In Which Our Hero Manages to Avoid the Temptation of a Spam McMuffin(tm) For a Whole Week
Dearest Readers,
It's been a long while since we've had a good chat! Come in, sit down. Care for a mimosa? You look great! How are things? Oh yeah? Uh huh. Uh huh. *nods* Uh huh. Okay, shut up, it's my turn to talk now.
Well, seeing as my shit-faced antics on All Hallows Eve left my camera stranded at writesthings's place and both of us were too miserably hung over to do much besides order takeout yesterday, the Halloween pix might just have to wait for a day or two. I'm sorry. I truly am.
But on to more pressing matters:
I know it, you know it, we're all thinking it, but let's just all say it out loud for once and acknowledge that it exists: VACATION BLOG ENTRIES ARE BORING. It's an unavoidable truth that a good vacation, no matter how thrilling it was to you, the bearer of seven carousels of slides of people with the tops of their heads cut off, a good vacation is inherently lacking in either conflict or dramatic tension, the very stuff of good storytelling.
Which, of course, is precisely why bad vacations are almost always the stuff of great stories. I mean, hell, if your trip to Costa Rica was interrupted by a surprise attack from the Shining Path that left you stranded in the deep jungle for three weeks without food or potable water, forcing you to eat your own foot to survive, it would make one heck of a blog entry...but probably not such a great vacation. Which is why few people return from such trips with slides or well-annotated galleries on flickr.com. Which is a shame, really.
Well, folks, I regret to inform you that my trip to Hawaii last week was a good vacation, so there won't be much excitement to write about here. I'll try to keep it brief. But you know that's not exactly my strong suit.
Anyway, on to The Sandwich Islands:
Mere moments after I took this picture, some Korean chick ran out on the beach pointing and screaming "Boat! Boat!"
Okay, bad joke. But I really couldn't get over how much the place looks like "Lost". Which is a silly thing to not be able to get over, since everyone knows it's filmed there, but I still found it kinda extra thrilling in that "look, it's the Brady Bunch house in real life!" kinda way.
To put it simply, Hawaii fucking rocks.
No, seriously. It's hard to add anything convincing to the canon of compliments that "the little state that could" has received over the years, but it's really true. No, it's not even remotely exotic (unless you consider Tony Roma's and The Cheesecake Factory exotic...you fucking hick, you), sure the native culture was cruelly decimated and gentrified out of existence over a century ago, and sure it's the place directly responsible for such crimes against humanity as bad floral shirts, Don Ho and the world's most annoying slang.
But even with all that, the place is a fucking paradise. There's simply less to not like about it than almost anywhere else I've ever been. It's gorgeous. The ocean feels like jacuzzi water, is crystal clear, and there's not a hypodermic needle or discarded sofa bed in sight. The seafood is so fresh it's practically still wriggling. And the fruit juice in the chick drink with the big umbrella you're ordering another of at 10am is probably the best you've ever had in your whole fucking life.
First off, and in the interest of full disclosure, I went on this vacation with my mom:
(Feel free to make the obligatory lei/incest joke for yourself. I'm not here to do your dirty work.)
For those of you who don't know her, my mom is actually a kick-ass travel buddy. We always have fun together, she lets me take the reigns with the planning and never complains about my choices, and for a 65-year-old, she's game for just about anything. We usually get in our requisite one argument per trip, but this time we didn't fight once. (My sisters and her scrap a lot more often, but not me. That's chicks for ya.) And when we're together we laugh. A lot.
As obvious as the gay momma's boy joke is, I've never gotten why people sneer at the notion of taking vacation with family. I can be whorish and hedonistic at home whenever I want to; I live in fucking LA for chrisssake. When I shell out the dough for a good trip I want to do stuff I couldn't possibly do anywhere else, not stand around in yet another gay bar that looks exactly the every other gay bar in every other city in the world holding a strong but tasteless over-priced cocktail waiting to make eye-contact with the next Mr. Right Now. To me, people who go on vacation solely to do that are like the creepy trailer trash types who go to Vegas and spend their whole vacation pulling the lever on a slot machine.
Thanks to some nifty package deals on expedia.com (no, seriously), we spent the first half of the week on Oahu and the second on Maui. For the uninitiated, Oahu is the home of Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, and Waikiki Beach. Once a prime destination, lately it's become increasingly fashionable to bag on Oahu, usually because it's overbuilt, over-priced, horrifyingly bourgeois and has all the charm of Los Angeles.
Let me tell you, if LA had half this much charm I'd never fucking go anywhere else. What is wrong with people these days? "Oh, GOD, I'd never go to Honolulu, it's a congested mess...this year, Trevor and I are going to Borneo, where we'll be sleeping in a thatched hut for only $.03 a night, and photographing macaques in the rainforest with Jane Goodall!" Whatfuckingever. Call me when you get back to San Francisco so I can cuss you out. Again.
Sure, Oahu is built up. And even with the aforementioned bad reviews, I was still kind of shocked to see every chain restaurant imaginable on the main drag of a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific. But, and I can't really think of a better way to explain it, Oahu just works.
Unlike other built-up beach destinations (I'm looking at you, Ocean City, MD), Waikiki beach is so clean you could eat off the sidewalk. Despite the commercialized trappings, to me the place just oozed a certain kind of relaxed, self-evident charm. The vibe actually reminded me a lot of Cannes, but with big green mountains instead of centuries-old French architecture. And it has a near-perfect mix of gorgeous tanned eye-candy and fat middle-aged dudes with boobs to titilate me and soothe my ego, respectively.
Our hotel was a cheap high-rise, so I was expecting the worst.
As it turned out, you could spit on the beach from our front door:
...and watch the sunrise over Diamondhead from our window.
But the weirdly wonderful thing about Oahu is how "Grand Theft Auto" it is. By which I specifically mean that the place feels breathtaking in scale and has every cool thing you'd want on an island vacation, but can actually be traversed by car in under a half hour. It was about twenty minutes from Waikiki to the Windward (East) coast, all of which looked like this:
If it looks slightly gloomy, it's not. The air is warm and smells like fresh fruit. The roads are curvy and windy, and every inch of the coast is beautiful. (It's also where I got the McDonald's cup you all were laughing about in the previous Hawaii entry.)
We also visited Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona memorial, which I won't go into at any length, except to say that it was not nearly as dripping with "America, FUCK YEAH!"-type jingoism as expected (probably due at least partly to the massive amount of revenue from Japanese tourists in Oahu), and was actually very quietly beautiful. Bonus points for the well-done documentary flick narrated by Stockard Channing. Too bad I don't really believe it happened that way...but whaddya gonna do.
Pearl Harbor is also where I dropped the ball on the best kitsch-souvenir gift of all time, The Pearl Harbor Rubik's Cube. No shit: the classic 80's busy toy, but instead of color stickers, each side was a different photograph of the memorial, or, essentially, a mass grave. In the car, driving away not 20 minutes later, I began to realize the gravity of my mistake. I might never forgive myself for that one.
The other best-thing-in-the-universe on Oahu is Hanauma Bay. (Honorable mentions include the Mai-Tai's at our hotel bar, the Sashimi at Duke's Canoe Club and the coconut fried shrimp at Cheeseburger in Paradise.) Widely considered the best snorkeling in the Hawaiian islands, it's probably an overpriced tourist trap in an alternate universe, but in this one it's a nature preserve where $5 and a boring safety film gets you unlimited swimming time with tropical fish the size of housecats that are so tame they'll swim right up to your mask.
The water is warm, super-calm, and rarely more than 3' deep, so one can swim around for hours just checking out the wildlife below. Which I did. It's like going to the zoo, but getting to go in the cages and hang out with the animals. I could do it every day.
The best moment of the whole week happened here. It was at the very end, after a couple of continuous hours spent face-down in the water exploring the reef, just shortly after I'd decided I was cold and waterlogged and finally ready to go in, when I happened upon a giant motherfucking sea turtle, and we hung out for the next fifteen minutes or so.
Now, I know fish stories immediately call to mind exaggeration and inherently have a low credibility, but I'm not kidding when I say this guy was the size of a very large dog, easily 4' from nose to tail, and almost as wide. But, more importantly, when the sudden force of an overhead breaker brought me probably within an inch of his shell (we just barely avoided touching), he didn't start, bolt, or even flinch...just kept munching on reef stuff, gave me an over the shoulder glance, and went on swimming beside me. He went up for air once, which would have been an excellent time to politely excuse himself, but then came right back down to where he was. My least favorite character in "Finding Nemo" really doesn't do the species justice. It was incredibly beautiful.
Sorry, no pictures of that moment, folks. You'll just have to use your imagination.
There were also black sea slugs that looked like giant turds, but those weren't nearly as much fun. They just kind of sat there.
Then it was off to Maui, where you'll be relieved to know there was less worth writing about.
Now, don't get me wrong, Maui is beautiful. The food and drinks are great, and there's plenty of super-fun stuff to do there. But, given its spotless reputation as "everyone's favorite island" of the "oh my GOD if you only go one place" variety, I have to say it was kind of a letdown. It's pretty, sure, but in a way that's not totally dissimilar from parts of the California Coast. (You could say it's Santa Barbara with warmer water.) Also, I don't know what the people who rag on Oahu for being overdeveloped are smoking; Maui is wall-to-wall hotels on the beaches, with construction cranes everywhere. Sure, maybe there are fewer people, but there are also way fewer roads (about 3, to my count), so there's also constant, very slow traffic. Ugh.
But that's not the big problem.
The big problem is that everyone on Maui is retarded.
I don't just mean "laid back" or "relaxed" or "low key", I mean bona fide special-ed short bus fucking retarded. Don't even think about asking these people for directions; they'll overload you with vowel-laden Hawaiian street names and totally forget to mention that there isn't any signage anyway. And don't get me started on the service at the restaurants. Maybe it's something to do with the mowee-wowee. (I wouldn't know; I didn't get offered to purchase smoke-smoke-sense until my last night there. Fuckers.)
Mind you, this is a small price to pay for a cheap condo that's maybe 50 feet from the surf with a fantastic view of Molokai Island:
Almost beautiful enough to make you forget it's a leper colony. But, if I were planning a return trip tomorrow, I doubt Maui would be on my agenda. Seen it, it was fun, moving on. Oahu, on the other hand...I'd go back there in a New York minute.
Anyway, after dealing with an over-sharing pilot ("We're having some trouble with getting the landing gear to lock in place, folks, but we think it's just a bulb that needs to be replaced"), and the world's stupidest Alamo trainee (seriously, this bitch had to ask for help every time she made a keystroke), we finally ended up with the ugliest rental car on the island:
(No, that cup's from a different McDonalds.)
The other big disappointment on Maui was the superfuckingfamous "Road to Heavenly Hana", a 20+ mile drive on a winding coastal highway that's supposed to be the most breathtakingly beautiful thing you've ever seen.
Not that these pics are lending me any credibility, but we both agreed that it was "just okay". More specifically, if you've ever driven the PCH from LA to San Francisco (or vice-versa), there's not much different to see here, except bamboo and some really good banana bread at the midway point. Well, that and some really cool waterfalls you can stop and splash around in:
That's fresh water, by the way. It's freezing, but it was so fucking hot out that it totally worked. And the sun really is so fucking hot on Hawaii. It feels like being a black ant under God's magnifying glass.
Of course, there was this one particularly beautiful waterfall that required me to scale a steep rock face and then climb upstream a good ways off the path. The way was steep, so my mom decided to wait behind on the overpass while I took a look, and a dip. When I returned only a few minutes later, she told me that as soon as I'd disappeared from view a local had pulled up in a jeep and advised her "don't you go down there! That place can flash flood in a minute, and the next day they find the bodies way down there!" pointing at the rocky ocean cove below. Nice.
As it turned out, our penultimate night in Maui was also my mom's 65th birthday, so I took her to the best Luau on the island:
Yes, a Luau. One of those trashy tourist buffets where hot shirtless guys bury a pig in the ground:
And ply you with trashy girl drinks while you watch a bunch of dancers deliver a sanitized version of local history:
It was a blast, frankly. Make all the "Lilo and Stitch" jokes you like; the pork was juicy and sweet, the drinks delicious (and frequent), and the strangers we were seated with laughed at all my jokes. (Which is a must.)
A brief word, if I may, on Hawaiian cuisine, which I can't believe it's taken me this long to get to, and clearly played a major part in this trip: Hawaiian food is pretty much all junk food. Burgers, ribs, sugary glazings, fried seafood, and pineapple with everything. I fucking loved it.
Almost every restaurant has essentially the same menu as Island Burger in LA (or Chili's for that matter), regardless of price range. Except everything's at least twice as good as you've ever had it before (probably because it's twice as fresh), and all of it goes really well with massive quantities of rum. If you can wait the 2.5 hours for a waiter on Maui to take your order (and another 2.5 to get it right), it's some of the best comfort food in the world.
My only complaint about the food, however, is just how much pineapple they give you. As in, "here's your teri burger with a slice of pineapple on it, and some pineapple on the side, and your mai-tai with a big honkin' wedge of pineapple in it. Oh, and you ordered a side of papaya, but we're out of that, so would you like some pineapple instead?" Don't get me wrong, the shit's damn good, like it was pulled off the tree moments before arriving on your plate, but still...I must have had more pineapple that week than in the rest of my life to date.
Actually, if I had one overall complaint about Hawaii, it would be the massive number of homeless folks. They do a good job of keeping them off of the main thoroughfares and out of sight of the bourgeoisie, but you don't have to drive more than 15 minutes in any direction to reach a shanty town of plastic tarps and wheelchairs. Is there a difference between the urban homeless culture I'm used to and the supposed "beach bums" of Hawaii? I dunno. But it's the only thing about the place that bummed me out at all.
Anyhoo, the luau was a nice wrap-up to a pretty great trip. See, the thing is, while I can't take much credit for taking my mom to Hawaii on her birthday (which was really just a coincidence), this whole trip really was a gift I'd been wanting to give her for a long time. I don't wanna get too sappy here, but in the long, dark teatime of my soul that was the first couple years after Grad School, she not only helped me out a lot financially, but she never doubted me for an instant. Sure, your mom's the one who'll always love you and think you're "a great catch", even when you're not. But during those long, cold nights of endlessly re-cutting a stupid short film that was probably never going anywhere even if I did ever fucking finish it, she didn't waver for a second. That meant an awful lot. Still does.
Actually, truth be told, I've always dreamed of going to Hawaii since the time they went there on Sesame Street. Am I really the only one that remembers this?
As a final note, given the overwhelming popularity of the "McDonald's cup" posting, we made an active effort to include it in as many pictures as possible from then on. Here's another:
(Laugh it up; that effing coconut was five bucks.)
So that's it, really. Not very dramatic, I know. Good vacations never are.
But it was nice seeing you again. And I want you to know I thought of you at least once while I was away:
That is all(oha).