Finally, another walking commute, about 10 minutes. The scenery isn’t as great as before, but the weather is nicer. Mostly it’s just views of the city:

One nice thing about the new digs is that the first and last photos above are views from our balcony at the beginning and end of the day. You can just make out AT&T Park just to the right of the Bay Bridge.

After Hanauma Bay, we had to return our rented snorkeling equipment. Snorkel Bob’s is a walkable distance from Waikiki, but we were being lazy, so we decided to catch a cab. A taxi was idling outside our hotel, but as soon as I walked up, the driver drove away. He must have not seen me or something.

There was another guy sitting on the steps outside the hotel and asked me where I was going. I was a little suspicious, but he had already gotten up and started walking towards a limo. So I followed him to the door and asked him “how much?”; I wasn’t sure if this was some kind of off-the-books operation.

“This is a taxi!” was the response. Sure enough, in the front seat was a taxi meter. So we took a ride down Kapahulu avenue in style.

“How long have you been married?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“You’re obviously not newlyweds because you’re sitting in the back seat as far apart as you can.” That taxi driver wasn’t missing a thing:

(picture from the other side of the back seat.)

I’ve been snorkeling a few times before, but they were all boat rides out to deeper water. Hanauma Bay was a singular experience.

On the plus side, there are no boat rides or $100 operator fees. Pay just $5 to get into the Nature Preserve, set up your spot, and go swimming as much or as little as you want, in water as deep or as shallow as you want. And the water is as clear as any off-beach water I’ve seen.

There are some downsides, but not due to the preserve itself. You have to get yourself to Hanauma Bay, either with a rental car, or a $40 taxi ride. No operator means your beach responsibilities are your own. Pack your own food, bring your own equipment, and watch over your own things; things do get stolen. The public nature of the beach means that it can get extremely crowded, both on the beach and in the water. I’m not that strong a swimmer so I stayed in the shallower water. There was no lack of fish in the shallow water, but the floating sediment did contribute to slightly decreased visibility.

Based on advice we had read elsewhere, we got up at the crack of dawn to arrive at Hanauma Bay when it opened at 6am. We got to make first tracks on the beach, and had the bay pretty much to ourselves for a few hours.

The first tour buses started arriving around 9am, and it got unpleasantly crowded very quickly after that. People were standing on the reef (a big no-no, since it kills the coral), kicking each other in the water out of either clumsiness or disregard, and also disrupting underwater visibility from kicking up sand.

We were very glad we arrived as early as we did, and left soon after the buses came. We were a little worried about being able to get a ride back to Waikiki since we had arrived by taxi, but that turned out to be no problem. There is a municipal bus stop at the Bay as a last resort, but there are so many tour van operators coming in that it was just a matter of time before one of them asked us where we were going, and offered to take us into Waikiki for $5/head (sweet!).

If I get to do it over again, I’ll try to schedule a trip for early-morning high tide. The reef being very close to shore makes it difficult to get out to see the rest of the preserve; going at high tide would enable one to swim over the reef.

The Outrigger Keauhou is near Kona. It is a nice modern well-equipped hotel with free internet. The rooms are spacious and clean. The problem (for me, anyway), is that it is rather isolated. On the grounds there are paths to walk on, and a nice black sand “beach” (rocks, really), but anything else is really a drive away, so this hotel is really more of a sleeping place than a “staying” place. The restaurant is not that good, even by hotel restaurant standards (I tend to think hotel restaurants are not as good as their standalone counterparts).

We left Waikiki to see downtown Honolulu and Iolani Palace. Our route took us past the old judiciary building and one of the statues of King Kamehameha I. Downtown we saw some very colorful street markets, and had some limited-edition McDonald’s mango peach pies.

Shortly before our trip, the Hawaiian Kingdom Government had blocked access to Iolani Palace to all but those with Hawaiian bloodlines. By the time we arrived, the group had been relegated to a small area of the grounds, but were physically preventing people from viewing their proceedings (my brothers had curiously wandered over to see what was going on, and were physically shooed away by some big dudes). I was purchasing tickets for our group and missed this experience.

The audio tour of Iolani Palace itself is very thorough (almost a little too thorough) and very educational. The audio recording for each room has a full description of its significance, but also contains a good amount of historical context as well. Audio tours are one of the things Patrika and I do at museums on vacations, but even for me, I found myself wishing the audio snippets would hurry up so we could move on to the next station.

This “Pearl Harbor Museum” is not really a museum per se, and as such it might leave many visitors feeling disappointed. It is really just a memorial to the sailors on the USS Arizona when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The Smithsonian-like exhibits one might be expecting to find, such as those on Japanese airplanes or US aircraft carriers and other WW2-era military technology, will be rather conspicuously absent.

The better expectation to set would be akin to a visit to Arlington National Cemetery or some similar site. There is a small museum, but in general, the USS Arizona Memorial is more of a quiet beautiful place than it is some kind of Pearl Harbor museum. The other related sites might be a better match for those interests, but I can’t say (we visited neither the USS Missouri, the USS Bowfin, nor the Pacific Aviation Museum).

The minimal museum does have a few interesting scale models of US and Japanese ships. There were also some Pearl Harbor survivors in front of the book store talking to people and doing book signings.

We arrived at 8am and the line already stretched out to the parking lot, with lots of people fighting for pictures at the front of the grounds. However, the line moved quickly, and we entered to get tickets for the 9:15am group to see the film and board the boat for the actual memorial. When we left around 11am, the line was completely gone (although there were plenty of people inside waiting for their memorial film showing and boat ride), leaving the grounds completely free for anyone to photograph without random people in the way.

We rented snorkeling gear from Snorkel Bob’s near Waikiki, for $32/week (their “Ultimate Truth” package). The rental experience was very smooth, with a very helpful staff. You can do inter-island drop-off and pick-up for certain kinds of equipment (boogie boards, but not snorkeling gear) to avoid having to lug them on the plane if you are island-hopping.

At their website, they also advertise snorkeling with DolphinExcursions.com, where they pick you up from your hotel and drive you to the launch site (1-hr drive) for a 2-hr excursion to swim with dolphins and fish.

I don’t know how I felt about the experience. The snorkeling itself was great; the water was very clear, with good visibility, and we saw lots of stuff (dolphins, fish, octopus, turtle). But a few things didn’t seem quite right:

• I felt weird about the way we “hunted” dolphins, where once they were spotted, the operator basically had everyone stampede to within some distance of the pod for viewing.
• At the second site, I did see the operator throw a muffin overboard prior to the dive, and later, after more thought, I think this was to lure the fish to the surface. That seems wrong on both ecological (don’t feed the fish) and marketing (see lots of fish) grounds.

This is our first trip to Honolulu, and in a short time we learned and saw some new things:

• Honolulu does not use Daylight Saving Time (timezone abbreviation is HST). This caused my auto-synchronizing atomic-clock timezone watch to get confused.
• Ala Moana is not in the middle of things at Waikiki. We are right next to the Hawaii Convention Center, and adjacent to the Ala Moana Shopping Center (an upscale-but-not-quite-high-end mega-mall). It is within walking distance to Waikiki (a hike), and a few blocks away from the Ala Moana Park and its beach.
• We saw many red-crested cardinals at Ala Moana Park (apparently, a.k.a. “Brazilian Cardinal” – an imported species).

Ala Moana Beach Park is 100 acres and is more of a local beach than a tourist beach. There are no fish in the shallow water, but the sand is very nice, the beach is very un-crowded, and the water very swimmable (no currents or rocks).

We are staying at the Ala Moana Hotel for a few days for a conference. Many things we read about this place were rather negative, but the hotel is undergoing renovation, so perhaps they completed the renovations just in time for our stay. Our room and the grounds are great: new and clean. The whole hotel is non-smoking; there are little signs in the rooms that say there will be a $200 room-cleaning charge for smoking.

The rooms are all very modernly-furnished and laid out, with lots of right-angled furniture and artwork everywhere. Each unit has a private lanai (we can see the ocean if we lean out over the railing), a dorm-room refrigerator, and free cabled internet access (WiFi is handled by BlueSocket and costs $10/day):

There are two perks to this hotel’s location:

• It is a five-minute walk to Ala Moana Park.
• It is a two-minute walk to the Ala Moana Shopping Center. For the hardened traveler, the benefit is not so much in the shopping (although there is a Foodland grocery store there) as it is in the large food court for quick meals.

More photos from New York:

Is New York really able to enforce “No Honking Zones”?

Sadly, the romantic gift shop is closed. And this really is on “Mott” Street; not an Engrish spelling of “Most Romantic”.

A first visit to New York cannot be complete without a visit to the Empire State Building.