanderung 33

By Boat to Oz

October - November 2017


 

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Wednesday October 11: Bus Around Oahu

To make lemonade from our lemon, we spent our extra day in Honolulu riding The Bus around the island. The first section of that was taking the Number 8 bus to Ala Moana shopping center, the perimeter of which serves as probably the world`s largest outdoor central bus station. To circle Oahu, we transferred to the 55 bus, which cut northward through Honolulu and then the Pali Highway past Queen Emma`s Summer Palace (not having Winter, really, in Hawaii, Queen Emma apparently never built a Winter Palace!), and then over to the northeastern coastline of Oahu.

Turning northwest, we followed the Kamehameha Highway along the coast past a string of coastal parks with lovely little beaches on the ocean side. Usually, we could see the line of surf where the waves were breaking on the outer edge of the coastal reef that protects the shoreline. A few folks were swimming--a school holiday apparently, and we saw one guy out on a paddle board but no surfers, probably because the waters were rather calm. Some of the coastal features, like the "Chinaman`s Hat" rock formation, were interesting and even cute.

But on the other side of the highway, the Koolau Mountains gave a spectacular backdrop of ruggedly-eroded mountainsides covered with thick, green, almost jungle-like vegetation. The clouds around the mountains and the scattered rays of sunshine breaking through the clouds and transforming sections of the mountainsides into a brilliant emerald green (almost like Ireland), gave us an ever-shifting show of unique, gorgeous scenery.

We passed by the Polynesian Cultural Center run by the Mormons, and the nearby Laie Mormon Temple, set back rather nicely on a broad avenue from the main highway. Just after the Kuhuku Sugar Mill we saw a small wind farm with about 9 windmills churning away and generating electricity. As Oahu lies in the Trade Wind belt, I was interested in how much wind power had been developed, and on our entire circuit we saw one other wind farm of about 21 windmills in the flat valley between the Koolau Mountains and the range on the western side of Oahu, the Waianae Mountains. We also saw a small percentage of buildings with solar cells or solar hot water heaters installed on their roofs, but nowhere near as extensive a coverage as we have seen, for example, in Germany.

The highlight of our day, however, was a walk up the Waimea Valley, a valley that had been owned by a High Priest during the Hawaiian Royal period, but was now dedicated to a truly extensive botanical garden. I had not realized that Hawaii was a hotbed for the hybridization of the hibiscus flowering plant from the mid 1800s to the current day! A lot of plants were in bloom, and although most were grouped by type (e.g. Bromeliads) or origin (Pacific islands) and many were labeled, we still didn't recognize most of them. One in particular was a large bush or small tree with what looked like "Bird of Paradise " flowers on it, but the flower blooms never alone but rather were in a connected CHAIN of "Birds of Paradise", and I just had never seen anything like it before.


 

The distance to the falls from the entrance is under a mile, but there was a lot of Hawaiian cultural information along the way. Some of that info was on the information placards alongside the trails, but at certain spots they had cultural interpreters with whom we could actively discuss and even try out ancient Hawaiian games and sports, which I found to be a lot of fun. I liked the weird cross between the Chinese game of "GO" and checkers that used black and white pebbles and a grid of holes in a rock ranging from 6x6 to 10x10 or even larger.

But my all-time favorite was a game based on "chicken-bowling". The game was to skid a truncheon-shaped stick along the ground as far and accurately as possible. However, that skill was directly used to hunt chickens by skidding the truncheon into the feet of a chicken, thereby knocking it over, and then running up to grab it before it could recover, right itself, and run off into the underbrush. That surely did sound like fun (I'm no fan of chickens) and I really would have liked to try hunting chickens like that because at least you would not have to dig out bird shot like you would if you used a shotgun, for example.

At the upstream end of the park's main trail is a lovely little pool at the base of Waimea Falls. On the day we visited, we were allowed to swim in that pool, but only if we used a life vest provided for free by the park folks. We had not even thought about swimming, however, and thus did not have our swimsuits, so we limited ourselves to paddling around a very short time in the shallows at the edge of the pool. It was a short time not because the water was cold, but because the rocky shoreline and bottom of the pool just dug at our tender feet unmercifully. I, for one, was glad to limp back out of the pool and put on my shoes and socks! But still, we did it.

Walking back to the entrance we walked through a recreated Hawaiian village and enjoyed that all the buildings were nicely labeled.

On the way back to the entrance of the park we encountered a few strange, unknwon-to-us birds. It reminded us that we actually where in Hawaii.


 

Back out on the coastal highway, we caught the Number 55 bus back to a Number 52 bus that took us back to the Ala Moana shopping center where we then shifted to the Number 8 bus to get back to our hotel. Later that afternoon we walked around Honolulu a little to try to find an old favorite of ours, the International Market, a group of craft and food stalls with local crafts and various kinds of Eastern cuisine. But we could not find it, instead there was a new upscale mall called the "International Market Place" with stores like Saks Fifth Avenue! Oh well, all good things seem to pass. Sigh.

Neither of us was hungry, so we just found some ready-made sandwiches at the ABC store across from our hotel and had those for supper, after which we put up our aching feet for the rest of the evening. But what a great day we had to kick off our trip! Lemonade!



Copyright 2018 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt


 

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