Friday

Honolulu

Hawaii

One of the passengers, easily recognisable because he seems to favour for his daily dress long black trousers, with braces (!), and an Hawaiian shirt (very poor quality as well), is videoing our arrival in each port; I don’t mean the few minutes as we tie up at the pier but hours before; this morning he set up his tripod at least 90 minutes before lines were cast ashore. On days we are at sea he is videoing the sunrise. Be very wary if you ever get an invitation to go around to his place to see his holiday videos. Years ago someone filmed the exterior of the Empire State Building for 24 hours; basically all you could see were lights going on and off and night turning to day turning to night; this film had a very limited release at the cinema. Maybe this passenger has taken up the mantle of that long forgotten auteur.

On the October long weekend in 1986 the US Navy battleship Missouri visited Sydney. In those more innocent times visiting naval ships were usually open for an inspection by the public. By inspection I mean that you were allowed to wander around on the deck and ask sailors questions. The visit by the Missouri, then the largest and probably only remaining battleship on active service, received lots of media attention especially when the ship demonstrated off the coast of Sydney the firing of a broadside (all guns at once) of her nine 16 inch guns which each could fire a shell weighing a tonne about 40 kilometers (the guns were fired away from Sydney and not towards it). So on the Sunday of the public inspection the Buchanan boys plus father Peter headed for Garden Island. We weren’t the only ones to have this idea; about 200,000 people packed into Woolloomooloo and after things threatened to turn dangerous the inspection was cancelled and everyone, except a fortunate few who had got there at dawn, went home disappointed.

It’s now 26 years and a few days since that long weekend Sunday in 1986 and today I finally visited the Missouri; which is now permanently berthed at Pearl Harbor naval base. The main, or most popular,   attraction at Pearl Harbor is the sunken wreck of the USS Arizona which during the Japanese attack on 7 December 1941 took a direct hit by a bomb to its powder magazine and it blew up and sank so rapidly that many sailors were trapped inside. To visit the Arizona or the viewing platform which floats above the wreck is a tedious process as a limited number of people can be accommodated on the viewing platform at any one time and access is via boat. I had decided long before arriving here that a visit to the Arizona would, in my view, not be appropriate, and that the remains of the long dead men who had been trapped in the sunken wreck should be left alone.

So I got on public transport (bus number 20) to visit the Missouri. I paid my admission charge of $30. It is beyond ironic that announcements on the transport at the Pearl Harbor naval base are made in English and Japanese. The Missouri is nearly 300m long and 35m wide. It could go through the Panama Canal with just 300mm clearance on each side. The Japanese surrender at the end of World War II was signed, while the ship was in Tokyo Bay, on the small deck outside the Captain’s cabin. Interestingly, on the Japanese copy of the surrender document the Canadian Representative signed in the place marked for the French representative; so every else had to sign one place below where they should have signed. This left the New Zealand representative, as last on the page, with nowhere to sign so he had to scribble his signature across the bottom of the page.

Only one deck below the main deck is open for inspection, plus all the upper decks. The deck below the main deck is a rabbit warren of rooms and passage ways and all the doorways have a high threshold so you have to remember to step up or fall over. This reminded me of a story my childhood friend Ian Hutton told me many years ago about a teacher he’d had at school (Barker College) who’d been in the Navy for so long that he couldn’t get out of the habit of stepping high for any doorway; a habit that his pupils unkindly mimicked with great exaggeration whenever the teacher was looking. Of course this recollection made me laugh out loud as I went through one of the doorways; this caused a bewildered look on the faces of those who were following me; which probably intensified as I laughed going through each successive door until my merriment subsided to a low chuckle.

The Missouri fought in World War II, the Korean War in the early 1950s, was mothballed from 1955 to the 1980s and then refurbished and was engaged in the liberation of Kuwait after it was occupied by Iraq in 1990/1991. The most common bit of equipment left in the administrative offices on the ship is IBM golf ball typewriters; I hadn’t seen one of them for a long time.

After the Missouri I went aboard a submarine from WW II, the Bowfin. Movies about submarines in WWII don’t convey the cramped claustrophobic feeling that envelopes you as soon as you get to the bottom of the ladder. If you can imagine 70 people living and working (for a couple of months) in a low-ceilinged corridor  about 30m long that is crammed with equipment then that’s what it’s like.

I caught bus number 20 back to near my ship and had a late lunch. I then walked off to find a post office. On the way I saw the Iolani Palace, the only royal place in the United States and the nearby statue of King Kamehameha. I also saw many fine public buildings, none of which had been built in the last 50 years. The more recently constructed Federal Courts building looks like it has been designed to withstand an armed attack; which perhaps is true. The central business district reminded me of Brisbane; maybe it was the heat, the vegetation or how slowly everyone was walking.

I then tried to catch a bus to Waikiki but after waiting 20 minutes I decided to get a taxi. Honolulu seems to have fewer taxis than any other major city I have visited. Or maybe the drivers were all having an afternoon nap. Eventually I got a taxi and went to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. This is a pink coloured hotel is on the beach at Waikiki; built long before the high rise towers that now surround it. I wandered through the spacious public areas of the hotel to the beach. Without the background of Diamond Head Waikiki would be a rather pathetic beach; some of the hotels don’t even have sand in front of them and at its deepest the beach is about 40m from hotel boundary to water.

I had a look around the area behind the beach and it looks just like Surfers Paradise; many of the shops are exactly the same. So I wasn’t much impressed by Waikiki.

Caught bus number 20 back to the ship. I think it odd that the bus company doesn’t provide a map and some timetable information at bus stops frequented by tourists. Doubly odd as they boast on the side of the buses that they are the best bus company in the US (perhaps that is an instructive comment on the quality of public transport in the US). At least the driver on the bus was very entertaining and announced at one stop that it was the last stop and we’d all have to get off; as angry passengers surged towards the front of the bus he shouted out “just kidding” and put the bus in motion.

The theme from Hawaii Five O has been in my head all day. When I got off the bus near the ship there was a police car stopped at a car accident. I was tempted to go over to the policeman and say ‘book him Danno”; but I resisted.

A lawyer on holidays is still a lawyer. The fine print on the reverse side of bus tickets grants each passenger a free transfer from one bus to another at designated transfer points, provided that the transfer is made within two hours of originally purchasing the ticket (a ticket is marked with the time of purchase). A warning is given that the right to transfer must not be given or sold to another person. The penalty for such behavior is a fine of up to $2000 or up to one year in prison! Two points spring to mind; how would the sale of gift of the ticket to another person be detected and why is the penalty potentially so harsh? Also, because of the two hour limit on transfer if you were to give or sell to the transfer right another person then you’d have to effect it by prearranged meeting or soliciting such an arrangement at a transfer point. As the fare on the buses is a flat $2.50 for any distance travelled I can’t imagine that the potential for profit making is very large. Anyway that’s what occupied my mind for about 15 seconds on the first bus trip of the day. I was then on the alert for people offering me second hand tickets at bus stops but I saw no evidence of this secondary market in transportation documentation.

Tonight’s movie is Blue Hawaii starring Elvis, and there is a pool party at 9pm which is the perfect excuse to put on an Hawaiian shirt and have a cocktail, or three, with a little umbrella in it.

At 11pm we depart Honolulu and start to sail south west; we will be at sea for 5 days, and cross the Equator, before we get to our next port in American Samoa.

there is some 'banding' visible in some of the Mauna Kea photos; this is because i tried to reduce them in size.