Wednesday 8/4 - Exploring the Island Past and Present

Ultra-busy day on the island today, with A LOT to say about it, so pardon me if I philosophize for a bit.

Wednesday morning we got up early to catch a tour bus to go to Pearl Harbor.  The tour was going to take us out there (about a 35-40 minute drive with traffic), get admission to the USS Arizona memorial (though admission tickets are free, it's helpful to secure them with a group so you can be guaranteed not to have to wait), and then take a quick sightseeing tour of downtown Honolulu on the way back.

The first thing that should be said about Pearl Harbor is that every American should try to visit there at least once.  Even though the attacks on the Pacific fleet took place almost 37 years before I was born, their importance in terms of the impact of American involvement in World War II and the subsequent emergence of the United States as the preeminent superpower in the world (and not Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan) cannot be overstated.

A sobering reminder that our freedom is certainly not free.

Though it is understandable that not all Americans will be able to visit this site, certainly anyone visiting the island of O'ahu should make an effort to go.  It's probably the least that we can do to show our appreciation for the efforts of that generation-- and it kind of annoys me when I hear (as I did recently) that someone was "bored out of their skull by the history" when they visited the memorial.  Anyone who appreciates the freedom that we enjoy in this country owes it to themselves to go.

 After taking the short ferry ride from the visitors' center to the memorial, two things struck me.  The first is that parts of the sunken ship actually stick out of the water and are therefore visible above the surface.  I was kind of taken aback by that.  I had known that the memorial is constructed in a way that you can see the ship resting below, but it had never occurred to me that the harbor waters would be so shallow that actual gun turrets and other high-reaching parts of the mighty battleship would be so easily visible over the water level.  Seeing those added a whole new realization to the experience that what you are looking at is truly real, and we're talking about something which is not a fabrication of Disney or CGI effects but instead an actual human tragedy and a reminder of the consequences and risks of war.

Secondly, I was struck by something else you can see on the surface--oil.  According to our bus driver and tour guide Frank, the Arizona still holds 500,000 gallons of oil which is trapped within the hull of the ship.  It is clearly visible-- the shiny oily film which has been leaking from the doomed ship for almost 70 years, and which apparently is the cause of a major policy debate of how best to handle the oil.  If divers go in to attempt to patch the leaks, they are in many ways intruding on a hallowed burial site of almost 1,000 people.  If they don't, obscene amounts of oil will continue to leak into Pearl Harbor for decades (maybe centuries), and who knows the long-term continued environmental impact.  So it is clearly a delicate balancing act there.  (We have a photo of the oil but it didn't come out great.)

One of the gun turrets on the Arizona is visible poking out of the water behind us.

At the harbor you can also tour the USS Missouri (where the final Japanese surrender of WWII was signed in 1945) and the USS Bowfin submarine, but we passed on both those tours and instead watched a video of the attacks and bought a souvenir newspaper from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin from 12/7/41.

USS Bowfin submarine in back, memorials to deceased military in the Pacific in front.

On the way back to Waikiki, we were treated to a tour of downtown Honolulu from Frank, who had a nice personal touch to his tour, telling everyone where he went to high school and where his parents bought houses, and told us all about the schoolyard bully of his childhood who is now the city police chief, and takes a group of friends (including Frank) out to dinner once a month, I guess to atone for his bullying way back when.

Downtown Honolulu isn't really anything to get worked up over, as it lacks the history and sightseeing possibilities of a city such as Boston or New York or San Francisco.  We did get to see a few interesting things, such as some of the Hawaiian royal palaces and other remnants from Hawaii's days as a kingdom.  He also showed us the neighborhood where the president grew up, the apartment building he lived in with his grandparents, where his school was, and the basketball court he used to play on.

This is something historical in Honolulu... I probably should have written down what it was.

According to Frank, this is where Obama used to ball as a kid.  His apartment was about a block away across the street.

Driving a convertible is the perfect way to let what's left of my hair to blow in the wind.

Back in Waikiki and with the solemn part of the tour behind us, it was time to let loose a little.  We picked up our rental car, a sleek Volvo convertible, and immediately drove up to O'ahu's North Shore.  I was amazed at how close it was (it couldn't have taken us more than 45 minutes to get up there) but then you realize that you are, after all, on an island, and it's not like you're driving halfway to Peoria or something.  After we had lunch in the cute town of Hale'iwa, we decided to check out some sites from the filming of LOST which we had done some research on.

Basically the entire series of LOST was shot entirely on the island of O'ahu.  Knowing that we were going to take a full LOST tour on Thursday, I found some sites that were not going to be covered on the official tour.

(If you're not a LOST fan or have no interest in our brushes with television history, then skip most of the next section.)

First we stopped at an off-the-beaten-path beach called Papa'iloa Beach, where most of the scenes of the survivors' camp were filmed.

Scene from Season 1 episode "Homecoming" (not our picture)

Same backdrop-- the part to the left on the other side of the orange fence is private property, which was the camp.

Is that Jen or Juliet Burke? (Tomorrow Jen will briefly get to BE Juliet for a bit.)

One of the locals probably thought that Hurley was back when they saw me.

The survivors' camp.  There's the tree on the right where Sawyer's tent was! (See below)

Taken from lostvirtualtour.com

Later we ended up at Waimea Valley Falls, which is where Kate and Sawyer found the briefcase and went for a swim in the waterfall pool.  The pool here was great-- about 30 feet deep, gorgeously clean water, echoing the force of the thundering water coming down from above.  On TV you would never be able to tell that there's actually a concrete road leading up to it and lifeguards guarding the swimming area.

Sawyer and Kate found the waterfall in Season 1 "Whatever the Case May Be"...

... and went for a swim

Looks like the real waterfall doesn't have the full CGI effect of raging rapids

I'm not a strong swimmer, embarrassingly there's a noodle under the water there somewhere

This looks more like the thunderous rapids I wanted to describe it as

This may have been Sawyer's house.  Ahhh, who knows, they all look the same!

Later on we found the YMCA camp which was used as the base village for the Others (and also of course for the Dharma Initiative) which may have been the creepiest location of all, considering the contrast between what happens there in real life and what the on-screen location was.

Gazebo was clearly visible in the show; couldn't find the famous swingset though.

Glad there was no poisonous gas being released in an act of genocide while we passed by.

Not LOST-related, but another stop on our Wednesday jaunt around the island was Turtle Bay, a place where giant turtles apparently just come up on the shore, relax and chill out for a while in the sun, and then head back into the water when they feel like it.  Click on the video below to see one in action.

This turtle is either twice the size of a human... or a great photographic experiment in perspective.

Odds are that these turtles were rather annoyed that a bunch of gawking idiot humans were disturbing their beach time.

Finally, we stopped at a place called Mokule'ia Beach, which is where they filmed a lot of the nondescript beach sites in LOST (which is to say, generic beach settings with not a lot of background so it's hard to tell exactly which scenes use it).  More importantly, the waves here were pretty strong.  Certainly not the kind that would intimidate a hardened year-round North Shore beads-around-neck long-hair surfer dude with a nasty six-pack who calls you "brah," but definitely the type that were able to knock over this unidentified, unfortunate pasty-skinned landlubber in the video below.

Above, getting ready to go mano-a-mano with the mighty Pacific tides... and below, failing miserably.

Overall, a very successful day on the island.  TOMORROW: Ryan and Jen ride the waves at Waikiki, and the real LOST tour in the afternoon.