Hawaii State of Mind
Oahu is Hawaii’s “gathering place” for good reasons which also make it the ideal four-night vacation destination for families who get bored spending an entire vacation inside a resort.
Having attended high school in Honolulu and lived in Waikiki, I have feelings for Honolulu and Oahu. Over the years I’ve returned a half dozen times and have visited some of the outer islands. But when I spend the time and money to visit Hawaii, my first choice is always Oahu — not Oahu the way most visitors experience it, but Oahu as experienced by a kamaaina — that’s Hawaiian for old-timer.
Oahu offers a richer plate of experiences than any of the outer islands, partly because it houses a city of nearly a million, including the lively Waikiki district, partly because it has a unique combination of street life, geographical features and climate the other islands can’t match. I know some people like to “get away from tourists” and end up spending their whole vacation holed up in Maui or Kauai. But take my word for it, Oahu is where the action is.
When I contemplate a Hawaii trip a long list of activities come to mind — gorging at Zippy’s, hiking through a rain forest to deep pools fed by a waterfall, enjoying the lonesome crystal waters and spectacular vistas of the windward coast, soaking up the atmosphere at old Haleiwa, body surfing on the North Shore, snorkeling at Hanauma Bay, seeing the Society of Seven at the Outrigger, joining the human river coursing through Kalakaua and Kuhio, exploring the colorful Asian eateries popping up all over Waikiki, dining at the hip new restaurants reinvigorating the old Chinatown section of downtown Honolulu, hiking out to the beautifully desolate beach at Kaena Point, and cruising around the island and through its rugged lush mountains.
The only way to work in the activities on that list is to rent a car, preferably an SUV, book a Waikiki hotel and a flight that gets into Honolulu by the early afternoon of Day 1 and flies out late evening of Day 5. That way you can fit five full day’s worth of activities into a four-night stay. This kind of a custom driving stay to Oahu is costlier than a tour package, but not too much more if you plan in advance and shop around for deals on air fare, car rental and hotel.
We took our latest Hawaii trip during spring break in mid-March. By booking early, we got a great deal on Hawaiian Airlines which flies the Airbus A330-200s with spacious, accessible 2-4-2 seating in economy class. Our fare limited us to a single carry-on suitcase each, plus a “personal item”, meaning a purse or a backpack. A $25 additional charge would have applied for each checked suitcase but — being practical travelers who didn’t expect a dinner invitation from the governor while in town — we had no trouble fitting the minimal wardrobe needed for a five-day Hawaii stay into a small carry-on suitcase.
Board your flight wearing running shoes (which you will need for hiking as well as to keep your feet warm during the flight, especially the one back) and carry a pair of comfy but durable sandals in your suitcase. Skip dress shoes. Wear a light windbreaker for those all-too-common showers or squalls, as well as to help you get some sleep on the redeye back. Pack six tee shirts, one for each additional day plus two more to change into. You will only need two pairs of socks. Wear a pair of long pants on the flight and carry two pairs of shorts plus, of course, your swim trunks. A pair of nice sweat pants and a long-sleeve shirt for sleepwear also come in handy. Don’t worry about gear for snorkeling or other activities. Quality equipment can be easily rented at very competitive rates.
The nice thing about Hawaiian’s A330-200s are the roomy overhead storage compartments that dispense with the need to scramble for storage space. Unlike many planes, the overhead bins can store three carry-on suitcases vertically above each pair of center-row seats. That third slot comes in handy because the overhead bins above the pair of window-row seats are shallow and can only hold one small suitcase sideways plus a backpack. You can also put a backpack or a small overnight bag under the seat in front of you.
Our Hawaiian flight left the gate at LAX at 10:35 a.m. on Saturday and arrived in Honolulu at around 1:10 p.m. local time (3 hours earlier than PDT) after a 5 1/2-hour flight. Getting there takes about 55 minutes longer than flying back because of the jet stream at the cruising altitude of around 40,000 feet. The resulting headwind varies by latitude. Flying in the westerly direction to Honolulu the headwind blows at around 70 mph at 32-degree N. latitude (Los Angeles) and weakens to 9 mph at 21-degree N. latitude (Honolulu).
The sense of having arrived in Hawaii hits you profoundly the moment you walk out into the open-air walkway for the long trek to the main terminal for the shuttle to the car rental facility. The temperature, humidity and constant cooling breeze in Oahu combine to make you feel as though Mother Nature is caressing you. If not for our compunctions about propriety, natives and visitors alike would happily go naked.
After about a two-minute wait on the center island in front of the terminal, the Dollar shuttle bus arrived for a four-minute ride to its bustling lot and outdoor rental counter. We had booked a Ford Escape or equivalent at the special rate of $35 per day but were told by the harried counter lady that no more Escapes were available. She suggested a few alternatives that sounded stodgier. They didn’t appeal to me, I told her. After some minutes of checking with staffers processing returns, she said a Jeep Wrangler was being washed. Fifteen minutes later we were delighted to drive away in a Wrangler Sport Edition with oversize wheels and a soft top that normally goes for $65 per day. Its rugged look and feel and arrogantly high seating instantly transformed us into adventurers in paradise.
For Angelenos used to endless gray freeway drives, Oahu’s scale is delightfully reduced. The entire island would fit inside Los Angeles County with room to spare. The drive from Honolulu International to Waikiki is only about five miles. After barely two miles on the H1 freeway we exited on Nimitz Highway, the main coastal surface road that takes you efficiently along the southern edge of Honolulu into Waikiki.
But just two miles from the freeway exit, on the southeastern edge of downtown Honolulu, we made a left into the Zippy’s at 666 Nimitz Highway. Zippy’s is the Islands’ ubiquitous fast-food/family restaurant chain. It offers Asian dishes like teriyaki, saimin, Korean barbecue, katsu and mahi mahi along with American staples like chili, hamburgers, pastrami and spaghetti. Whatever plate you order comes with a scoop of rice and a scoop of macaroni salad.
The chain has added a bakery annex called Napoleon’s which offers some Asian-flavored pastries (red bean buns, for example) as well as typical American-style donuts, buns and tarts. When I was going to Honolulu’s McKinley High, the Zippy’s on King Street used to be a favorite after-school snack stop. Over the years I’ve stopped eating most of the dishes I loved as a teen, but the restaurant exerts a powerful sentimental pull, making at least one Zippy’s stop mandatory per Hawaii trip.
From Zippy’s it’s less than two miles to the Hyatt Regency on Kalakaua Avenue, Waikiki’s busy main strip. We made a halfhearted attempt at locating cheap parking and decided it was worth paying the $35 per night for valet service. The hotel comprises a pair of 40-story circular twin towers joined at the bottom two levels by an open-air shopping and dining arcade, the reception lobby with a big waterfall and a beautiful pool area that overlooks the center of Waikiki Beach. Being just a half block east of the International Market Place and directly across the street from the Beach, the hotel is right at the center of the liveliest part of Waikiki.
We could have gotten a lower rate by booking another four-star hotel through a discounter like Hotwire, Priceline or Hotels.com but had decided that booking directly through the Hyatt site using my Gold Passport would give us benefits that more than justify the $219 a night rate — plus a $25-per-night resort fee which includes reliable wi-fi access and use of various resort amenities like the the pool and use of chairs and towels on a choice plot of beach across the street for which everyone is charged, regardless of whether you go through a discounter.
For starters, as we expected, the check-in clerk upgraded us to a Regency Club floor, then performed a quick welcoming ceremony. I was presented with a kukui nut lei and the women were draped with orchid leis. It was the kind of touristy touch that was well appreciated by our teen daughter.
That upgrade also got us a 37th-floor room with a spectacular view of the ocean and of Waikiki. Most importantly, it earned us access to the Regency Club, an exclusive lounge on the third floor that would provide us each morning with exactly the variety of tasty, healthy breakfast foods we like to load up on before an active day. What’s more, the Club provides a wide assortments of evening snacks that are easily enough to serve as a deluxe dinner of small plates, including freshly-baked desserts. It also provided one of the big indulgences of our days at the Hyatt — all-day access to a speedy, state-of-the-art espresso machine that whipped up first-rate lattes, cappuccinos and an assortment of other coffee drinks. The convenience, luxury and savings on meals that our Regency Club access provided would more than make up for the small premium we paid by booking directly with the Hyatt. But more about the Regency Club lounge later.
We had originally planned to spend the afternoon exploring Waikiki. But the sun was at precisely the angle to make the waters below too transparently turquoise for our teen to resist. We changed into swimsuits and sandals and went down to the street level. They were out of towels and beach chairs at the counter at the main entrance, so we took the escalators back up to the pool on the second level and found an abundance of them there.
Waikiki Beach — a stretch of white sand that stretches a half mile or so — was colorful and lively with swimmers, surfers and sunbathers, giving credibility to its claim to be the world’s most popular beach. We positioned our chairs and towels on a slightly raised, level rectangle of sand known as Hyatt Beach.
About a thousand feet offshore, off to our left, we could see the dredging barge of the The Waikiki Beach replenishment project which had begun on January 24, 2012. The surf eats away at the sand of Waikiki Beach at the rate of about a foot or two a year. During the 1920s and 1930s the state conservation department imported many barge-loads of replacement sand from Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County. More recently the state and local hotel operators hit on the solution of setting up a dredging barge a quarter mile offshore to suck up sand washed offshore and dump it onto a pile on Kapiolani Beach Park on the eastern end of Waikiki Beach. From there bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment move the sand to various points. A short section of Waikiki Beach was closed every morning until noon from mid-March through the end of April. Most stretches remained open and swimmers had free access all parts of the water. The $2.5 million project plans to restore 37 feet of sand, putting the beach back to its 1987 width.
On a Saturday afternoon during spring tourist season Waikiki Beach is a bit too lively with surfers, kayakers and tourist catamarans to be an ideal swimming beach. Still, the water was a cool but pleasant 76 degrees. We enjoyed a half-hour swim before heading back up to shower and change for our evening in Waikiki.
We were eager to take in the sights and sounds of Waikiki. Kalakaua Avenue is the showcase strip along which aloha-mellowed tourists from all over the world stroll, pretty much around the clock. Since my two years there as a teen, the biggest change isn’t in the structures lining boulevard but the composition of the tourists. Back then the vast majority were Whites, mostly from the mainland, some from Europe. The only Asian tourists were Japanese. They were unmistakeable because they always moved in tight clusters led by tour guides holding up small flags bearing the logos of their tour companies. They acted like anthropology students taking a potentially hazardous trek through some newly discovered land, conscientiously recording the native fauna.
Today the racial mix on Kalakaua is about 55/45 Asian to white. Japanese no longer travel in groups and make up somewhat less than half the Asian tourists. Koreans are surprisingly numerous now, making up about a quarter of the Asians. Chinese from the mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong combine to make up a similar number. A few South Asians and assorted groups of Southeast Asians were also visible. The Whites are about as likely to be Europeans and Australians as US mainlanders. It being the start of spring break, we saw groups of American college kids, mostly girls. Among the tourists were a few Oahu residents — local merchants, hotel workers, street performers.
The truly international but distinctly Asian-flavored mix gives Kalakaua Avenue an appeal not matched by even the more cosmopolitan Asian cities like Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo or Seoul. The closest thing to Kalakaua’s lively multi-cultural mix may be the Las Vegas Strip, Vancouver’s Robson Street or possibly Fifth Avenue in the summer. But none of those streets offer the luxuriant tropical ease of Kalakaua’s broad palm-lined sidewalks and abundance of open-air architecture only possible in a place with year-round paradisal weather. For sheer upscale ambience Kalakaua beats out Rodeo Drive or Rue d’Antibes in Cannes. It fairly drips with the gracious touches made possible by the many billions of dollars poured into the deluxe hotels and glitzy boutiques lining Kalakaua with an eye toward wooing the world’s most reliable flow of tourists.
The Waikiki Strip isn’t all deluxe hotels and pricey shops. Even along toney Kalakaua you can find plenty of tourist schmaltz. The timeless International Marketplace (IMP) just across from the Outrigger Hotel is an agglomeration of stores and stalls selling souvenirs, trinkets, gewgaws, knickknacks and cheap meals of every variety from Cantonese to Hawaiian to Indian to Korean. IMP runs a long half a block along the north side of Kalakaua through to the decidedly less upscale but perhaps even more atmospheric Kuhio Avenue which runs parallel to Kalakaua along most of the half-mile long Waikiki Strip. IMP may be a bit cheesy in its Polynesian-themed decor but over the past half century it has become a truly organic and authentic part of the Waikiki scene as merchants have evolved niches catering to every tourist taste.
These days Korean merchants operate the majority of stalls lining the western side of IMP, just as they control most of the sushi bars on the islands as well as the mainland. Stalls offer bargains like 3 tee-shirts for $12, 2 bikinis for $10, 5 puka-shell necklaces or bracelets for $20. A few yards away you can climb into a giant transparent plastic ball and roll around in a small artificial pond. You can watch a free Hawaiian song-and-dance show while eating $1.50 tacos or $6 combo plates at the open-air food court. Bargains at the IMP are every bit as obscenely cheap as outdoor markets in any Asian city. In fact the IMP makes you feel that you are in an Asian city.
Sadly, IMP is destined to pass into Waikiki history. In May of 2010 Queen Emma Land Co, which owns its 6.48 acres, signed a deal with Taubman Centers of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan — developer of the Beverly Center, Short Hills Mall and Fair Oaks Mall — to transform the property into something more in keeping with its prime location at the heart of the world’s most popular vacation resort. That probably means another lovely but sterile mall like Taubman’s other ventures. But any changes to IMP’s gloriously fecund ambience is likely to take years if not a decade or more given Hawaii’s exacting development protocols and vocal preservationists.
We knew we would be strolling the lush byways of Kalakaua many more times, but for during the first hour of our first evening in Waikiki we had our heart set on venturing down to Kuhio to find an authentic local eatery. One of Waikiki’s evolutionary changes over the past quarter century has been the influx of cheap, unpretentious Japanese restaurants and eateries to cater to the large numbers of tourists seeking a break from hotel buffets and chain restaurants. The most endearing thing about these small Japanese eateries is their lack of pretension. Partly that’s a function of economics. Most actually seem to have been started by Japanese who decided to chuck the corporate grind back home and settle in Hawaii. With little capital and few entrepreneurial skills, they were able to open tiny, unpretentious boxes you might find in back alleys of Osaka or Nagoya or Kyoto. A bit short of time, we settled on a hole-in-the-wall takeout place in a small L-shaped courtyard just a few yards off Kuhio. The combo plates, served in styrofoam boxes, were perfect for satisying our appetites for a bit of local authenticity before hurrying off to see a Waikiki institution.
The Society of Seven is Waikiki’s longest-running show. The act came together under that name in 1969, a few years before I began living there. Their lively mix of songs, dance and comedy was designed to appeal to tourists but became a hit with the locals. My high school friends and I scraped up some money to see the show. The group began spending more time in Las Vegas and even created a second unit in 2001 called SOS LV. But the original group, with all new members except Bert Sagum, ended up in Las Vegas and the second unit in Waikiki. That was the group we went to see on our first night in Waikiki.
