Left the North Shore mid-morning Wednesday and headed around to and down the eastern shoreline -- the Windward Coast. And, indeed the wind was strongly blowing onshore. We stopped at the Polynesian Cultural Center -- a Mormon-developed cultural theme park, staffed largely by students at the BYU branch located nearby. Different Polynesian island groups have areas in which they demonstrate native customs, crafts, music, and dancing. We heard Tongan drummers, New Zealand (Maori) songs and chants (including the fearsome Haka war chant that NZ sports teams do before contests), and Fiji songs and dances (which we as anniversary celebrants, got to participate in) … . We missed the Hawaii, Samoa, and Tahiti demos. Here's a Tongan teaching an Australian how to drum.
The shows were capped by a parade of long canoes. Here are some pix.
This next canoe is the NZ Maori group. We thought they had a particularly good show, brought back fond memories from our time in NZ, way back in 2003.
Incidentally, at a buffet lunch before all the cultural shows we heard people at our table mention Albuquerque. We chatted a bit and found they were attending Jehovah’s Witness convention in Honolulu. Newspaper said today that there would be 30,000 attending in total, half this week, half next.
We had one night to ‘kill’ between three-night reservation blocks on the North Shore and on Waikiki. I had read good things about Kailua, just east of Honolulu, and its attendant Bay and Beach, so I picked a vacation apartment from the internet with a minimum of research. Well, it wasn’t quite as close to the beach as the website suggested, but it was quite adequate for our needs. It was nearly dark when we got there. We found a nearby pizza joint for dinner and took a long morning drive in search of both sights and breakfast, then worked our way around the SE corner of Oahu and on to Waikiki.
Pictures en route: Bay, SE Oahu. Beautiful day, but windy.
Pictures en route: Bay, SE Oahu. Beautiful day, but windy.
Halona Blowhole. When the waves are just so, water spews up like a geyser through a hole in the lava rocks.
Our Waikiki hotel was part of the package deal we got. I hadn’t even looked it up on the internet, so we didn’t know whether it would be high-end, low-end, or somewhere in between. We were pleasantly surprised. We’re in the New Kamaiani Hotel which is on the east end of Waikiki, away from the traffic and congestion and bright lights, across from a park and situated on the Sans Souci Beach. They call it a boutique hotel and it’s very nice.
We had lunch on the lanai adjacent to the beach, spent some time on the beach and in the sea, and just hung around the hotel in the evening. Got to see OSU narrowly beat Colorado on TV in late afternoon. We'll be here three nights, leaving near midnight on Sunday for home.
Cheers,
Susie and Rob
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