Welcome to travels with Todd

Well folks, this is it. Although I’m not leaving until tomorrow, this is the last day I’ll recount in any detail from my great 2024 autumn / winter adventure since I spent most of Boxing Day either at the airport or on flights back to the mainland.

If you’ve slogged through the entire trip, you read 48 posts about Australia, 10 about that country’s two Olympic host cities, 24 about Aotearoa New Zealand and this is the 15th post about Hawaii. I will follow this with one more that identifies the song sources for the post titles and internal headers. In total just shy of 100 posts and if you’ve struggled reading them, imagine what I’ve gone through writing them.

I knew K & P had two main activities planned for the day – a walk around (not up) Diamond Head and a buffet lunch that they’d needed to reserve some time in advance. Given that I’ve spent the past three Christmas Days far from my home turf (two in Lisbon and this one in Honolulu), I think it’s fair to say that I’ve given up my Baltimore childhood tradition of Chinese food and a movie

so I was pretty much up for anything.

Lunch was going to be later in the afternoon but food would still take center stage in the early part of the day. However, before meeting for breakfast at the Hula Grill at the Outrigger, I had one task to complete. You saw the result earlier when I wrote about the International Market place and included a photo there of the astonishing banyan tree that was and remains a centerpiece of that space. In case you missed it, here’s that photo again.

For some reason – probably because I had no idea how long the walk around Diamond Head would be – I had walked nearly two miles before I met P & K for breakfast where I had a vegetable omelet that included kale, mushrooms, seared grape tomatoes, onions, brie cheese, and sliced avocado.

We needed to walk another mile or so to reach the real start of our circumambulation of the iconic Waikiki tuff cone the Hawaiians call Lē’ahi or forehead of the tuna although another possible interpretation is that Lē’ahi could indicate “fire headland” because ancient Hawaiians lit navigational fires at the summit to guide canoes along the coast. (I prefer the pareidolic interpretation.)  🙂

British sailors provided its English name when they mistook calcite crystals on the slopes for diamonds. The crystals themselves have little value. Fools diamonds, perhaps?

(About 300,000 years ago a single, brief, explosive eruption blasted ash, rock, and debris into the air, which then settled and compacted to create the tuff cone structure we call Diamond Head. During the eruption, hydromagmatic explosions (the interaction of hot magma with groundwater) not only formed the crater but also incorporated materials from the surrounding environment. This included ancient coral reefs and limestone deposits rich in calcium carbonate. As the volcanic materials cooled and weathered over time, groundwater percolated through the porous tuff and volcanic debris. This water, carrying dissolved calcium ions, then encountered carbonate ions that arose from the breakdown of the coral or limestone. Calcite crystals precipitated and formed within cracks and cavities in the rocks.)

From the land where the palm trees sway

(and desert plants bloom?)

I let P & K take the lead and paid little attention to our route but it’s likely that we continued along Kalākaua Avenue and joined Diamond Head Road at some point. The first notable place we reached (or at least the first spot I took a photo) was at Kuilei Beach Cliffs – AKA Diamond Head Lookout – where there’s a sadly deteriorated commemorative marker honoring Amelia Earhart.

It monumentalizes her 1935 solo flight from Oakland, California, to Honolulu. The 19-hour flight was the first successful solo flight from the continental United States to Hawaii – an accomplishment well worth the marker. I wish someone would keep it polished.

Taking this route around rather than up Lē’ahi provides, I think, a different perspective on the formation particularly since we’re so accustomed to seeing it in profile from some distance away such as in this photo from Shaka Guide.

Navigate the five-point-seven mile circumference walk and you can come away with a very different impression. I know I did. Looking at it from this distance, for example, you might be surprised to learn that much of the area around Lē’ahi  is residential.

Or that you pass by what remains of Fort Ruger – the first coastal defense fortification established in 1906 by the United States Army in the Hawaiian Islands. (President William McKinley signed the law annexing Hawaii on 7 July 1898 with a formal ceremony replacing the Hawaiian flag with the American flag on 12 August at ‘Iolani Palace. Hawaii gained official territorial status on 30 April 1900.  It became the fiftieth state a bit more than 59 years later on 21 August 1959.)

A bit more than halfway through the walk, we came to Kapiolani Community College. We took a little detour onto campus through the parking lot where, on Saturday we might be snacking at a well-known local farmers market, but today were headed to one of K’s favorite stops on this ambulatory route, to visit the Cactus and Succulent Garden, established in 1988 by Moriso Teraoka. It’s rather surprising to find such a wide variety of desert plants thriving in a tropical setting making it a unique botanical attraction.

At the time we started our walk, P said that he had a goal of having me walk the most steps I’ve ever walked in a day and while this was a relatively easy walk with a modest elevation gain amounting to less than 250 feet, I think by the end of the day he could well have achieved that goal. My pedometer would show a total step-count exceeding 26,000 and more than 21 kilometers or 13 miles.

The sun to shine by day and all the stars at night

By the time we’d finished our walk, we had, as you can imagine, worked up quite an appetite and we had reservations for the second lunch seating at the Side Street Inn on the Strip. It was not only a massive buffet but a high quality one. I couldn’t begin to list the variety of choices that included prime rib, snow crab, shrimp, bara fish, and more. There was also soup and a wide variety of vegetables to accompany the proteins and desserts galore. It was a lunch that not only required some walking off but that also resulted in having shave ice for dinner at Lahaina Shave Ice. It was good but not quite the same quality as those we’d had with the homemade syrups at Matsumoto.

I had one last stop with K & P and that was at the ‘Iolani palace where we could step onto the grounds but that was otherwise closed for the holiday. It’s actually a noteworthy place to visit because it’s the only royal palace on American soil.

As for me, I’d join my friends one final time on the 26th when they were kind enough to let me ride with them to the airport. But on that ultimate morning, I had two final tasks before that departure. The first was to get a photographic reminder that I had, indeed, been in Hawaii on Christmas.

The second, although I’m not a surfer, was to place a lei (in my case a beaded rather than a flowered lei) at the statue of Duke Kahanamoku as a gesture of honor, respect, and the spirit of aloha.

A few unposted pictures remain. Whether you were with me for a single stage or the entirety of my 2024 travels, I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride. And until next time I hope all your travels bring you adventure of the best kind.