I’ve decided I LOVE Hawaii. So much that I think I would like to live there (okay, so I’ve decided I want to live in almost every place I’ve visited recently but truly, I think I’m a Hawaii kind of girl…). The first two days were spent on Oahu, and our hotel was right on Waikiki beach. It reminded me a lot of Miami Beach; lots of big hotels, sexy surfers, designer shops and palm trees. At one end is a volcano crater called Diamond Head, which features in many vintage posters of Hawaii, usually with a hula girl surfing in front of it, or a bloke in a Hawaiian shirt, or something equally uncliched.
Thankfully, many, many of the shops along Kalakaua Avenue offered Hawaiian kitsch by the truckload. I stocked up on dashboard hula girls, fridge magnets and macadamia nut pancake mix while my fellow traveller Nick invested in proper, garish Hawaiian shirt. Best $15 he’d ever spent, in my opinion.
Oahu is a stunning island and a lot of it is used as the location for the filming of LOST. We visited slightly sinister, looming, thickly wooded mountains, and a somewhat eerie Japanese temple situated in a graveyard, and felt a bit scared. But not for long! Because the next day we drove to Haleiwa, the home of surfing! And, joyously, the home of ‘Hurricane’ Bob, the man who runs the surf museum! Bob is about 100 years old! And he still has piercing blue eyes and goes surfing every other day! Bob rocked. Sadly, we never managed to get our scheduled surfing lesson as the laid back dude who was meant to be teaching us drove so slowly that he lost us on the way to the beach. Tch, surfers, eh?
