BOXES 191-192: Hawai'i 2: O'ahu, Maui and Kaua'i.

Diamond Head, a little before sunset. We're on the grounds of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel at Waikiki, where tables have been set up for a luau that Anne and I and my in-laws were about to attend. It's 1994 and our second visit to Hawai'i: on this trip we hung out on O'ahu, visited Maui for the first time and Kaua'i for the second, and, after the arrival of Becky and Michelle, went to the Big Island as well.

First, I'll report very briefly on a conference I attended in Scottsdale, AZ that spring. It featured Native American filmmakers and included film showings as well as panel discussions among directors, producers and actors, plus a side trip to the Apache reservation south of Phoenix--a completely fascinating and enlightening experience. I have only four slides from that trip: two looking out windows at the hotel pool and two of the adjoining Scottsdale Civic Center, where the conference was held at the Center for the Arts. The weekend of sunlight, greenery and heat were very welcome during a chilly Midwestern spring.

My only other pics from early '94 are one of our cat Cotton and two of what seems to be a combination picnic spread and birthday party, presumably Michelle's in June:

And so on to this post's main event, the trip to Hawai'i. This time we didn't take photos at the airport (see BOX 186 and following for pics of our first trip), but I did take one of Anne, looking happy to be back in her favorite state, when we arrived at Bob and Tripit's Waikiki apartment building:

And here are the both of us--in a setting that might not look very tropical except for the welcoming leis:

The next photo takes us into the building, with Anne and Bob's brother Jim and his then-wife Lisa. We must have brought the Point beers (favorites of the brothers) from Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, I seem to have settled quickly into Hawai'i lifestyle:

And finally from this group of photos, Bob and Tripit's notoriously unfriendly (except to them) but good-looking cat, Poi:

The next set of photos all involve the Royal Hawaiian, built in 1927, and only a short walk from Bob & Tripit's. Below you see part of the grounds on the opposite side of the hotel from the beach:

And here is the main entrance. The famous pink color of the hotel is not captured at all well in this slide, though you do get a sense of the elegance of the grounds:

Beyond the hotel is this classic view of Diamond Head from the beach:

The Royal Hawaiian holds luaus on their patio facing the ocean: an evening of dinner with Hawaiian-style foods followed by a stage show featuring dancers from various Pacific islands. I seem to recall we had attended one with Anne's parents on our first visit, but this time it was just Bob & Tripit, Jim & Lisa, and Anne and me. I took photos of us as we entered and after we sat down:

And here we are standing with our mai tais, just beyond the beach:

I see that I also took photos of other guests arriving and of some of the performers:

And I tried, with little success, to photograph the fire dancers and others during the show:

In better focus is this sunset from Bob & Tripit's apartment window a day or two later:

One day we went on a hike through a forested area quite close to Honolulu:

Back in Waikiki, here is their street corner (Kuhio and Seaside), followed by a shot of palm trees against a sleek high-rise on Kalakaua Avenue:

A favorite place to visit, or just walk through on the way to the beach, was the open-air International Market Place, with its banyan trees:

At some point Anne and I took a side trip to Maui, an island we hadn't visited on our first trip. As I recall, our hotel was near the airport at Kahului--nondescript but centrally located. The first place where I took photos was the 'Iao Valley in West Maui:

A park in the valley had a statue honoring sugar cane workers, many of them immigrants from Japan in the decades before and after the turn of the 20th Century, when sugar cane was central to the Islands' economy:

Maui is essentially two volcanic uplands connected by an isthmus where most of the sugar plantations were located. Here's a view from West Maui looking across the isthmus to the slope of 13,000-ft.Mt. Haleakala :

We were struck by the sight of one of the few remaining cane processing plants:

You can see cinder cones dotting the landscape of the lower Haleakala slope:

You need to drive around the south shore of West Maui to get to the resort areas of Lahaina and Ka'anapali. Below is a view of the mountains of West Maui seen from the western shore:

And looking in the other direction you can see the island of Lanai:

We crashed a really great hotel pool along the Ka'anapali coast:

But we were also interested to see cane growing wild at the side of the highway, and a red-dirt road leading into a cane field (we'd been reading fiction about plantation workers on this part of the island back in the 1930s):

That evening, when we had dinner at a Ka'anapali hotel restaurant, I took my first restaurant-food slide ever:

It was an ocean fish with what looks like a mango salsa on a bed of zucchini with a macadamia nut sauce: the sort of thing you can find nowadays in countless fine-dining places, but in 1994 it seemed wildly imaginative to us. We also took pictures of each other at the restaurant:

On another day we visited Maui's only winery, on the southwestern slope of Haleakala. (They made a pineapple wine as well as a couple of grape varieties.)

And we visited resorts in nearby Waimea. From one pool there was an especially memorable sunset, though my slide does not capture the full range of colors:

Another day we were on the northwestern slope of Haleakala, where we stopped in the former sugar plantation town of Pa'ia:

A once-common sight in Hawai'i towns was a general store, often named after its Japanese proprietor. This one was still around in 1994:

From Pa'ia we began driving along the narrow winding road along the north coast of East Maui toward the isolated town of Hana. We didn't get all the way to Hana on this occasion but the part of the road we did drive was as scenic as we could want:

There were waterfalls alongside the road, some with swimmable pools; and beaches as well:

One especially impressive view was looking down upon taro patches:

From Maui we flew to Kaua'i to spend more time on the North Shore, one of our favorite places on our first trip to Hawai'i. The photo below is of Kauapea (aka Secret) Beach, with Kilauea Lighthouse in the distance; there was a trickly waterfall along the cliff.

And here, where we had taken photos on our first trip, is the lookout over the Hanalei Valley:

There was a fine waterfall at the edge of the highway, near the Hanalei lookout point. But we spent the most time on the broad Hanalei Beach, with its great views of the mountains. The next two photos are pretty similar--you can decide which is better:

Likewise, I took two similar photos from the beach at Ke'e, looking west toward the Na Pali cliffs--they differ mostly in the views of the beachgoers in or near the water:

I'll throw in a shot of a cardinal that joined us on the beach at Ke'e. My last shot from Kaua'i on this trip is of yet another beach--I think this one is Lumahai, between Ke'e and Hanalei, used for the movie of South Pacific:

We flew back to O'ahu and greeted Becky and Michelle when their plane arrived. As I mentioned at the top of this post, we visited the Big Island with them as well as continuing to hang out with our Hawai'i relatives. I'll show the photos from this part of the trip next time.