Our Week in Hawaii (part 4)

We have now been to a Luau, and it's all we expected, and more.
Most of Monday was spent hiding from the sun in various ways. We were a little bit muscle-sore, and medium sun-burnt from the one snorkel outing on Sunday. So we rested a lot, ate a lunch, and browsed a used bookstore (I got another John Le Carre novel, to follow the one I devoured on the flight over, and also something by Elmore James, whom I've long wanted to read and never have).

The two things we needed to do were connected. One, turn up at the conference in order to register and collect my materials. And, two, among those materials find tickets so we could attend the Luau. Both these goals entailed driving down to the bowels of Honolulu and, after consulting the map, we decided to take a different route: one that would involve negotiating the Likelike Highway.

After the usual vexing navigation problems we found the Likelike, and made our way south and west towards the big city. This, after about half an hour, brought us out by the blue-green water in the somewhat run-down west end of town, technically Pearl City, and the Nimitz which runs past the dockyards along the coastline in to the center of town: a spike-fest of high rise buildings far to the east of us.

We followed the shore, past the giant ship-loading cranes and unpainted warehouses, through into the suddenly upscale parts of Waikiki Beach where all the expensive hotels and shops are located. We were looking for the Waikiki Sheraton, but were gawking at all the foot traffic, sun bathers, surfers, taxis and moped bikes, and somehow we went past it. The street scene, on and near Waikiki Beach is truly a churning mass, by the way. People are out on the street, out on the beach, out on the sidewalks, traipsing past at all angles. The cars creep along, through the sea of humanity, and the whole thing is reminiscent of what I imagine the streets of Calcutta would be like, if they had an upscale beach instead of the sacred river.

It was my impression that most of the hotels in this region have very understated signs, perhaps due to city ordinance, and it was difficult to tell what-was-what amongst all the sky-scrapers. By the way, we discovered that if you have a sign with the word Waikiki on it, and some vandal steals your "i's", all you have left is "wakk".

Eventually we were through all the tall buildings and passed into the city park and zoo region without finding our goal. So we pulled off and consulted maps and materials until we had an address on a street, and were able to determine it was the street we were JUST ON. Short story: it took us a bit of circumlution, including several round-the-block trips to bypass one-way streets, and pulling into and through an underground parking garage, but finally with a little help from the parking attendant we found the place.

We parked in the Sheraton lot, which was practically the only choice, and found the conference without too much trouble. They seemed pleased to see me, and gave me my materials, and tickets, and we were all set for the Luau.

After a short wait, we were directed onto a bus. There were perhaps 50 of us on the bus, and it turned out there were 10 buses (only one from our conference, but others from others, and we soon learned we were going to the "Paradise Cove" which, in a moment of horrid realization, Rita remembered as the place we had to listen about for hours on the flight over (and which meant, due to long-winded sales-speak, we only saw one in-flight movie instead of two).

The bus pulled out, made it's way through the congested streets, and pulled onto the highway going west which was, no kidding, a bumper to bumper nightmare. My heart usually sinks at joining a creeping freeway mess, but this time it was okay. First, I wasn't driving, and second, we had the comedic stylings or our tour guide, Mark B, to wile away the time on the public address system.

Mark B. was career Air Force before this job, and worked as a busboy on Air Force One. He was stationed on board for the latter part of the Nixon administration, through Ford, Carter, and Reagan. He had served them all, plus Margaret Thatcher, and many other dignitaries, plus, he claimed, the Pope. I doubted this last, but who knows?

Mark B. kept us amused and illuminated with his patter through the long ride westward. He pointed out Richard Chamberlain's house (for sale at $4.5 million), and some of the local flora: weird trees, round on top and flat on bottom; the etymology of the Mango, related to poison Ivy, according to him; and the "signature tree", where you could sign your name on a leaf and come back 100 years later to find it still there.

At last, when we were literally bursting with new knowledge and amusing anecdotes ("land is so precious in Hawaii, and houses built so close together, you just need to reach out your window to borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbor"), we arrived at Paradise Cove.

Picture Disneyland, only much smaller, and with no rides or anything, and where the structures all appear to be temporary and stapled together. Okay, forget that. Picture the circus in a small town, where the rides don't look too new or too safe. There's a lot of little huts with trinkets to sell, and a "tattoo" booth, some fabric for sale, a gift shop, some other booths, and about 50 banquet tables set up in rows in front of a stage. But no rides. Now picture all this tacky detritus on the shores of a blue sparkling sea, with a totally gorgeous beach, as the sun is setting through crimson clouds. As Rita said, "we're not in Kansas any more".

The Luau started with getting pictures taken, moved to wandering through the various booths, progressed to an amphitheater where there was some hula dancing and a pig was dug out of it's firepit, to a guy, with his feet tied together, climbing a tall palm tree and dropping flower petals on the crowd, to a buffet with, I swear, the slowest moving food line in all of recorded history. Once we had our chow, we sat at our designated banquet table and watched the "show". This was a sequence of Hawaiian song-and-dance numbers punctuated by the lounge singer stylings of our Master of Ceremonies: Mr. O'Brien (an enormous Hawaiian man with a Wayne Newton slash Bill Murray stage presence). The real crowd pleaser was the hula production numbers, with 6-8 bare chested men, and 6-8 slender Hawaiian ladies, doing the shimmy in unison, and then the hefty man, with his flaming wooden sticks, doing a pretty fair baton twirling impression -- only once did he attempt a behind-the-back catch and drop it.

We danced in the moonlight. Then we got back on the bus, with our photo in hand. A successful Luau by any standard.

On Tuesday morning we again went down the Likelike Highway, but this time in search of the Bishop Museum. I had arranged to visit the staff anthropologist there, a nice young fellow named John Dockall, since he's planning to work in collaboration with the archeologists I know at NDSU. We arrived and gave our names, and there were passes waiting for us. We had a 45 minute conversation with him that left me wondering if we'd connected very well. It was congenial enough, but whereas he's been talking on the phone about bringing me in to meet the director of research, it turned out he had a meeting to prepare for, and we were set loose to look around the place after about 45 minutes. I'm still not sure if we hit it off.

The Bishop Museum is an old-fashioned place: an enormous building with three levels of wood-and-glass cases and various objects on display. There's a wing devoted to the Pacific and another wing devoted to Hawaiian artifacts. It's one of those museums, now out of fashion, like I visited when I was a child. John Dockall appeared to be embarrassed while describing it to us: modern museums are interactive, this one is not. It's all look but don't touch. I said, "so, your museum is something of a museum-piece?", and he agreed.

We had planned to stop at the museum for this meeting, however long it took, and then press on to snorkeling on the west coast of the island, at a place called "Electric Beach" where it's possible to see Spinner Dolphin. However, the meeting was short, and the museum beckoned, so we ended up traipsing through the whole thing, with a lunch break, and even the new "highly interactive children's section", which I found to be weak in terms of exhibits (yes, yes, everything is interactive and manipulable, but what is gained from seeing the inner workings of a mechanical giraffe? and how can you make sense of squid propulsion when you're asked to, for some reason, adjust the nerve conformation along its torso? this was a particularly empty exercise, as you are not told anything about the organism, you're led to believe you can adjust nerve firing, and there's so little additional information that you have no choice but to make decontextualized trial-and-error attempts, in order to accomplish nothing and learn the game, for no purpose).

At any rate, I view museums as akin to the mall at Christmas. You walk and walk and walk, viewing objects through glass, in a crush of humanity, until you're finally a shell of your human self and all the energy has been sucked from you. After about 5 hours, which is what it takes to get through Bishop Museum at a fast trot, we were in no shape to go snorkeling: even at a place with the potential promised by Electric Beach. So we came back to the cottage, and settled in for a nap.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, I give my talk at the conference.