Not Even Not Traveling 68: Hawaii - Oahu

In the morning, we arrived at our fourth stop, our third Hawaiian island, Oahu. Although Oahu is not the largest island in the chain, it's home to the most people, The state capital, Honolulu, sits on its southern coast.

On other islands, we landed in towns like Hilo, Kahului, Waila, and Kona. They seemed reasonably-sized - but not Honolulu. Because Honolulu was enormous.

A Comparison

When I vacationed with my wife in Chicago for a few days, many years ago, we wisely decided not to drive in the city. No one ever says, "Hey, what I want to do with my precious free time is fight the traffic in downtown Chicago." But that's the mistake we made with Honolulu. It's because I hadn't realized downtown Honolulu is basically Chicago, but moved to a nicer beach.

We went to pick up our rental car. Even getting to the site by taxi and on foot was a struggle through the crowds. Driving back out into the perpetual traffic jam of the downtown was almost impossible.

Another Comparison 

I have driven in New York City. It takes a special type of driver to do it in rush hour - basically, not me. You have to be assertive at a different level. My impression of Chicago traffic was similar, although as a tourist I could see it was a step below the intensity of New York. Honolulu, to my shock, competes at the Chicago level, albeit with more of a smile. The drivers have an aggressive downtown culture and, if you're going to drive with them, you need to watch and follow their unwritten rules about how close you can be, whose turn it is, and how much room to give pedestrians.

To make it extra stressful, I decided at the rental agency to make this the first time I drove a Toyota Prius. Now, they gave me five options. I picked the Prius deliberately. Immediately, I realized I was going to have regrets. The car had standard features and advanced configurations at the same time. It didn't have many built-in services but all of them it did have were engineered in a confusing way. I spent half an hour fighting for traffic position while struggling with the car's weird gear shift. Diane had to puzzle with the bluetooth at the same time. Plus, the car started with a 'Maintenance Needed' notice on the dashboard that never turned off.

Finally, A Sandy Beach

Eventually, we made it out of the city. The process was no fun but we broke free. We knew where we wanted to go: a park where we could rent equipment and go snorkeling. Diane had one picked out on her GPS. After twenty minutes more driving, we got there. Except we didn't, really. We couldn't park. They had the equipment shack. They had room in the ocean, sure. But the parking lot was closed.

We drove to our alternate destination, the Diamond Trail. A sign on the mountain there said the parking lot was full. Tourists had parked their cars along one side of the road, too, creating imaginary spots. There were no imaginary spots left.

So we kept driving. In time, we reached the southeast shore. There we found a docks area with an outdoor mall. We decided to have lunch at an Italian restaurant and look at our maps. I stared for a moment at the prices, though. The cheapest appetizer was twenty-five dollars. Of course, we ate anyway. We wanted to sit and figure out our next targets. Getting a table was also the only way to go to the bathroom. All the bathrooms in Honolulu and Waikiki were closed to non-customers.

During our lunch, Diane found another place to go snorkeling, then another. The businesses occupied spaces on the east bay. That meant we needed to keep driving. By this point, I was starting to resign myself to the time on the road but I was going stir crazy in the car. Lying prone in a bay gazing down at fish sounded wonderful.

The problem was, the next place was was closed due to lack of parking. And the next. We kept driving the loop of the main highway around the island and came down off the mountains to a place called Sandy Beach. There was no sign saying it was closed. I had to try it. Then, in the imaginary parking lot (there was a real, paved part but our part was a sand pit), I saw where I could make an extra imaginary space for our car. Diane pointed to a police car.

"They're not bothering anyone here so far," I countered. To be safe, when I saw someone pulling out, I snuck into their spot. Now we were just doing what the rest of the beach crowd was doing. In the Prius, we flopped around for a few minutes to get dressed for the surf. It wasn’t too hard because we had been ready to snorkel.

The beach was so nice that Diane felt the ocean touch her feet and said it was enough for her. She was done.

"I have to get in," I told her.

"I know you do," she replied. 

As I waded into the surf, teenagers kept telling me how “the waves were crazy” due to the storm on the other side of the island. Okay, fair. The waves were a lot taller than me. I'd never been here before, though. Maybe that was normal. 

It did not occur to me at the time that I am no longer fifteen years old. Body surfing was no problem for the first ten minutes. I rode a few waves successfully. But as I grew tired battling the waves and the undertows, it took more and more effort simply to survive failing to catch the waves (as the real surfers zoomed by) and eventually it took even more effort for me to recover from the pounding surf and sand and staying (mostly) upright.

Oh, the undertows. There were two, one moving north, another southeast. They met where the waves were the best, so of course that's where I wanted to be (along with everyone else). Thankfully, the crowd wasn't big and the surfers dodged through the swimmers with skill. The surfing area was bounded on the south side by sharp, volcanic rocks. So we were limited in how far we could spread out.

After the thirty-fourth surfer sped by me through the crowd, a magic timer went off in my mind/body saying, “that’s enough.” I had been thrashed in the surf for most of an hour. Diane deserved however much time it took for me to accompany her on a trip through the tidepools. 

To the south, we thought tidepools were nice enough. Getting dry and figuring out where to go next was okay, too. Half a day later, though, it occured to me that only teenagers had surfed in those waves. And me. I think the oldest person aside from me in the water at Sandy Beach was about twenty-five. Most of the others were in high school. I had been older than the boogie boarders, surfers, and body surfers by about forty years. They probably weren't telling me the surf was crazy because of the storm. They were, as politely as they could, telling me I was crazy.

Anyway, the tide pools really were nice. As we clambered back into the car, we glanced to the southwest and saw storm clouds. We gazed north and saw only sunshine in Waikīkī. 

Friendship Garden

Diane searched her phone for attractions. At this point, she was looking for almost anything: museums, parks, beaches, hiking trails, luaus, whatever looked open to the public. And we tried. We meandered along main and side roads to each spot. Some looked beautiful. At each and every one, though, the parking lot was full. When there was imaginary parking, that was taken, too.

Hawaiians on Oahu are comfortable with making their own spaces. However, I think they balk at rolling over the curb and into the park. None had done it, anyway, or I would have tried.

After five more failures, Diane found a place called Friendship Garden where the parking was described as “limited.” Given how things were going for us at sites with a hundred places to park (but all full), I figured we had no chance at Friendship Garden. It was a hiking destination, though. That’s something we have loved to do in these past few years. We were close, just ten minutes away. We had to try. 

The GPS took us off the main highway onto a side road north of Waikiki, in Keana. Next, it told us to turn into a housing development. It guided us up switchbacks in the development. Then we took a small road, one car wide, up a lonely mountain into exclusive, gated estates. Soon the path grew more tilted than anything in San Francisco. And it remained obviously private.

“Is this park accessible through someone’s house?” I joked. But my sarcasm turned out not to be entirely wrong.

Diane responded with a description of the nature trail. She read from an attractive paragraph supplied by her map. We could walk about a mile on a little mountain, under the shade. 

“You have reached your destination,” the GPS intoned. Diane waved it around.

“Stop! Stop!” She rose out of her seat.

“Do you see anything?” We paused on the road with estate walls to our left and a spacious, cast iron gate to our right. 

“No.” She slumped down again.

Down the slope to the right, which was the north side, we could see a mansion with its own vineyard. It didn’t look anything like a hiking spot. Next to the estate walls, two cars had occupied the only imaginary spaces available. I pressed the pedal down. The Prius rolled on.

In a quarter mile, the mountain trail ended in a loop. So the one lane road we were driving must have been able to accommodate two cars in opposite directions at least some of the time. We looped and headed back down, defeated. 

“You have reached your destination,” the GPS intoned. Diane sat up. And in front of us, a young man and a woman crossed the road from the mansion to one of the two cars in the imaginary spaces. Now I could see the spaces lay on a semi-paved shoulder. The shoulder looked designed to provide sewer access. I could see a round sewer plate on one side, in the shadows underneath a big truck. The young couple hopped in their brown sports car behind the truck and pulled out. We watched them roll down the hill in front of us.

“Pull in, pull in!” She held up her phone with the GPS blinking green at the bottom. “Let’s get out and look around.” 

I was cramped from driving. Stretching my legs sounded great. So I swung into the muddy gravel of the topmost spot. As I did, the truck in front, which apparently had a driver sitting in it who I hadn't noticed, started to pull away. The movement revealed the round sewer plate entirely. There was asphalt around the sewer plate. It looked like better parking so I rolled forward. I cut the engine and pulled the emergency brake.

“We’re here,” Diane announced as she got out.

“Well, we’re somewhere.” I stood up straight and closed my door behind me.

“No, I mean come around to this side of the car.”

When I walked around, I saw to my surprise that Diane was pointing to a placard. It read, in small but unmistakable letters, 'Friendship Garden.' In half a minute, we discovered another sign, one chiseled in stone. It had lay hidden by vegetation and, formerly, it had been blocked by the truck. I scratched my head as I thought. 

Two spots. That was the extent of the public parking. And we had just gotten one.

Well, Friendship Garden was worth the trouble. We wandered up the path and found a gazebo with pamphlets inside, describing the hike routes. The place turned out to be a large, private reserve although it was technically open to the public. (It had those two spaces.) Obviously, the locals of the neighborhood had to be the main users of these footpaths. The best source of access was a stroll up the road; otherwise, visitors had to depend on their luck with the uncertain parking.

To our shock, as we marched up a slope, we met a young woman coming down. She did not look happy to see us. She scowled as if we had invaded her private space. 

Friendship Garden is a ten-acre park, more or less. It occupies a mountain peak high enough to give a view of Kaneohe Bay, provided visitors climb half a mile to it. On its paths, hikers pass long stretches of trees, flowers, and birds. Some of the trees are Cook Pines. And that's weird. I found it odd and unsettling to see pine trees invading a tropical forest. New settlers to the islands must have planted the trees about a hundred and fifty years ago, from the look of them. The name 'Cook' pines is probably a clue. 

The Kokokahi Tract, the residential development outside the boundaries of the park, was developed in 1927 as a multi-ethnic community. Kokokahi was based on a Christian belief in the brotherhood of mankind. Its name translates to “one blood,” and amounts to a statement of its multi-ethnic purpose, which ran contrary to the prevailing segregation on the island at the time.

Not long after we started out, a bevy of college-aged kids started climbing up. We heard them park down below, a faint slam of car doors and excited, young voices. To our surprise, though, at about the halfway point on the trail, we got passed by someone different. A man who seemed to be walking his dog caught up to us. We stood aside to let him pass. Before we reached the summit, the college group passed us, too, where we stopped beside a pagoda to look at the Asian-style masonry.

At the top, we found ourselves surprised by the view of Kaneohe Bay. It really was beautiful in a way we hadn't expected, or at least I hadn't. The college kids were making a lot of noise, shouting to one another and fooling around by the side of a tree-lined cliff. One of the youngest ran up to us and beamed a white-toothed smile.

"Want us to take your picture?" he said. 

And so, at the top, we got a picture of us with a bit of the Kaneohe Bay in the background.