Today we were up early to do some 'sight seeing', once again I use the term 'sight seeing' loosely as it also included a fair bit of shop wandering. But none the less, sight seeing was certainly included.
We woke to a bit of a windy morning (not up to Geraldton wind standards, but wind none the less) and headed down the road a little bit to catch our Waikiki Trolley (green line) to head up to Diamond Head and the look outs along the way. We were at the trolley pick up area early, so photo's were taken of the Duke statue and then we sat an waited for the trolley. This my friends is where the hilarity of the day happened.
Strike a pose
I saw this young lad walking towards us, probably 21 or 22, my initial thoughts were, it takes commitment to have a permanent press iron line down the front of your jeans at that time of the morning and especially for such a young lad. Anyway he plonked himself on the chairs next to us, closest to poor Chris. After a couple of minutes had passed he gets up with his funny little phone in his hand and says to Chris "does this text make sense to you without using any vowels?" She sort of reads it for a bit and says "oh yes"... It was something about his Uncle Keith and a gun, not really sure but.
At this point Shell turns to me and says on the quiet "You know what, I am not the slightest bit surprised that this is going on right now" to which I got the giggles at, cause it's true, we always seem to attract these oddball characters that give us a great laugh and a story to tell. Although I had to reign in the giggle as he had already spoken about a gun in the first sentence and he was odd enough that there is every possibility that he could have had a knife tucked in his commando boots or a gun in his bag. I was wise enough to realise this.
Front on, close up and with his haircut, he looks sort of like Lloyd Christmas (only with a ginger tinge), Jim Carey's character from the movie Dumb and Dumber.
Shell asked him if she could take a photo of him to which he asked "Why, what website am I going to be on now?" To which Shell relied "What do you mean now? How many websites have you been on?"
His answer was something like "The Europeans and the Asians love putting me on their websites, some American websites too" (to which I was thinking, what America's most wanted?). There was more to this conversation while waiting for this trolley, there was erratic talk from him about library cards, bribery, Cuba, being robbed and stabbed in Panama, Florida drivers licences and passports and this was all from him in the space of about 4 minutes. Then thank god our trolley turned up and we were out of there leaving the ginger headed Lloyd Christmas to find his next un-suspecting target to talk to.
We got onto our trolley sat in quiet for a second or so, waited until we had pulled away from the stop and all said at the same time "oh my god, what just happened?". Poor Lloyd, he gave us ample to talk and laugh about. Perhaps it is one of those location situations where you just had to be there to appreciate the pure gold it was. And by god, we certainly appreciated it. (This has all happened before 8.45am I might add).
The trolley took us up through the 'rich and famous' neighbourhood, I don't necessarily know about famous, but certainly rich. There was one lady by the name of Doris Duke who had inherited over a billion dollars from her tobacco tycoon father. When she died in 1993 at 79 there were no living relatives and the house here in Hawaii was taken over by the government and is now a museum / tourist attraction. I think all her money went to charities.
We stopped at a nice look out and our funny tour guide these lovely photo of us.
From there we made our way onto a lovely local shopping centre had a late breakfast and a bit of a wander. After about 2 hours we jumped back onto the trolley which took us into the Diamond Head crater (a very old inactive volcano). On the way to the crater we passed the Honolulu film studios where the modern day Hawaii-5-O is filmed. Chris's dad Bernard kept on telling us we had to walk the crater cause he did it many years ago when he was in Hawaii. Here is the photographic evidence of how totally nackered we were upon crater walk completion. Done and dusted.
And then it was back onto the trolley to rest our weary legs
View from Diamond Head
Check out the Japanese tour guide in her ensemble.
We came back to the hotel and did some house keeping (all important hand washing) as clothing was starting to get a light on. Women's work is never done, even on holidays. Then it was time for dinner, we went to Duke's restaurant at the bottom of our hotel, it was ok we just shared a couple of appetizers, certainly not the best meal we'd had. But Dukes is famous for it's Hula Pie. Legend has it that this is what the sailors used to swim to shore for, I think they swam to shore for the ladies not the pie.
No comments:
Post a Comment