Welcome to Honolulu

 After the great cities on our route, Cairo, Mumbai, Delhi, Singapore, Hong Kong, Osaka, Nagoya, Tokyo-Yokohama, Honolulu is just a minnow. It boasts barely some 370,000 people and is the largest city on the island of Oahu, which itself has barely 1 million inhabitants. In fact 80% of the popultion of the Hawaii Islands live in Oahu, although it is far from the biggest island in the archipelago. 

Certainly, as Borealis slid into Honolulu harbour it looked far more welcoming than Hong Kong. The immediate surround of our pier consisted of low at most two storey buildings, with the Aloha Tower, built in the 1920s the most dominant feature at the quayside. Just to make this even more homely a giant full arch of a rue rainbow appeared over the harbour entrance, perhaps replacing the wide concrete bay bridges that dominated our East Asian harbour entrances. Aloha indeed. Until we came across the immigration rules. I think that the instructions from Sammi over the tannoy and the organizers from the ship's immigration department became somewht contradictory. We were told that we had to all be cleaed by immigration at the terminal getting there deck by deck. She stared with decks 7 and then 6, so Albina turned up with all our paperwork, including our passport, photocopy of our psssport, the ESTA visa aproval form, the landing certificate, our ship's yellow key card and our excursion tocket. The queue was still surprisingly short so we faced an immigartion officer within less than 5 minutes. He took imprints of our fingers and thumbs, checked our passports on his laptop and handed them back. No interest in any other document. Puzzled, we returned to the ship and reported to the Neptune Theatrefor our tour roll call. There the instructions had been different. If we were on an excursion we should only go through immigration as a tour group. When our tour was called, back then we went to the terminal to queue for immigration inspection. When we told the crew stewards thaat we had been through this course already, we were sidelined through a seperate door and found ourselves oustide the terminal with the coaches. No other documents were necessary.

Although eventually we got through so quickly we still had to wait more than half an hour for all the other tour members to go through immigration and come into our coach. A black coach awaited us. Our guide drove the coach himself and gave a running commentary on everything we passed, adding his own little joke puns at our expense. He would give us flowery Hawaiian names for certain plants, such as types of banyan trees, and then twist the names into mock functions of the trees in English. The high rises near the waterfront and the commercial centre have distinctive styles and do not try to cram the skyline. Each such building shows architectural flair and in the case of the residential buildings look like highly desirable residences that stare outwardly at the attractive surrounding scenery, and not inwardly at each other. The dominant materials appear to be glass and steel, often blue in colour. I understand that these central flats are priced at over $2mln.

The driver-guide led us through the Ala Moana Drive with its large open air shopping mall, and then the gorgeous sandy bay forming Waikiki beach with its army of hotels overlooking it. He made mention of a tiger shark attack a couple of days ago, but I am not sure if he was joking or not. Then he drove across the wide Alawai Canal, passing low lying suburbs until we reached the relaxed and extensive campus of the University of Hawaii with its lecture hall and libraries named after U.S. Presidents and other rich benefactors, while the impressive university theatre building was named after J F Kennedy. Of course this being Hawaii and in the middle of the ocean, it is not surprising that the university is most renowned for its marine biology department. 

Then we drove into a genuine crater from an ex volcano, called the Punchbowl Crater, It now hosts an impressive National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, beautifully laid out with 30,000 graves and 74 memorial stones dedicated to soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines who served or died in action in the Pacific theatre. c. The graves include famous commanders, recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honour for their valour in battle, unidentified victims on the USS Arizona killed during the Pearl Harbour attack, victims worked to death in Japanese POW camps and even an astronaut killed in the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986.  The centrepiece of the Cemetery is a wide grass alley dominated by the Honolulu Memorial in white stone, which includes a chapel and the figure of Lady Columbia, symbolizing the grieving wives and mothers of America. Its side panels commemorate more than 27,000 servicemen missing in action or drowned with unmarked graves in the Pacific. The Monument is separated from the wide avenue below by a magnificent and high stone staircase. It is a very impressive sight enriched by the panoramic view of Oahu Island and the Koolau Mountains behind.

We drove back down into Honolulu through Chinatown and eventually to the iconic buildings of historic Honolulu. There was the delightful Iolani Palace, a singular mixture of European and Hawaiian styles with 2 stories fronted by long balconies with Ionian columns. It has the fairytale daintiness of what I might call hawaiian rococo. It is topped at the centre by a shorter third storey. It could be the palaceof a magical kingdom, but in fact it was the very real palace of the last three kings of Hawaii before American businesses smothered the state and made the popular last queen, Liliʻuokalania, a prisoner in her own palace and imposed direct U.S. rule This ruritanian structure possessed electricity, telephones and proper plumbing earlier than the White House and Buckingham Palace. So say the Hawaians at least. It was also the only royal residence in the United States. Around it were the elegant symbols of American administration and culture. These include the equally imaginative Supreme Court with its two long balconies, topped with 2, not one, extra storey at the middle suggesting the superiority of the judiciary over the executive. So very American. In front of the Supreme Court and facing the Iolani Palace there is a striking mejestic statue of King Kamehameha the Great, the founder of the dynasty which united Hawaii at the beginning of the XIX century. This statue rivals the Aloha Tower as the most iconic builing in Honolulu. Alongside the Supreme Court was an impressive clusterof banyan trees, that could, for all I know, be just one banyan tree linked underground by its route as well as shielded into forming one large canopy. Then there is the State Capitol, which is not the usual domed classical building you find in other Amercian state capitals, but a low lying columned buiding dwarfed not only surrounding building but also trees. We also passed St Andrews Cathedral with its elegant front garden, the Kawalhao Hawaian City Church, and, a little further down the street, the Honolulu Museum of Art. 

Once we had had a chance to get out of the coach to do some photographing of these buildings, the guide told us that he had completed the whole tour on his programme in the space of 2 hours, even though it should have lasted 3 hours. He suggested we go towards Pearl Harbor and although we had no tickets he promised us the possibility of taking a picture of the USS Missouri, the battleship on which the Japanese prime minister eventually signed the articles of surrender. He swerved this way and that around the car parks and across the approach road until eventually he drove over a bridge and managed to stop and allow us to take a difficult picture from the coach. All the time he regaled with stories of the tragedies which befell the sailors on the vessels which were sunk and pointed out that the Americans also lost 340 planes that day to 29 Japanese losses. It was of course a surprise attack bedore the issue of a declaration of war, and to all Amercians it was "a day of infamy", similar in effect to the 7/11 attack on New York and the Pentagon. He also praised Elvis Presley's contribution to erecting the USS Arizona Memorial. There is a memorial there to each battleship that the Japanese sunk.

We returned to the pier terminal and waited for what we thought was a free shuttle serviceto the nerest shopping centre at Ala Moana Boulevard. Unfortunately that appeared to be a misunderstanding and we had waited fruitlessly for more than an hour. Even after the driver of a minicoach oferred to take us and four other passengers there for free Albina had felt so upset by the fruitless wait that she returned to the ship.

However I took advantage of the lift and arrived at Ala Moana Shopping Centre which, I was told, was the biggest open air shopping centre in the world. It was certainly a well structured and aesthetically pleasing lay out with the main shops at first floor level, playgrounds and boutiques on the top floor and the main food court on ground level. I ordered some chicken fingers and friesat the food ourt, wandered around th shops, bought myself a Hawaiian shirt, and then wandered pver Alana Moana Park and its adjacent beach, which was just a short distance away from the more famous Waikiki Beach, which we had earlier seen from the coach. In both cases the sand was pristinely beautiful and the sea calm and clear. I photographed a newly wed couple posing for photographs standing barefoot at he waters' edge, kis playing in the sand, and some scantily dressed young ladies displaying their bum cheeks. I then followed the Ala Mana Boulevard back in the direction of the harbour. Some helpful young Hawaiian ladies helped to choose which bus i needed to catch to get to the Aloha Tower shopping complex. The fare was only 3 US dollars, so I was able to avoid an expensive taxi fare. The Tower itself was imposing and when it was built in 1927 it was the highest building on the island. It is still dominant in the harbour area. Unfortunately it was closed, so I decided to complete a 25 minute walk back to Pier 9 where Borealis was docked.

That evening I handed back my passport and watched a Hawaiian Hula Show in the theatre from a troupe of Hawaiian dancers, including some quite young children. Their dancers are more melodious than rhythmic but the most common feature is either a dance with pairs of sticks or a sweeping arm movement as they chant their laments to their imprisoned Queen Liliʻuokalania. Quite effete and not really my kind of music. Albina was already in bed when I got back. I wrote up some notes on the events of the day, took a shower and went to bed.