Hawaii 2003

Bill and I went to Hawaii for eight nights... four on Oahu, right on Waikiki Beach, and four on Kauai, at the Marriott Beach Resort. We really, really didn't want to come home; against our better judgment, we came home anyway. Here are our pictures.

Waikiki Beach is very narrow; in fact, most of the sand was brought in in the 1950s to widen it. The sand has been washing out to sea ever since. That's Diamond Head crater in the background.

Our hotel (the Outrigger Waikiki) is home to Duke's, the most famous bar in town. Catamarans brought tourists who weren't staying nearby, to experience the bar.

We were told that Waikiki is so crowded that nobody goes there anymore, but we didn't encounter the towel-to-towel crush of humanity we'd been led to expect. It's really a wonderful beach.

The color and clarity of the water blew me away. The Caribbean pales in comparison. So do these pictures. All those dark dots out in the water are surfers, by the way, waiting for the next good wave.

Those umbrellas are at the hotel next door to ours, the Royal Hawaiian. The hotel is pink, too. There's a lot of pink in Hawaii. They like to call their pink "coral," though, just like we in Arizona like to call our pink "desert rose."

Off the beach, Waikiki is a madhouse of commercialism. There are areas with booths set up, just like in Mexican border towns, selling jewelry, shirts, and all manner of ticky-tacky. Then there are the buildings full of more upscale stalls with slightly higher-end products. This one has an enormous fish tank as its front window. The tank has a dozen or more kinds of fish, including sharks and rays. This staircase takes you up into a transparent tunnel built into the tank, where you can see the water and fishies all around. Way cool.

This ray seemed to settle right on the glass. Bill has seen lots of rays from the top in his diving trips, but never got such a good view from underneath!