Hawaii Trip Day Two (The journey to the center)

Hawaii Trip Day Two (The journey to the center)

We woke early to a mildly overcast day for our next Hawaii trip, it never rained but we were happy to not experience the walking tour in the beating sun.  Our ride out to the Polynesian Cultural Center seemed to fly by as we had a very animated guide with American name of Ken, his Samoa name was too long to remember. Ken explained that when his island was “discovered” they had no written language, the discoverers banned their culture and religion; brought Christianity,  believing they were enlightening them. Ken was a bit bitter, but jovial about the whole thing.

The water must rush down these channels during rainstorms.

This was said jokingly yet it was clear that there was a certain amount of resentment for the loss of culture by the western civilization. Ken commented that you can’t discover a place where people already had a surviving culture for over 1000 years. Ken explained that the naming of the children was a way for his people to pass their culture along without the knowledge of the new discoverers, which is why the names are so long. We learned that the cultural center was a source of funding for students to attend Brigham Young University.  we were more than happy to contribute to the advancement of someone going through the school; we enlisted Ken as our personal guide.

As we passed through Honolulu, I was surprised to see the decrepit living conditions of the islanders. It was surprising for an island chain referred to as paradise. Actually, I was also surprised at how large this city actually was, certainly larger than I had thought. Sadly, we noticed the amount of homelessness in the parks and street, since our Hawaii trip we learned they’ve been banned from parks. We were never panhandled, yet saw countless areas where there were tents and carts used as permanent housing.  We did hear from our guide of a large volume of upscale housing drove up the cost of living The downturn in job availability made a bad situation worse, it looked to be a very sad situation for many to endure.

Riding up highway H1 to H3 we saw some fantastic mountain scenery, passed by amazing fluted mountainsides.  I tried to imagine the action the water pouring down those mountains during a rainstorm, I wondered how the highway, which traveled close to these mountains in places, might be impacted as all the water drained away toward the ocean.

Our guide talked about all the movie sights along the way and the impact on the area when filming crews came into town.  We saw the valley where they filmed many scenes from Jurassic Park, envision the dinosaurs running through that area.  Our guide mentioned that the homes bordering the filming area were paid to keep tall trees in place to protect the filming crews from onlookers during production.  We enjoyed the monkey-pod trees, which were used to hide planes during WWII under their large canopy area. We saw a bunker high up on the hill, used during WWII.

 

We went through the mountain pass, moving closer the windward shore, we caught our first glimpse of Kaneohe Bay and the air base in the distance.  As we traveled along route 83 we soon found ourselves with the ocean directly on our right passing by Mokoliʻi, formerly known as Chinamen’s Hat, we saw people gathering at the beach. The surf didn’t appear to be very high and we saw few, if any, surfers in this area, the homes were modest in nature as the area maintained its rustic charm.  Our friend in Waikiki was very familiar with the engineering firm which designed many of the bridges, when we passed by construction at Kehana Bay we knew it was a Baginski bridge project.

This seems like a long post covering just transportation from Waikiki Beach to the Polynesian Cultural Center but since we had such a wonderful guide it was loaded with information that begged to be shared.