Hawaii

I got back last night from a week in Hawaii (and a night in the airport). I went with Rez, and we stayed on Oahu, for a few days in Honolulu on the south coast and a few days on the north coast. All in hostels, taking public transit (hitchhiking one day) and eating beautifully unhealthily. Hawaii itself, at least the part we stayed, was Disneyland for the tropics--really just a more crowded Costa Rica without the lush plant and animal life. What was amazing was budget traveling with a friend, and all the people we met along the way. This was not so much "my trip to Hawaii" as "our social adventure around the world."

So, the sparknotes:

I arrived around sunset on the first night to see a double-rainbow above the mountains from the plane. I met up with Rez in the airport, and we took the bus to our first hostel in Waikiki (about 45 minutes away from the airport). On the bus we met Frank, an asian guy from New York with an incredible Bronx accent who, it turns out, had actually been behind me on the flight and who was going to the same hostel. After checking in, the three of us wandered the streets for a while, eating Burger King and ColdStone's before heading in for the night.

The next morning Frank left to meet his girlfriend at the airport (the last we saw of him), and Rez and I went on a hike to a nearby mountain which was organized by (and had about 7 people from) the hostel. There was a Frenchman, an Englishwoman, and a Scottish woman on the hike who I talked to a lot, and I got my first taste of how Europeans travel: in bulk. All of them were away from home for at LEAST two months, traveling around Asia, Australia and the US in one single, long trip. The French guy was working at the hostel for this month, getting managerial training and free room and board in exchange for his services. The English woman enthusiastically expounded on the differences between England and the US; the two bits I remember now are that she was having to get used to called "rubbish" "trash" (a term reserved for people exclisively in the UK--how sweet!), and that we was shocked and appalled that she had purchased a salad and they hadn't given her a knife to cut it with.

Getting back from the hike we met two Australian guys who were sharing our room: Glen (who organized concerts), and his quiet buddy Daniel (a surfer taking a break from school, who had never been outside of Australia before). We went to lunch at Taco Bell with them (Glen made it a point to come every time he was in the US, he said), and went swimming. Daniel, though the quieter of the two, was hilarious--his comment on the one dollar fee for the hike, "that's steep," was indicative of wonderfully terrible sense of humor. He was amazed by peanut butter and took every opportunity to eat it (especially with sweets) that he could get. He bought a belt with a gun on it, and was very proud of getting his gun in America.

That night was interesting. Rez's mom knew a guy from her villiage in Bangladesh who she knew from work but had never actually met, and we went and had dinner with him. He had a wife, three kids, and a nephew over, and I was the only one who didn't speak Bengali--which was an experience. Fortunately Rez scattered enough English into his Bengali so that I could understand most of what was going on, and the food was really good. After dinner, the guy gave us essentially a lecture on his view of life and what we should do with it. "Make the right choices," "The future is yours," "Money is important," and "Let me give you example" were favorite phrases of his. He drove us back to the hostel for the night.

The next day we visited the Pearl Harbor Memorial, which was somewhat of a bust in that it took a long time to get to and we had to wait a while to get in, but once inside had some interesting stuff. We got back in the evening and spent the night on-and-off with Glen and Daniel and some Australian girls from our room (it seemed like every fifth person was Australian--every other person was Japanese, but none of them were in the hostel). We went out for dinner (Beef! Chicken! Mahi Mahi! Spam! Delicious.), and went to a bar/restaurant where the Aussies drank and Rez and I were ridiculed by other tourists for our pathetic attempt to play pool. We wandered around, watching street performers as, early at night, the streets reached New York levels of congestion. We went back to the hostel, wandered the beach, went to get pastries, and finally fell asleep talking in hammocks at the hostel before it got cold and we moved inside to real beds.

The next day we took a free shuttle up to the north shore, where there was another hostel. Unlike crowded, touristy Honolulu, the north shore was a relaxed place filled with a lot of surfers who were frustrated at the severe lack of waves. After meeting Sarah, an English law student who would be one roommate, we swam, took a long and futile walk to try to get to a town, and went back to the hostel for a barbeque. As that died down, Rez, Sarah, and I went to a supermarket nearby to get orange juice (Rez and I both had the odd craving) and got caught in the pouring rain before reaching the freezing, air-conditioned store. Drinking orange juice, we went to the beach to look at the stars, which were pretty clear up there. I guess there was a meteor shower, because there were shooting stars every five minutes.

The next day Rez's mom called and said she wanted him to catch a flight back home, so I went off by myself to town (getting a ride from some people at the hostel). After eating lunch and seeing various galleries, surf museums and the "surfboard graveyard," where old, broken surfboard were carved and painted and made into art, I hitchhiked back to the hostel with three old computer geeks from Alabama. I went swimming for a while then (Rez can't swim and had been afraid of the water, so I hadn't gotten out as much as I would have liked to).

On on the rocks looking at tide pools, I ran into a military unit off-duty, a bunch of guys who had just gotten out of basic training. Most of the hostel people were in their 20's, so these guys were actually nearer my age than most of the people I'd been interacting with, and I hung out with them for the afternoon. They were intensely stereotypical. There was 'The Mexican," "The Funny Black Guy," "The Loner," "The quiet, nice, nature-loving soldier," and "The Jerk, with wife and kid at home." The contrast between them and the two Norgwegian girls (waitresses on their month-long Euro-vacation) who had just come into the hostel and who I spent the rest of the evening with was amazing. Only on this trip...

The next day I spent getting back to Honolulu and the airport, taking my leisurely time and finishing Milan Condera's "The Joke" (the writing is dense and Russian, but the story ties up beautifully). At the airport I met up with Rez--who still hadn't gotten out and, as I am writing this, still has not--and missed the 10:15 flight. We spent the night in the airport, getting more and more rediculous as time went on.

By the middle of Monday when I had finally gotten on a flight, I had smuggled banannas into the airport (we were going to just eat them there instead of overpriced airport food, but "no produce!"), and got onto my flight wearing a Burger King crown.

This proved to be an interesting contrast. The flight was full, so I got a seat usually reserved for flight attendants (it went all the way back--nice!) next to an army guy going back for 5 more months in Iraq. It was intensely surreal, after a night of almost no sleep, to sit in a Burger King crown next to a guy who got shot at every day, who had watched two of his friends get blown up, and who for two weeks had seen his baby for the first time in 10 months.

And I arrived home. Keep your fingers crossed for Rez!