Aging Disgracefully

1. Do not stay in Waikiki or at the the Aston Waikiki Sunset.

Let's tackle the latter first. The Aston Waikiki Sunset is certainly no dump, but neither is it a crisply efficient business hotel, and you feel it from almost the outset. I arrived 15 minutes before check-in time and was a bit surprised when they told me that I could not check in until check-in time. Most hotels I've been to are friendly and accomodating in this regard (at least compared with their tone when they later learn what I have done with the room). But, they were within their rights (as they got to define them) to deny me. No question about that. But when I was still waiting an hour after check-in time, I finally got sort of aggressive about it. I explained my position. You could tell that they felt they were confronted with a pretty typical specimen of male Haole (non-Hawaiian resident, especially white) asshole. But their position is really fairly ridiculous: this is Hawaii. People arrive here at the bitter end of a 5-11 hour flight, depending on where one started. And most of the flight options, at least as they were presented to me when I was trying to book for this excursion, arrive in the late morning to early afternoon. It isn't reasonable to ask people to spend their first 3 to 5 hours in Hawaii sitting in the hotel lobby, especially in light of the fact that the alchohol on the flight ran out before we even left the North American landmass. I found that this awkward beginning generally set the tone. At one point I went to the front desk to pick up my laundry (they don't pick up and drop off in the room) and actually had to pressure the girl on duty there to keep looking until she finally found all of my items. She kept protesting that she knew of no one registered to the hotel named Savage Henry, and anyway I was sweating so much she wondered if I had contracted the plague. On a more everyday basis, the elevator situation ranges from tolerable to nightmare. My longest wait for an elevator down was close to 15 minutes. If I had known that I would've walked down the 21 flights. Finally, I am supposed to get free parking at their deck and, while I've never been hassled about that, I certainly have had an impossible time finding a spot again when I have gone out in the evenings: they let the general public visiting Waikiki park in their deck for a fee. The trouble is that they do so with no regard for their commitment to maintain spots for the guests with whom they have some sort of parking arrangement. And regard for commitments means something much to me. Not much. But certainly something. Not a dump by any means compared with some of the places I've stayed, the Aston Waikiki Sunset stills musters only a C+ as US hotels go.

Waikiki itself is beautiful-or at least it clearly once was. It is no wonder they chose this as the spot for the main beach that would draw in the crowds. But therein lies the whole problem: Waikiki is a hiddeously over-developed tourist trap. A few lean years and it would start to distinctively resemble the seedier parts of Myrtle Beach, SC. It is very plastic and affected, and hence unsurprisingly a major draw for Japanese tourists. (Update: As the Good Rabbi noted in a phone call last night, Waikiki basically is the Japanese Myrtle Beach.) In fact, this place has a Japanese flavor well beyond what I have been able to pick up anywhere else on Oahu. But you don't come here for a Japanese flavor: you go to Japan for that. You come to Hawaii for a Hawaiian flavor.

2. So let me recommend some alternatives. First, if you are in the Waikiki area, the beaches at the foot of Diamond Head are far less crowded, and I felt just as beatiful. Second, get on the H1 heading East out of Honolulu. It eventually meanders through Hawaii Kai and becomes a two lane highway before reaching Hanuama Bay, which is just stunning. Even more stunning are the cliffside lookout points just a few miles beyond (you cannot miss them). You have never seen an ocean so blue. At the last of these (I think it is called the Halona Blowhole...the cliffs die out just beyond and there is a beach), you can actually climb down to walk the base of the cliffs as spectacular waves crash in all around you-just ask one of the locals where the trail down is. Third, if I ever come here on vacation with the wife, I am heading not for Waikiki or the Southern Shores, but instead for the North Shore. Let me particularly recommend Hale'Iwa. To find it, locate Turtle Bay on a map, near the Northern tip of Oahu. Then continue down the coast on the west side of the island. You can't miss it. It is this comparatively small, sleepy surfer town with a vaguely beach bohemian feel. It is just as beautiful a setting as Waikiki (in my not so humble opinion) and it feels like Hawaii should feel. In Hale'iwa, you will find a quiet little corner of this stunning island where you can do some swimming, lie out on the deck with some beautiful girl and maybe drink some great wine, chilled just so, and throw a few steaks on the fire as evening approaches.

3. The food has been good, but I've been a little bit surprised that I haven't been amazed, especially in light of the very high end restraunts we have visited. I think the star thus far would have to be a terrine of sashimi, a wasibi and avocado "mayonaise" and crispy noodles that I had at Alan Wong's, a pricey but quite nice place on South King Street in Honolulu, not far from the Ala Moana mall. Alan Wong's also has a truly superior wine list (though I have been nowhere with a wine list as commanding as Fearrington House or Il Palio in Chapel Hill). It was there that I finally got to try a Whitcraft Pinot, which was simply gorgeous.

4. Visit the lookout on the Pale highway where King Kamehameha won his final battle to capture Oahu. It has to be one of the most beautiful vistas in the world. You look out on a serene Hawaiian valley, then past Kailua and onto an immense, and immensely beautiful, tract of the Pacific Ocean. If I had to die anywhere, that place would certainly be in contention for the location of my final exit.

5. There are so many beautiful girls in Hawaii, and this is a land of bikinis. There are many women, white, asian, polynesian,... with perfect cocoa colored skin covering bodies that are...well, just about perfect themselves. Unfortunately, an incredibly large number of them have defiled those beautiful bodies with tatooes that are ugly and stupid. Now, I don't mind the occasional nicely done tribal tatoo on that sexy little stretch of real estate on the lower back. And I really liked many of the traditional Polynesian tattoos that I have seen during my month in Oahu. Unfortunately, however, these were the exceptions. For instance, on the lower backs of girls here I have seen the following:
"Since 1984" in an absurdly flurished cursive. I guess that is supposed to tell me she is 21 years old.
"Precious" in a bizarre gothic-style font.
"Bitch", in the same script. No need to point that out to me with a tattoo. Five minutes into speaking with her it would probably become self-evident. Try someday explaining a tattoo like that to your kid.

Finally, and worst of all, I sat at Waikiki beach and saw this beautiful girl, I suspect she was Korean-American but I am not sure, saunter up near me to settle down for an afternoon of maintaining her glowing hue. She had an hour glass figure, perfect breasts, a flat but pierced belly, ...aaah. However, as she settled down her towel, she turned around, in the process revealing a back that was covered with a tatoo of a hula girl and parrot set against an island tropical backdrop that looked like some awful thing a young US Navy sailor of the "Greatest Generation Ever" vintage might have gotten, along with the clap, during some long and ugly night in some humpy-hump dive in newly liberated Manila!! What the hell was she thinking?!? That sight just set me off on the worst kind of ugly ride.

6. Make sure to study the maps of Honolulu and Waikiki carefully before you arrive. There are three reasons for this. First, many of the streets are named for prominent indigenous Hawaiians, and their names can be a bit tough to handle at first. The more familiar you are with them in advance, the better. (The king who united Hawaii in 1795 was named Kamehameha-not exactly as straightforward to the Western ear as Richard the Lionhearted.) Second, Oahu's streets are generally terribly marked. The signs are small, faded and often obscurely placed. Third, Honolulu has alot of strange driving restrictions. For instance, they basically do not allow left turns off of Kapiolani to get into the Ala Moana mall. The better aquainted you are with the streets the more easily you will be able to adjust to these delightful and unexpected little twists.

7. Hawaii is somewhat suprisingly provincial. Before I visited, I assumed that such a cross-roads of the Pacific would have a real international flair, but it really doesn't feel that way when you get there. It is basically a rather inward-looking, primarily Asian American blue collar place (imagine if the show Roseanne had been populated by Asians). The local press is completely absorbed by local events, and when they do take note of some international event, it is generally only in so much as there is a "Hawaii Connection". In terms of this provinciality, it felt in fact as if I had never left home.

8. Be prepared for one major disappointment (if you a history buff like me, anyway): very little of ancient Polynesian society remains on Oahu. For instance, as you look out from the Pale highway lookout, you can see the remnants of an ancient Hawaiian fish pen along the coast, and a sign tells you that the valley below leading up to Kailua was a major population center for "pre-contact" Oahu. However, on repeated drives criss-crossing the valley, I could find no obvious evidence of ancient Hawaii, and no signs pointed the way to ancient remains. My guidebook offered little guidance in this respect either. A major let down since, while visiting Hawaii, some of us would like to experience some kind of physical connection to the Hawaiians: to see a place and know that they had lived there and left some kind of enduring mark. I know that some of you might be wondering what I am expecting to see: after all, didn't the ancient Hawaiians live more or less in grass huts. Well, in many cases yes. But they also had elaborate rock ritual sanctuaries, built large irrigation systems using lava stones, etc. Where are the remains of this stuff?