Hawaii Part 1 - What Not to do in Oahu

As travel destinations, the Hawaiian islands of Oahu and Hawai’i (also known as the Big Island) offer unique delights and an interesting use of apostrophes, but the experience of travelling with two small kids is as about as rewarding as being caught in a lava flow.


There could be no worse way to start your overseas voyage than spending 10 hours overnight in economy class with a one-year old and a three-year old who refuse to sleep. Maybe it’s the excitement of flying for the first time in memory but once we’d taken off and the excitement wore off (the 3yo was so excited he screeched in delight at take off and couldn’t shut his mouth for 10 minutes) the battle for diversions commenced.

Food is the great diversion of course and airlines know it. Sure Qantas had supplied kiddies meals but the only difference between them and adults meals was their juice came in poppers instead of those plastic cups that explode when you peel the top off them. What on earth made Qantas think a one-year old could stomach molten hot pasta? So of course Dad (yours truly) ate three servings of pasta for dinner that night while the kids ate bread, butter, ice cream and chocolate and not necessarily in that order.

Of course there was alcohol too but the wife wouldn’t let the kids have any. The puritan wouldn’t put them on drugs either thinking that being a night flight they’d have no trouble sleeping. Har. We also both thought we’d all have personal seat-back entertainment consoles too. Wrong again. So much for settling down to a night of movie watching while the kids watch cartoons.

The Qantas kids toy pack of crap stickers and a pathetic version of an etch-a-sketch lasted 3 minutes. Reading books to the kids lasted 5 minutes. Yet for some reason the 3yo found Daddy taking a wee to be almost as exciting as taking off – maybe it had something to do with the flush mechanism that you suspect would suck you out of the plane if you weren’t standing up. But after the 20th trip to the toilet the novelty finally wore off.

After fifty walks up and down the plane the 1yo passed out from exhaustion at all his screaming and slept for a couple of hours on mum and the 3yo passed out for about 1 hour, or just long enough for my back to give out after sitting in the only constricting position that the 3yo found comfortable. They woke up in time for a scalding hot breakfast, so of course Daddy ate three omelettes and the kids ate more bread. No wonder constipation became a bit of a travelling issue a couple of days later for them.

Still, at least we did better than the stroller which didn’t even make it off the tarmac in Sydney until the following day. All the other luggage made it fine but getting through customs in the States these days was more of an ordeal, a 15 minute interrogation, fingerprinting and mug shots and no air conditioning. I was almost surprised I didn’t have to drop my pants for a cavity search. Still, the 3yo found it all to be great fun. He has a fan obsession (he’s a fan fan) so loves the fact there’s no air-conditioning in any Hawaiian airport.

Indeed all the Hawaiian airports we went to didn’t even have walls. They operate more like a loose collection of roofs where aeroplanes just happen to park and your luggage just happens to circulate on conveyor belts. Must be great fun in the wet season.

So with exhausted kids and wife in tow plus a stroller borrowed from Qantas (a half hour adventure in itself trying to find the thing which gave the 3yo more chances to play hunt-the-fan) we caught the mini-bus to pick up our hire car – a Jeep Patriot.

Americans might love their cars but they have no idea how to build small four wheel-drives. The Jeep Patriot is the worst car I’ve ever driven. Not only did this one have all the features I hate about automatics (the delayed acceleration, the inability to find the right gear going up hills) but it strayed to the right putting the wife in direct line of the ripple strips. It took two days to realise it wasn’t me not being used to driving on the right hand side of the road but that the wheel alignment was horribly out.

That would be a problem at the best of times but those American cars I was swerving into are big and likely to squash a Patriot that gets in its way. Indeed it seemed most of them weren’t cars at all but were pick-ups (utes) or SUVs (sports utility vehicles) and most of them had monster truck wheels. Later on when I came to see the state of some of the island’s roads I would understand why.

The other feature of the roads was the number of Mustangs. After two hours of driving the Patriot (or in other words almost a lap of the island and enough sleeping time for the rest of the family to feel almost refreshed, unlike me) I’d seen about 40 Mustangs. They were all very new and shiny so I assumed that either Americans love their V8 petrol-scoffing dinosaurs (much like Australians) or there was a Mustang convention on somewhere in the opposite direction.

It took about a week to realise that many of your standard Hawaiian tourists (a recently married couple) like to hire the classic American muscle car to compliment the scenery. They don’t hire Patriots.

Hawaiian roads are also full of unhelmeted motorbike and scooter riders. Why such a litigious society allows such a thing is hard to fathom, but the Harley riders in particular seem to love it. They’re all probably tourists too, but between the belching old pick-up trucks, the monster-trucks and SUVs, the Mustangs, the throbbing Harleys and the Police Cars marked only by a lone blue light (including some that are Mustangs) much of Hawaii has a real Mad Max feel about it.

For two hours I listened to Lava FM (classic hits from mostly Rod Stewart and the Doobie brothers played in ever increasingly annoying rotation) while passing through and by North Shore surf towns of varying interest and aesthetic value and some famed enticing beaches which I vaguely recognised from Beach Boys songs. We finally stopped for lunch in Kailua where Hawaii’s rich and famous live. All we saw was a bunch of rich kids in a Burger joint, so that had to do.

American Food Surprise No.1: You can get a good burger in America (but they do come with pickles). With a choice of 5oz, 7oz or 9oz meat patties (1 ounce = about 28 grams) I went mid-size. It was thick and juicy and cooked medium rare. Now that’s a burger. Even the chips were thick and chip like and not McDonalds style fries. Extraordinary.

That was it for Kailua. Never made it to its famed beaches due to the demands of kiddie’s sleeping and eating habits, a common theme to the whole trip. Did check out the famed Waikiki beach that afternoon though.

Waikiki - Like the Gold Coast but with perfect teeth

It’s probably the nature of being spoilt by Australian choice but Waikiki beach is nothing special except as a place for a spot of people watching. Overweight and overtanned Americans (tourists and a surprising number of locals) compete for space with hordes of Japanese and Korean tourists – and this was the low season. What little surf there is is covered by masses of longboarder wanna-bes (more tourists) and boogie boarders. You can’t even swim it’s so shallow and outside the kiddie and Japanese friendly enclosed breakwater sections if you do try to swim you tear up your hands and feet on the coral.

You’re better off finding a piece of (imported Australian) sand and watching the flesh stroll by – big haired girls in little bikinis and topless bulky American blokes with crew cuts. And all with perfect teeth. Indeed if Waikiki is anything to judge America by (and it isn’t) then the whole country is populated by grid iron players and their equally chunky partners.

Diamond Head Crater - a Dora free zone

The Diamond Head volcanic crater just outside Waikiki a couple of days later was more of an adventure, though the chunky Americans and Japanese were still in abundance. It’s a two mile climb to the top of Diamond Head up 500m with hundreds of steep stairs and tunnels to and through an old military post (and you’ve never seen sweat till you’ve seen an unfit topless chunky American bloke climb a hundred stairs in the tropics). For unknown reasons the 3yo completed the entire climb with no fuss (I took the 1yo up in a backpack while wearing my wearing Dunlop Volleys but who’s bragging). I do have a couple of theories though.

American Food Surprise No.2: Their hot dogs are actually quite good. Frankfurts don’t exist in America. Their equivalents are more like Kranskys and they toast their, admittedly oversoft, buns too. They 3yo loved them and fuelled up on one prior to the Diamond head ascent. They may contain all sorts of nasty poisons (like salt and sugar) but if they inspire a 3yo to spend two hours climbing up and down a mountain I’m all for it.

The other theory is the Dora theory. Dora the Explorer, when not teaching kids Spanish they’ll never need, is always avoiding snakes in rivers, dancing with Gorillas and climbing mountains. Dora is clearly the 3yo’s hero and so climbed the mountain to be like her. He probably would have swung down a snake rope if one presented itself and saved a whale along the way. This would also explain his disappointment when getting to the top at not finding a polar bear or a blueberry tree. We had just enough time to admire the excellent views of the Honolulu metropolis and some pretty coastline we’d never get to see before the 3yo fled the scenery.

The other lesson learnt in Oahu was to never trust the Lonely Planet.

Our last full day in Oahu we decided to revisit some of the sites the kids and the missus slept through on the first day. We were to go via Oahu’s much maligned west coast and across the ranges in the centre of the island. Tourists don’t really go to the west coast. It’s beaches aren’t as good and nor is the surf. It’s cheap and out of the way which is why homeless people set up shanty towns there. But according to the Lonely Planet it’s an interesting different way to get to the North Shore. Except that the Lonely Planet is wrong. The road ends at a four-wheel drive track suitable only for monster trucks and the supposed road over the mountain is closed to all but the military which uses much of the island for ‘exercises’ (ie target practice).

The beach at the end of the tarmac was windswept and rugged with few services and lots of tourists in their Patriots, Chevvys and Mustangs consulting maps for a way out. There isn’t one except back the way you came so that’s where we went.

We did finally make it to the North Shore, to the ‘historic’ (as in a nice row of wooden houses and shops) Haleiwa for lunch and a chance to try Hawaii’s national dishes the Shrimp Plate and the Shave Ice. I’m a big fan of both but the kids would probably opt for the shave ice on account of it being cold and sugary. The wife isn’t a fan of either. There are lots of different varieties of shrimp plates but I went for garlic.

A shrimp bus - How does such great food come out of
such a decrepit transport vehicle?

American Food Surprise No 3: They do like flavour. Unfortunately it’s mostly of the sugar variety but there must have been 20 garlic cloves crushed on my shrimps and rice. Awesome. Some of the decrepit buses and shacks that offer shave ice boast of up to 100 flavours of sugary syrup, including some without sugar that seems to miss the point. During two weeks in Hawaii I tried about 8 flavours but by the time it melts into slush they’re all pretty much the same. And delicioso to quote Dora.

After lunch we checked out a surf shop and struggled to keep the kids out of the medical marijuana dispensary next door and then headed for a supposed small hike along the cliffs on the north-west corner of Oahu. The Lonely Plant implied it was a pleasant walk along a former train line. The reality was that it was a four-wheel drive track so rutted it swallowed monster trucks so we abandoned that after 10 minutes and got back in the car for a chance for the kids to catch up on some sleep and Dad to scowl and bemoan the fact he’d never get to ride the surf (not that he can surf and it was flat that time of year) at Waimea Bay or Sunset Beach.

Honolulu shopping could wait for the return journey, the Big Island beckoned, so we piled into the Patriot at 9am the next morning and made the flight with about 30 seconds to spare – who knew that the hire car would have to be returned to the same place we picked it up and not the airport! Still, it was nothing that a $20 tip to a porter to help jump the queue couldn’t fix when we did finally arrive at the airport.

Fortunately too the island hop took only 45 minutes so the kids didn’t have time to get bored and annoying. Well not much.