BOXES 237-238: Hawai'i 6: O'ahu.

You're at the Pali overlook on the island of O'ahu, where in 2002 Anne and I led a tour with nine UW-Sheboygan students, including Kim, whom you see in the lower left taking a photo. Stretching in the distance are the Ko'olau Mountains, which separate Honolulu and Waikiki to the south from the Windward Side that we're overlooking. This spot is of great historical importance--see here if you're curious--and it was one of many places we visited during our week-long stay on the island, following our visit to the Big Island that I described in my previous post.

We stayed at an Outrigger hotel in Waikiki, where we spent our first morning at the beach and our afternoon at the Honolulu Academy of Arts (now the Honolulu Museum of Art). On the second day we'd arranged for Anne's brother Bob to cater a picnic on the beach at the home of a Dutch friend of his--situated at Ka'a'awa on the Windward Side, an especially desirable location to us, because the district was the setting of a novel we'd studied in my Literature of Hawai'i course. In the photo below, Anne and Bob are in the water, the students on shore, Leo's house is hidden in greenery, and the highway runs behind the beach properties, along the base of the very high cliff.

Here's a more horizontal view. I must have been standing in shallow water, maybe on a sandbar, when I took these photos, though they might look like I was at a higher elevation.

And here are views from the beach, taken earlier in the day:

Leo's house was impressive:

But so were Bob's creations, including this plate of shrimp:

I have a few more photos from that afternoon, including ones with Mark and Bob enjoying their tropical drinks:

The next day we spent the morning at the Waipahu Plantation Village (which I photographed extensively on an earlier visit, BOXES 210-212) and the afternoon at the Bishop Museum. (I'm relying on a copy of our itinerary for the chronology, not memory!) In between we stopped at the Pali, where besides enjoying the stunning views we walked down (and back up) the Old Pali Road, now just a pathway, the paved road abandoned after a tunnel was dug to connect Honolulu with the Windward Side. In the two photos below, you can barely make out where the road ran along the cliffside.

I have absolutely no idea of what's going on in this next picture, or where it was taken. Was there a sudden shower, and everyone held out their hands at once? Is it a prayerful gesture? The next two pics are a mystery as well:

I have no memory of visiting this oceanside house or this elegant courtyard--in fact, I couldn't tell you if the courtyard belongs to the same house, though it's the next consecutive slide in the box. If any of the students see this post I hope they will enlighten me.

We spent a day on the North Shore, and stopped for lunch at a well-known restaurant called Jameson's-by-the-Sea. Here we are without and with flash:

Our main beach stop that day was Waimea. I've shown photos of this beach a number of times from other trips, but here it is in 2002:

In the photo below I don't think those are our students in the waves, but I could be wrong:

The next day we had a tour of the royal 'Iolani Palace near downtown Honolulu:

Afterwards we walked to Chinatown for a dim sum lunch:

But the next photo once again leaves me puzzled:

Is the woman with the Hawaiian headdress and lei a guide? If so, to what? What is the cloth or mat she is holding rolled up? Could we have simply encountered her as she was addressing some other group? Again, it will have to remain a mystery unless a student from the trip has a recollection.

My last photo of the students was taken as they posed ready to head back to the Mainland

Anne and I didn't join them on the plane (someone from campus would pick them up from the Milwaukee airport): we were staying two more weeks with Bob and Tripit. Before we left our Waikiki hotel I took this photo, a sort of still life with tropical flowers and tropical drinks (probably guava juice), plus the miniature Pink Palace (the Royal Hawaiian Hotel) in the snow-globe.

Bob and Tripit were still living on Wilhelmina Rise, with this great view of Diamond Head:

They had a very nice new kitty, named Laulau:

I see that Anne and I went out to lunch on one occasion where I took a couple of food pics:

Next I find a couple of pics that look like they were taken from hotel room windows--occasionally we did stay for a weekend with Bob and Tripit down in Waikiki when Bob was able to get a special rate. The first pic, with Diamond Head in the background, shows the Spanish-style towers of the Royal Hawaiian, quite a contrast to the modern highrises:

I also see that we went once again to the Honolulu Zoo, in Waikiki:

One afternoon we had a picnic near Sans Souci Beach with a couple of graduate student friends of Anne's, Georgiana and Steve. The only pics I have of them show them swinging on branches of a nearby banyan tree:

This sunset pic might have been from the end of that day, but I'm not sure:

On another occasion we went out to dinner with Bob and Tripit at an old-school restaurant called The Willows--a sort of Hawai'i equivalent to a Supper Club. Sorry that my red-eye removal wouldn't work on this photo or the next.

The gardens next to the restaurant may be where we took these next pics of each other. I should have been standing closer to Bob and Tripit, but I guess I wanted to take in the kitschy fountains.

I like the way this pic of a ginger flower turned out:

The one remaining slide in the box shows one more view of Waikiki Beach from in front of the Royal Hawaiian:

At this point in my project of scanning my slide collection, photo-editing each shot as needed, and posting the pictures here a slide box at a time, I am facing a bit of a challenge. Up through BOX 234 my many different photo developers always stamped each slide frame with the month and year of development and a consecutive number for each slide. As I've scanned each slide and stored it on my hard drive I've labeled it carefully: e.g., "BOX 221 23 "Anne in front of Canterbury Cathedral," and made a folder for each box: e.g., "BOX 221 Jan 1999 Canterbury, London, Sheboygan." But starting with BOX 235 my developer(s) stopped stamping any information on the slide frames. For BOXES 235-238, covering the Hawai'i trip I've just been showing you, I had to hand-number each slide and assign box numbers while jotting down place names on each box. I must have done this soon after getting the slides back.

But then I got lazy--and I am now faced with a shoebox containing 16 boxes of slides plus a ziploc bag with another box-and-a-half worth of loose ones. At least I did label eight of these boxes and number their slides: six boxes cover the trip Anne and I took in summer 2003 to Spain, Italy and Germany, and two show our 2004 visit to Hawai'i. But the other eight boxes and the bag are totally unmarked, so if I want this 'historical' blog to continue to follow chronological order--from slide to slide (though I occasionally reorder them for the sake of good storytelling) and box to box (a rule I've never broken)--I will have to digitize all the "mystery" slides first.

I got a digital camera for Christmas in 2005, at which point (if I recall correctly) I gave up buying slide film; but I'd still like to show you my slides from mid 2002 to late 2005. In those unlabeled boxes there should be pics from our January campus trips to Spain (2003), Canterbury once again (2004) and Belgium (2005), not to mention more family photos. So I had better get to work at once, probably starting with the ziploc bag.