Hawaii! Part 5

Oh goodness, could I be any slower in posting about our Hawaii adventure??? And I haven't posted boo about October.. or November... and now December's half over... jeepers. My apologies, gentle readers. All two of you, hah!

Now... let's see... can I even remember Kauai?! It seems like a dream now.

Sept. 13: East coast of Kauai - Kapaa/Wailua/Lihue

We were pretty excited for our first morning in Kauai - we hadn't seen the island at all since it was dark when we landed the night before, so our first peek at the island from our hotel lanai that morning was a delight.

The mountains on Kauai are stunning. They are jagged and steep and jut unexpectedly out of the surrounding lush forests, and they're green. They're jagged and craggy and green all over. They're spectacular.

So our first order of business was to get up into them. We had breakfast at a cute coffee shop in town, then drove up to a trailhead recommended by our trusty guide book. The hike was amazing. It was pretty humid and we really got the sense that we weren't just someplace tropical - we were in a rainforest. The views were breathtaking, we were surrounded by every shade of green imaginable, and we took tons of photos. We were pretty much by ourselves, too, which was lovely. We occasionally passed folks on the trail, but for the most part we were hiking alone. Compared to the crowded beaches that we could have been visiting, we were pretty delighted with our choice of activity for the day.

The trail took us over the tips of the ridges of some of the mountains. The tops of these ridges are pretty narrow - there were places where the mountain fell away dramatically steeply on either side of the path. The path got pretty muddy too. I have several pairs of socks that are still stained orange from our adventures on Kauai.

After our hike, we went back to our hotel to clean up (our legs were all muddy!) and a nap, and then we set out for a late lunch. It was around 2pm but there were several restaurants right by hotel, so no problem, right? Wrong! All of the restaurants were closed -- we were too late for lunch and too early for dinner. We checked with our guide book and decided to go someplace in town that came highly recommended - a deli that was famous for their plate lunches. So we drove into town, parked, punched the address into google maps on my phone, and set off walking. We walked all the way to the end of main street looking for this place, and never found it. I finally asked a local, and it turns out google maps was waaaay off - the deli was in the center of town! We had to walk aaaaall the way back to our car, then past it by a few blocks, to get to the deli. When we walked in, I almost passed out from the heat. Everyone was super nice and had me sit down and got me water and they were all super concerned about me. The sun in Hawaii is intense. It was a hot day. AND we had gone on a long hike that morning.

We got our place lunches, and we picked up a coconut from a street vendor - coconut water is the gatorade of Hawaii, it's full of electrolytes and apparently rehydrates you better than real water. So I sipped that (it really worked!) and we found a picnic bench on the beach and we had our lunches. It was very good and ultimately well worth the trouble of getting it. I loved eating all the traditional Hawaiian food on our trip, and the ahi poke (the raw pink tuna in the top right of my plate) was the best I had during the whole trip.

After the lunch debacle, we went to a beach near our hotel for some relaxing and reading... and observing the local fauna.

Kauai is famous for its wild chicken population. I forget who brought the birds to the island originally, but they've pretty much taken over the place. They're everywhere - on the beaches, by the sides of the roads, in parking lots, always looking for handouts or dropped bits of food. They're pretty funny.

Then it was getting on towards sunset but we wanted to make the most of our daylight, so we drove over to a lookout nearby to see a double waterfall, and after that we went to a mall hunting for a bakery that makes malasadas (the pastries we had in Honolulu). I read about it in the guidebook and wanted to try it out. Unfortunately we got there near closing and their malasadas weren't fresh, but they were okay.

Sept. 14: North Shore of Kauai

We had breakfast at our little coffee shop again, before driving up to the North Shore of Kauai to hike the famed Kalalau trail. The drive up was gorgeous, especially once we got to the northern side of the island. The mountains are even more astonishing up there.

The Kalalau trail is pretty famous, and parking at the trailhead was ridiculous. It was so crowded. And compared to our hike the day before, the trail itself was jam packed with people. We were passing people or standing aside for a group to pass us about every ten steps.

And the trail itself was insanity. It was very steep, and unrelenting. From the moment we stepped on the trail, it just went up, up, up. And it wasn't smooth either - it was a boulder-strewn path for the first (very slow) few hundred feet, so we had to haul ourselves up and down all these rocks along the way.

The views were gorgeous, and hiking the trail would have been a nice feather in our Hawaii experiences cap, but given the exhausting morning-hike-and-lunchtime-near-heatstroke adventure from the day before, I just didn't have the energy for it. And there were helicopters buzzing by every five minutes (helicopter tours are extremely popular on Kauai, since that's the only way to see something like 80% of the island) - which were very noisy and really distrupted the communing with nature thing we were trying to achieve. So add up the complete lack of energy, the noisy helicopters, and the crowds, adn the whole experience wasn't really worth it. We turned back after maybe 15 to 20 minutes. The whole hike would have taken us a few hours. (Actually, the really hardcore folks get a permit and hike in for a day, then camp at a beach, and hike back out.)

There was a pretty little beach right by the trailhead, so we changed into our suits and went for a little swim, and that was nice.

View of the beach from the trail

The mountains behind the beach

We worked our way back to our home base, stopping at a beach for some fresh pineapple from a vendor and then in Princeville we had yummy Hawaiian-style burgers for lunch. And Hawaiian chips and Hawaiin sodas. Near our hotel, we found a shave ice man that the guidebook recommended, and I finally had my first taste of Hawaiian shave ice! After two years of living in LA (where I first heard about shave ice) and a full week in Hawaii itself. It was really yummy!

Yes, our trip to Hawaii was basically a foodie tour of the state, and yes, that was my doing. Mmmm!!

Sunset at Poipu Beach

Speaking of which, we went to a guide-book recommended Italian restaurant in Poipu for dinner that night, and we visited the Hawaiian ice cream institution of Lappert's for dessert.

Sept. 15: Western Kauai

On this day we drove to Western Kauai to see Waimea Canyon, the "Grand Canyon of Hawaii." We stopped along the way in Kalaheo (I think) for breakfast at a place the guide book recommended. I was always interested in eating at places the guide book recommended!

We went to several lookouts in the state park to see the canyon. It was very impressive!

We hiked down a trail into the canyon, too, which was exciting. And very dusty!

We hiked a good way in, but decided to turn back before we reached the end. The trail was a steady downhill slope on the way in, so we knew we'd have a long steady uphill climb on the way out. And it was a long hike out so it's probably good we turned around when we did. It was a really neat experience.

We had lunch at a plantation-house restaurant on the drive back towards the east side of the island. The couple in the table next to us were really irritated with our waiter, but we didn't have a problem. The food was really good - my salad was incredible.

The nuts in the salad were macadamias (candied, I think) - they use them like we use walnuts or peanuts on the mainland. There was goat cheese and pineapple and a tasty dressing... we devoured every bite of this huge salad. James doesn't even like vegetables and he couldn't stay away.

After lunch, we went to JoJo's Aneneue for shave ice. I'd read about this place in a food blog I read (bakingbites.com) and so I wanted to try it. It was delicious! JoJo uses real fruit for her syrups and it was super good - it's the local spot for shave ice.

Back at our hotel that evening, we had leftover pasta ragu from the Italian restraurant we went to the night before, sitting out on our lanai. Our hotel room happened to have a kitchenette which was nice. We worked on writing postcards to family and friends that night, and I worked on our Hawaii journal.

Sept. 16: Southern Kauai and Honolulu

This was our last day on Kauai, but our flight to Honolulu wasn't until the evening so we were able to squeeze some more sightseeing in. We drove down to the Poipu area at the south eastern tip of the island to see the spouting horn and a botanical garden. Kauai is called the Garden Isle so I wanted to see one of its famed gardens.

The first order of business was to get malasadas from a lady that the guide book recommended. These are apparently the best malasadas in the area - she has a stand in a mall parking lot. We got there a little before her advertised opening time, but she wasn't there yet... and then she had to take a while to set up and get the oil to temperature. Things in Hawaii are pretty casual and business hours seem to be more of a general idea than a strict policy. But the malasadas were great!

To get to Poipu from the north, you drive through a tree tunnel, which is a beautiful experience.

The spouting horn is a hole in the volcanic rock right at the shoreline, with a cave below the waterline that connects the hole to the ocean, so that when the waves crash to the shore, some water comes shooting out of the hole. It's actually not that exciting and since the outlook is right by the parking lot, there's not a whole lot to seeing it.

The botanical garden was beautiful and very interesting. They have an area that's a culinary garden, so we got to see things like allspice and and cacao and vanilla growing, that was probably my favorite part. They drove us in on a tram and the driver acted as a tour guide, which was nice. Then he released us in the garden and we were able to wander around ourselves.

The garden is a part of the National Tropical Botanical Gardens, but don't let the name fool you - it's not free or even cheap to get in. I don't think it has anything to do with the park service or anything like that. We went to the McBryde garden, which they describe as a "living laboratory" - it contains a lot of species of rare or endagered plants, but it's not a manicured garden by any means. The manicured, fancy, allegedly very aesthetically pleasing gardens with fountains and statues and whatnot are in the Allerton garden. However, admission to the Allerton garden costs $45 per person and the McBryde gardens cost $20 a pop so that's why we went to McBryde instead.

The Allerton garden was used as a filming location for Jurassic Park - that scene where the scientist guy finds the dinosaur eggs nestled in the roots of a tree. But the McBryde garden has a smaller version of those trees, so I was happy to see it and take pictures with it, even if it was less impressive.

After the garden, we went to Puka Dog for lunch - they use tropical fruit sauces on their dogs, and they put the hot dog right in the middle of a fresh bun. They were delicious!

Puka Dog also makes shave ice, and they use real fruit for their syrups too - that was delicious too.

After lunch, which I think we had around 3:00 or so (our eating times were all messed up on this trip, we were always eating lunch at odd hours), we drove down to Poipu beach to hang out. We saw sea turtles swimming in the water and we camped out at a picnic table, reading and writing in our journal, until sunset. Then we raced back up to the airport for our flight - we were cutting it close by staying at Poipu until sunset, but we wanted to see it. :)

We flew to Honolulu and checked into our hotel. We were upgraded for some mysterious reason, which was nice because our room was in the tower and we had a pretty view of the lights of Waikiki.

Hawaii! Part 4

Sept. 11 - 12: Kona

Our goal for the day was to go snorkeling, and the guide book said that the best place for it was Kealakekua Bay, so we drove down to the bay just by following the map on my phone and trusting that when we got there, we'd find someone renting snorkle gear. The drive was long and very winding down a big hill, and it was surprisingly remote and residential. We expected to find someplace to eat breakfast on the way, and the only place was a little shop that sold coffee and macadamia nuts. We sampled some coffees, and bought some Kona coffee beans, cups of coffee, chocolate-covered macadamia nuts (for later) and two small homemade muffins. It was a pretty stingy breakfast. When we got down to the bay, we found a parking lot... and not much else. The only person renting snorkle gear was a toothless woman who approached our car - she didn't have a store. Pretty sketchy.

We drove all the way back up to the main road and found a legitimate snorkle-renting establishment. The guy told us that the people down in the parking lot were renting gear illegally, and we found out that if we had taken her up on her offer, we could have gotten in trouble. See, we would have had to rent a kayak to get out into the bay, and she didn't tell us that if we want to park the kayak on the beach, we'd need a permit. Otherwise we'd have to tow the kayak as we snorkled. Since kayak rental wasn't cheap, and towing the kayak as we snorkled sounded really lame, we asked the rental guy where else we could go, and he recommended Two Step, a bay about 20 minutes south with a volcanic shelf extending out into the water. The name comes from an area of the lava shelf where there are natural steps that make an easy launching point into the water, so we wouldn't need to rent a kayak.

So we drove down there, stopping along the way at a cute little diner perched on the hill, and their dining area was an outdoor patio with a great view of the ocean. There were geckos crawling around on the banisters and sipping from the little jelly cups that customers had left out for them. Super cute!

After a very tasty breakfast, we went down to Two Step, which is right next to the Place of Refuge. We snorkled around and had a lot of fun, there were so many fish! The water was ridiculously clear and there was lots of coral. The water was pleasantly warm too, quite a change from the snorkling we did in Southern California, where we needed wetsuits. It was awesome.

After a while, we decided to try another location, so we got some lunch and drove about an hour north to another spot that the guide book recommended. We had to drive down this long, unmaintained dirt road that was heavily potholed and rough and rocky since it went right over lava rock - it was pretty harrowing and I think we didn't have any business on that road, it should have been restricted to 4WD vehicles only! Anyway, we drove down to this state park where the snorkling was apparently fabulous. We don't know. We never snorkled there, because when we went to get our snorkle gear out of the trunk... it wasn't there. I'd left it on a picnic table at Two Step. I, of course, proceed to freak out and cry, bawling about ruining our day and how expensive it would be to replace all that gear. So we drove back to Two Step.. and everything was still on the table, hours later! Yay friendly, honest snorkling folk.

We decided not drive aaaall the way back to that state park, which was an enormous waste of time, and just snorkle at Two Step again. As we were walking out to the launch point, I realized my wedding ring (we'd locked my engament ring in our safe at home) was feeling loose, so we locked it in the car. I thought about suggesting to James that he lock up his ring too, but then.. didn't.

We got in the water and snorkled around for about 10 or 15 minutes when James popped up out of the water and said "I lost my ring!" My heart stopped. I couldn't even understand him at first. His wedding ring?? Lost?!? It slipped off his finger and he followed it down to the coral, where he saw it land on a sea urchin, but the urchin's needles kept him from getting the ring back. He asked me for a bobby pin, but I didn't have one in my hair. So he swam back to shore to get one from the car, while I treaded water and kept my eye on this one piece of coral, to keep our spot over the place where he lost the ring. It was about 100 feet (or more) from shore, and the ring had fallen, luckily, on to a rocky ledge about 10 feet deep. If it had fallen anywhere else, it could have landed in 30 feet of water, where we'd never see it from the surface and could never get down to retrieve it, or in a sandy patch where sand could have covered it up, or into a deep crevice in a rock.

James swam back to me and tried to find the ring again (he found a bobby pin on the rocks as he was climbing out of the water!), but the sun was going down and it was overcast so the lighting was terrible. We swam around for a long time looking for it, but couldn't find it again. We went back to shore, and somewhere along the way I started crying. I'd been holding it together pretty well until then, I was remarkably calm while we were looking for it, but when we decided to give up, that killed me. We had a flight to Kauai at 7am the next day, so this was our only chance to get the ring back. We sat in the car for a bit in a state of shock, then James decided to go back in before the sun set, to look one last time. He was the only person in the water at that point. I stood on the rocky shore and watched him, fretting. I was so worried he'd get into trouble out there all alone. Eventually I called him back because I was getting so worried he'd drown.

We drove into town for dinner, at the Kona Brewing Company, and cried into our beers (and pizza). It was devastating to lose the ring. At first we thought, oh it'll cost about $400 to replace, it stinks but it's not too bad, we'll get a new ring engraved with "My hope is constant in thee" and it'll be okay. But the cost was nothing. The sentimental value of the ring was enormous. We'd just assumed we'd have our wedding rings forever. And getting a replacement, we'd always know that the new ring was not the ring. It would always be the not real wedding ring. The ring I gave to him on our wedding day would always be lost at the bottom of that bay. We were wrecks.

We went back to our hotel and went to bed, but we both woke up around midnight and were wide awake. James paced the room and I looked up the fee for changing our flights online, but I couldn't find anything. We debated whether it would be worth potentially the cost of the ring to change our flights, to stay in Kona and search for the ring again. It seemed like it was really unlikely that we'd find it, and that would just be money down the toilet. We were so anxious and distressed and miserable at the thought of leaving the ring.

Eventually we fell back asleep, and got up early to go to the airport. We checked out of the hotel and were all packed and ready to fly to Kauai, but first James decided to talk to a Hawaiian Airlines person about how much it would cost to move our flight out to the evening. It was less than $200, so we went for it.

It was about 5:30 am and we were dead tired, so I suggested we sneak back into our hotel room. We'd dropped our keys in the express checkout box, because we'd left before the front desk was staffed, so I figured they probably hadn't actually checked us out yet. When we got back to the hotel, we asked for a new key to our room, and they gave it to us! Yippee! I guess they hadn't processed the keys in the drop box yet. We went back to our room and immediately fell asleep for a few hours.

We drove down to the place where we'd rented snorkle gear the day before, but they weren't open, so we went across the street to a European snorkle shop. I didn't understand what was European about it until we went in, and the woman at the counter only spoke French. We asked to rent some gear - snorkles and masks, fins, a shorty wet suit for me because I'd gotten some bad burns on my back and upper thighs the day before, and waterproof flashlights. We explained we needed the flashlights to try to find James' wedding ring. It took a lot of pantomiming and explaining to get her to understand what happened, and when she got it, she called out to her partner in the back. The man came out and she explained what happened to him. We explained and pantomimed some more. He said he'd get his scuba gear and go down and help us search - we were shocked! We asked him how much that would cost, and he said he'd do it for free. It was amazing. We were kind of speechless but happily agreed. They loaded us up with gear, then the man got in his truck and took off for the Place of Refuge. We had a hell of a time following him down - we were afraid he might not go to the right place, so we didn't want to lose him, but he flew down those winding crazy roads like a bat out of hell. It was nuts.

When we got to Two Step, he leapt out of his truck and started putting on his gear and getting into the water, so James told me I had to park our car, he had to follow the French man! So James jumped out of the car and ran off after Frenchie, and I carefully picked my way down this narrow road with all these cars parked on one side, nervous that I'd bang up the rental car that I wasn't even supposed to drive. Eventually I found parking, and on the walk back to Two Step, I thought "they're going to find the ring before I even get in the water!"

I got my wetsuit on and was sitting on the steps, jamming my fins on my feet when James swam up to me. I asked him how it was going, and he proudly showed me his wedding band, back on his finger!

James and Frenchie had swam out to the spot (the fact that James had swam back and forth to the shore twice the night before had given him a really good idea of where the ring was, the angle he needed to swim from the step and how far out to go), and after a few minutes of orienting himself, James spotted the ring. He pointed it out to Frenchie, who plucked it out of the urchin with his bare hands.

So that was that. We thanked Frenchie profusely, and he took off in his truck again. We got breakfast at the same diner as the day before, just marvelling at having the ring back. We couldn't believe it!

We went back to the Place of Refuge to snorkle again. James wanted to show me the urchin that held his ring all night (we joked that I'd been married to an urchin for one night), and he wanted to take a picture of it. But by then the sky was all clouded over (when James found the ring that morning, it was during the one hour of sunshine for the whole day) and the water was cold, I was having trouble with my snorkle, and James couldn't find the urchin again, so we decided to call it quits. But I did get a picture of Two Step, and the place in the water that was almost the final resting place of James' wedding ring.

See that guy who's bending over, in the checked blue shorts? The ring was lost in the area just to the left of his head. I think.

We returned our gear, thanking the French man and woman again, and we even got pictures with them, haha.

We drove about halfway to the airport, to a Border's bookstore that I'd seen driving around the day before. I knew that big chain bookstores are good places to use bathrooms so we went there to change out of our wet bathingsuits. We hung out there for a while, I read a guidebook for Kauai and James worked on his computer, killing time until our 7pm flight. Eventually we decided it was time to get some food before our flight, so we went to a strip mall nearby and a nice little cheap BBQ place. It was called the Meat Shack or something. It was surprisingly tasty - I got chicken with a spicy Thai peanut sauce and brown rice. James got plain chicken and brown rice, so I shared by peanut sauce with him.

We repacked our luggage in the parking lot after we ate - things were kind of crazy. Then we drove up to the airport and waited around for a long time for our flight. Then we flew to Kauai!!!

Well, first we flew to Honolulu, where we didn't listen to the announcements after landing, disembarked, then realized that our plane to Kauai was the same one we took from Hawaii, so we could have just stayed on the plane, which is what the announcements had said, if we had listened. Oh well!

After we landed in Kauai, we got our rental car and drove to our hotel, which was thankfully only 15 or 20 minutes from the airport. We checked in and went to bed. It had been a crazy and exhausting couple of days!

Hawaii! Part 3

Sept. 10: Kona

After our last yummy breakfast in our cabin, we packed up and got ready for our drive to the Kona coast on the other side of the island. We first got waylaid searching for Garret and Sandy to check out. They knew we'd be checking out that morning (there are only a few cabins on their property) but they weren't in the office and they didn't answer the doorbell to their house, and finally James called them and found out they weren't there and just leave the key in the office. Fine, but annoying because we wasted time.

Then we went next door to do a load of laundry. There's a coin laundromat and it seemed like the best opportunity we'd get on the trip, and we didn't have enough clothes to go the whole two weeks without doing laundry at least once. So we washed a load. And the clothes were SOAKING WET when the cycle finished. Dripping wet. Argh. So we had to wring out all of our clothes, piece by piece, which was cold on our hands and annoying and probably not that good for the clothes. Then we dried the clothes in two driers to try to speed things up. Of course, they took forever to dry. We kept having to load quarters into the machines. I don't remember how expensive it was to do laundry that day, or how much time it took, but it was a big waste on both counts.

Finally we bought sandwiches at the cafe and took off. We ate on the road. Google Maps says it's a two hour drive but it felt like a lot longer than that. Maybe just because we got such a late start. It was interesting that once we got to the other side of Kilauea, the island turned very desert-y. The east side of the island is lush and green, but the west side is very dry. And we saw so many random piles of black volcanic rubble! It was so weird to see grassy fields with streaks of black lava rock running through them.

We wanted to go see the famous green sand beach, but Sandy told us we'd have to park our car and hike in for an hour, then hike out for an hour, and the parking lot is unguarded and there's a high rate of break ins there. Since we'd have the Mac and James' work laptop in the trunk, we decided not to risk it. It was a bummer, but with the late start we got, we couldn't have done it anyway.

We did make one stop along the way - to the Place of Refuge, Pu'Uhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park. We walked around and snapped some pictures.

We finally arrived at our hotel -the Sheraton Keauhou Bay Resort - and checked in. It was quite a different experience from checking into Volcano Country Cottages - we had to pay for parking, for one, and they just handed us our keys and gave us a generic welcome. We swam in their fancy pool for a while, which was nice. The pool was fairly large, and part of it was in the courtyard area, surrounded by the hotel and therefore shady, and part of it was out in the open, by the ocean. The water was much warmer on that side. There was a little water slide that connects the two areas, and we slid down it, then discovered that there's a full-sized slide on the sunny side of the pool. So we went over there and went down the slide, and then waded through the kiddie area of the pool, where they had a chunky sort of sand in the bottom. I've never seen that in a pool before! The kids were having a ball with it.

Our 1001 Place to See Before You Die - US and Canada Edition (which we used on our honeymoon) said the best place to go to a luau was at the Kona Village Resort, so I made reservations about a week before we left for Hawaii. It wasn't until we got to the Kona coast that I thought to check how far away the luau was from our hotel. I mean, it's called the Kona resort and we were staying in Kona, so it couldn't be that far, right? Um. They were an hour apart. Awesome. It's just a good thing I checked before we went into the pool, because then we knew to keep it short, otherwise we could have been late for the luau. And it's $100 a pop, so we didn't want to miss a minute of it. So we got dressed and drove up and got there in time to see everything.

The first thing we did was stand in line for a while, then they let us in to the tables. As we waited, a couple of men came around and gave the women leis. I was super impressed - orchids! - but then in the grocery store I saw a necklace lei - twice the length of the one I got at the luau? - selling for about $7. It's hard to believe that all those orchids could be so cheap!

Anyway, I was still super excited to get a lei! We sat down at our table, and we got good seats, right by the stage. A trio of singers entertained us with Hawaiian music while waiters went around and got everyone their drinks.

We munched on taro chips while we waited, which were very yummy. And purple.

After a while, they announced it was time for the ceremony to open the cooking pit where the pig had been roasting whole all day long. We all trooped over to another part of the grounds and gathered around the pit. They opened the pit and took out the meat, while the woman described what was happening.

The pork was roasting in a whole in the ground. If I remember correctly, the meat was wrapped in banana leaves and then some sort of cloth, like burlap, then covered with more hot stones, then the whole thing was buried under a lot of dirt. When we arrived, the dirt had already been removed, revealing the burlap and rocks. The men removed the hot rocks with their bare hands.

Then some dude standing in the back of the audience passed out and at first all we heard was his wife frantically saying his name and then we all realized what happened, there was this dude on the ground, out cold, and his wife was knealing over him all teary-voiced and trying to get him to wake up, and it was really scary for a moment until he came to and it became apparent that he was just dehydrated. He was young, in his 30s, and so they just gave him some water and he went back to his table, but I think if it had been my dad (he's passed out like that before), they would have called an ambulence. I realized how scary it would be to see my poppa pass out (he's done it several times, each time landing in the hospital, but I've never been there for it.)

Before they unleashed us on the buffet, this guy came out to teach us how to open a coconut the traditional way:

He was really funny and charming. He asked if anyone had any questions after his demonstration, and someone asked something like how long it took him to get that tattoo on his shoulder. He told them, then asked if there were any other questions, trying to redirect things back to coconuts... and some idiot asked "Were you drunk when you got it done?" James and I kind of gasped but the guy handled it well, and just said, no, it was a spiritual thing. But geez. A lot of Hawaiian men have traditional black ink tattoos and it's kind of obvious that they're a point of cultural pride. And this guy's tattoo is an elaborate, beautiful design, not some stupid cartoon character.

Anyway. Finally they let us go back to the food. They gave us traditional-looking wooden bowl/plate things. There were four or five tables loaded with food and I wanted to try a little bit of (nearly) everything!

So... I did. There's salad, fresh fruit, raw salmon and tuna slices (sashimi?), a raw salmon salad that I didn't like, a piece of BBQ beef that I was too stuffed to try, mac-and-potato salad (a wonderful Hawaiian staple of the plate lunch), purple sweet potato, bread fruit, turkey and pork that were cooked in the pit. No, I didn't eat it all. And yes, I felt bad about that. My eyes were definitely bigger than my belly, and I tried to only take a couple bite's worth of everything - but there was so much I wanted to try!

Except for the poi. Once I saw it in the serving dish, I discovered I didn't really have any interest in tryhaving it on my plate. We heard about poi since coming to Hawaii - it's taro that's been pounded and mixed with water until it's a pasty purple-ish grey-ish soupy consistency. Taro is a staple on Hawaii, and poi is one of the main ways they eat it. James got some and I tried a bite (it's the greyish stuff under his meat) - it's very bland and the texture is just wrong. It's like trying to eat wallpaper paste.

Then the show began! This is how it opened:

The show told a sort of story, taking us on a journey through the Polynesian islands with song and dance. There were a lot of neat performances, and it was fun and entertaining.

They did traditional dances from a lot of different islands of the Pacific. I forget what all of them were, except for the Maori men:

(Okay, I thought they were Samoan, but a looooong and fruitless Google search revealed that they were not Samoan, they were Maori.) They did the traditional bug-eyes, tongues-out face that Maori men did to scare the enemy in battle, but I didn't manage to get a photo.

But here's a photo of the Maori warrior face:

That took me a long time to find since I was googling for the wrong nationality, so. Appreciate.

The show ended with our coconut guy being a fire eater. He touched his burning torch to his tongue! Twice! He did that on the little stage close to the audience, then went back to the main stage (which was separated from the audience by a little pond). Then he did some awesome twirling with the burning torches, but I couldn't catch that with my camera because he was so far away.

It was a great night! A bit overpriced, probably, and touristy, definitely, but a good experience. We couldn't go to Hawaii for the first time and not go to a luau. I'm glad we went to once that was so high quality! And the food was really good, and there was sure a lot of it. We both enjoyed the show, it was fun and interesting to see the different dances and hear the different sorts of music, and it had a good pace to it so it never got boring. And it didn't drag on forever, which was good. Because you can only take so much super touristy staged fake-authentic cultural stuff.

(They present the luau as being a "traditional" luau, but there's nothing actually traditional about it. The word luau isn't even traditional. Hah! It's all for the tourists.)