We sailed again at night. You'll remember that we undocked at 8:02 pm. At each
port a local pilot comes aboard to dock the ship in his port, so at 6:50 am the
Honolulu Pilot boarded and we were docked in Honolulu by 7: 23 am. The weather
was good and the skies were mostly sunny. Now the temperature at noon reached
30c. Our cabin faced the quayside so we couldn't see anything except warehouses
.
Honolulu is a big city of 800,000 people. Ben and I left the ship and went ashore. You insert your special room key in a recorder. That way when it's time for the ship to leave they know if anyone is still ashore.
We took a three hour walk along the shore, through a pleasant park. There were
many palm trees, of course. Before that we walked along a palm lined street that paralleled the shore, passing marinas on the other side, and small lawns and lovely garden, and trees on our side, crossing streets at crosswalks until we were able to turn up into the city. There were beds of pretty flowers in bloom everywhere. That's pretty much the case everywhere in these islands.
We soon found a shopping plaza that had a Long's Drug Store. Sometimes it's a good thing to find a chain store when you travel, because you know what you can expect and can buy what you need. In this case it was useful and we bought what
we wanted for my cold. I also purchased a very large comb with long teeth, just
the kind that stands on piled up hair to hold a Spanish mantilla. The comb has
a garland of white flowers and leaves across the top. Only yesterday I sat outside in our own garden under the sun umbrella and busied myself with glue and things in order to repair five or six pretty things that had come apart. Two sets
of earrings, one pair of platform shoes, one glasses case, a napkin holder and
that comb. The flowers came off. I reglued it better and look forward to wearing it again soon. :-)
The flowers are small, four petalled white ones and the real ones smell to me like jasmine. I found the same flowers growing in Israel. They were planted along the path to the Prison of Akka where Baha'u'llah was imprisoned. I took a few
that day to press in my prayer book.
We didn't like the big city of Honolulu that soon turned into canyonlike streets
with handsome office towers. But an office tower is still an office tower, even in Honolulu. I'm sorry if I disappoint you. No matter how tropical and famous, Ben and I still don't like big cities. We found the beach off the park was not
in good condition for swimming. Waves were interesting. We saw people. The most memorable person I saw was a very large Hawaiian woman in a wheelchair in Longs. She looked like a Hawaiin queen. She also didn't meet my eyes though there
were opportunities. Later I did some internet research and discovered that all
is not peaceful in paradise. There are people of original Hawaiian heritage who would like their island back. There is a movement to try to attain that. It
wouldn't surprise me if she was one of them.
We decided that if we ever take this trip again we won't even go ashore at Honolulu. Of course, many people took tours. People from the U.S. were particularly
interested to see Pearl Harbour where the raid on their base and ships there finally brought the U.S.A. into the Second World War. There are rumours now that
Pearl Harbour was allowed to happen so that the American people would be willing
to enter that war. I don't know if they're true or false. U.S. foreign policy
traditionally always used to tend to be isolationist and turned inward. They preferred to stay away from European Wars, and who can blame them? Ben and I weren't interested in going to Pearl Harbour though, so we were back on our ship in
good time to dress for dinner. At twelve midnight we undocked and set sail for
our next port of call with the strange name of Nawiliwili.
These ports aren't really twelve hours or so apart, so what happens is that the
ship sets sail, and in the wee small hours of the night when they near the next
port they dawdle along until its almost time. Then they arrive, the harbour pilot comes out and they dock again. That allows the guests to have the evening and beginning of the night of sailing so that it's pleasant on deck. Then the next day there's another new and somewhat different port of call to be explored.
We sailed along what is known as "the Wild Coast" of Kaui. It was interesting to watch it from the ship, and the land certainly did look wild and unsettled by
people. There was lots of white spray shooting high up from between rocks and the long mountains seemed to rise right out of the sea. They were tall and and
stern looking, and looked as though they were pleated vertically, I've never seen such mountains before.
We arrived at Lahaina where I sent Ben ashore to scout things out. He came back
about 11 am. while I had nursed that blighted cold. By now I had a bad cough and was glad I had stuff along with me to help cope. We went ashore and saw a museum and a great banyan tree that had been brought from India. I liked the banyan with it's many trunks. It was a huge tree filling a large square. There were
benches underneath, and many birds in the tree(s). The museums were both interesting. Security was very high, as always, to get back on the ship. Of course
Hawaii is a U.S. state and they were attacked on 9/11, so they are exceedingly careful now.
While Ben was away I had used some time to return a book about Hitler I had borrowed from the ship's library. Hitler was even worse than I thought. He used his artistic talents to make extermination of the Jews worse, along with some black humour. I concluded that he consciously knew he was doing evil and did it with pleasure. He was terrible, monstrous. As he grew more jealous and hating he
did worse. He used thuggery, murder and more to get where he got. By then he had learned he could do whatever he wanted, and so he did. He wanted to reshape
humanity to his own ideas. He died an ignominious death. The judgement of God
upon him.
Regretably I was so sick that I didn't write much in my journal until Wednesday
when we were at anchor in Kona. Monday we docked at Nawilwili. The weather was
good although the sky was partly cloudy and temperature was 24 c. We undocked
after a relatively brief time there in that small place, at 1:54 pm. It was a
pleasant place, but I wasn't really well enough to appreciate it.
By 4:45 pm we were scenic cruising as described above, along the Na pali Coastline. By 5:25 pm we commenced sailing on to Lahaina. At 6:42 am we were again at
anchor, and by noon the weather was good and the sky mostly sunny. The temperature was up again, to 31 c. 10:50 pm was Anchors aweigh and we cruised on overnight.
Wednesday at 6:41 we were again at anchor and the weather was still good and mostly sunny, temperature was 26c. We stayed in port until 5:02 pm. By 10:41 pm we were watching Mount Kilauea, a live volcanic mountain with streams of red lava
pouring down her sides into the ocean. We were too far away for me to say it was a spectacular view.
At last, that day I enjoyed being ashore. We all wore stick-on identifier markers (round, orange, with a silhouette of the Holland America Line ship printed on
them,) for the tender that took us from the ship where it was anchored out in the water, and not docked. The tender was one of our life-boats. They are covered and can carry many people. The tender made a number of trips back and forth
carrying people who wanted to go ashore, and those who were ready to return.
We wanted to see the fish and ocean botrtom from a glass-bottomed boat. It was
an excellent choice. A nice, clean and natural thing to do. The glass-bottomed
boatwas different from the one we were on in last time we were in Mexico. That
one had a long area of glass down the centre of the boat and seats on both sides. The Hawaiian boat had two seats on both sides with a path in the centre. All seats faced the prow of the boat and each had its own glass area so that people in front of you were looking a little ahead of what you could see, and those behind you a little after you had seen whatever it was. There was a lot of excitement as we identified various varieties of fish.
Continued with more about the glass-bottomed boat, a sea turtle, pearl ring, and
so on.
