Enjoying the ride in Hawaii
A living-room-slideshow-style presentation of our recent trip to Oahu
OAHU, Hawaii — A couple of weeks ago my family was staying at a rented house in the Makaha Valley, on the west side of the island, what the locals call the leeward side. We met Nammin’s family here, as close as it gets to halfway from Korea.
The house we rented was in a new development, with light gray carpet, white baseboards and quartz countertops, a variation of six or so different architectural designs. The same type of mass-produced house you might see in the Front Range of Colorado or some Omaha suburb. At least three units on the block were managed by the same vacation rental service. We looked them up on Zillow.
After we landed and picked up our rental cars at the Honolulu Airport, the first place we visited was the H Mart in Pearl City. My mother-in-law gathered all the ingredients to make Napa cabbage kimchi. At the food court, I ate a plate lunch of Korean fried chicken in soy garlic sauce — not the most obviously Hawaiian meal, but when you’re traveling in a group you do what the group does.
From my Reddit research before we came I knew that some Hawaiian locals didn’t like our type of visitor, but this isn’t what the locals don’t like. What they don’t like is the type of tourists who stay in AirBnBs and eat their dinners from food they bought at Costco instead of spending money at local hotels and restaurants. Our second stop was Costco.
We should be given slightly more consideration, though, because my Korean family wanted to buy some U.S. products they can’t get or were far more expensive at the Costcos in Korea. Bulleit Bourbon, for one. Packages of ribeye steaks, for another. And we wanted to stay in a place where we could cook breakfast and dinners together.
I didn’t love flying nearly eight hours — Denver to Oakland to Honolulu — only to find myself in a Costco. But I found some dark chocolate and coconut-covered macadamia nuts and a local guy showed me how to pick a good pineapple, which ended up being the best one of my life. So it worked out. We loaded up the van and SUV with enough food and booze to make for some interesting evenings.
On the drive to the house, west along the southern coast, my father-in-law sat shotgun. In between bouts of sudden dozing — their jet lag was worse than ours, a 7-hour time difference to only 4 for us — he’d call out the Korean-made cars he saw — Genesis GV70, Kia Morning, Hyundai Accent. His way of connecting to the culture. I do the same thing when I’m riding in a car in a foreign country.
The first morning Jia woke up at 4:30 a.m. full of energy and ready to play. I got up with her, and we went down and played every board game in the house. Her favorite was Connect 4. She would fill it up with the yellow and red discs and laugh when she slid the bottom open and they spilled all over the table. I tried to get her to watch Moana, but she couldn’t do a full-length movie yet.
The rest of the family had stayed up late sampling the American whiskey. As they eventually woke up, made coffee, and ate breakfast I took the car to check the surf. I drove down the coastline toward the western edge of the island. The beaches were uncrowded and beautiful.
At first I thought people were camping along the beach, but when I looked closer I saw a lot of set ups with tarps and stronger infrastructure that looked permanent. A lot of the camps looked like the ones in downtown Denver, but with better views. I don’t know anything about Hawaii or the people here, so I couldn’t really say what they were doing. It isn’t my place to say, anyway. I wasn’t intentionally parachuting in from somewhere else to write a travel story. We were merely on vacation, and I like writing about my life when I’m out doing something I find interesting. This might be the modern equivalent of making your dinner guests sit through a slideshow on a projector screen in your craftsman house. Thank you for coming to my presentation.
The waves weren’t breaking. I called a number I found in a guidebook from 2015. I was sure it would be disconnected in our internet age, but no, there was a warm, upbeat voice on the line telling me that yes, the surf in the southwest part of the island was indeed flat, but there were small waves along Waikiki. Perfect for our group who wanted to learn.
We parked at the Honolulu Zoo and found a poke bowl restaurant for lunch. My in-laws were dressed in long pants, long-sleeved rashguards, and hats — displaying the typical Asian intelligence about the sun. They certainly didn’t fit into anyone’s vision of sun-tanned, coconut-oil glistening skin in bikinis and boardshorts. After lunch we walked past a restaurant called Cheeseburger in Paradise, just a few days after Jimmy Buffett died from skin cancer, and I asked who brought the sunscreen.
We rented chairs, umbrellas, and surfboards and joined the crowd on Waikiki beach by the statue of Duke Kahanamoku, the Hawaiian credited with popularizing the sport of surfing. My brothers-in-law and my nephew tried to catch some waves, and I held Jia in the water on an inflatable raft. She was so happy to be in the ocean, smiling and singing the whole time. She would say, “Papa! Schwimming!” Nothing felt better or could make me happier than playing in the shallow water with my daughter in a place like this, and my mind kept turning, kept trying to work out a way for us to live a life that allowed us to do more of this, to do this every day. After the guys took their turns with the rented boards, I paddled out to the lineup, where a mushy point break right was really the only decent wave. About 30 other surfers were vying for position. Poor conditions for someone like me.
If you’ve ever lived close to the ocean and surfed every day — which I realize is a tiny percentage of the population, but hear me out — then moved away and now only get to paddle out once a year if you’re lucky, you might just give up the sport altogether. You’ll never be as good as you once were, and it makes you feel old and like you don’t have the life you want when you do try. Every time I paddle out now — here, in Sayulita, Mexico; Rockaway Beach, New York; Kuta, Bali; Zarautz, Spain; my favorite break in North County, San Diego; other places — no matter how prepared I think I am, how much time I spend in the gym beforehand, there’s no substitute for doing the thing daily. Muscle memory helps, but it isn’t enough. I can still paddle well, and I can still read the ocean, but I don’t have the confidence of someone who surfs regularly, and I always feel it. Success in this sport, especially when you’re in a crowded spot, relies on being assertive, aggressive, to get in the best position for the best waves. It also forces you to be present, acting on instinct alone, and if you start to get self-conscious and overthink what you’re doing you can end up paralyzed, in bad position, telling yourself that even if you don’t get the prime waves you’re still having fun. You convince yourself you don’t deserve the best rides because you don’t want to battle the locals who know the wave. That it’s better to just stay inside and get up on the small waves and remember to enjoy being out on the water.
And that’s OK. I told myself to enjoy it. A bad day surfing beats the best day in the office. Put that on a bumper sticker and slap it on my forehead. When that shift in thinking happened I was present again, pretty damn happy, looking down the coast behind me to Diamond Head looming above us, and in the other direction at the pink Royal Hawaiian hotel where Joan Didion stayed and wrote part of The White Album. In the Hawaii essay, she talks about how a writer who loves a place and writes well enough about it claims it, and it will always be theirs. Hemingway and Kilimanjaro, Faulkner and Mississippi, and although she also meant James Jones had made Hawaii his, this hotel was hers.
You don’t have to be a romantic or imaginative thinker to see the beauty in Hawaii. The water’s warm. The beaches are huge. Turtles and dolphins play in the surf. Everyone loves all of that. Then there are the personal reasons that this place would make sense to return to again and again. For me, it’s the geographic location roughly halfway between the U.S. and Korea. The prevalence of Asian culture — including H Mart and the Japanese discount store Don Quijote — and all the other Asian countries represented by their food. It’s an eight-hour flight to Seoul and a five-hour flight to the States. It feels like a foreign country in good ways, but we also don’t have to go through immigration at the airport. It’s still riddled with the same problems plaguing the rest of the U.S., but god, how much fun would it be to live here.
The next morning I was the first one up and ate a breakfast of dark chocolate and coconut-covered macadamia nuts with passion fruit-flavored black tea. The backyard looked out on the Waiʻanae mountain range and small yellow clouds drifted and dissipated as they crested the ridgeline.
That day we hiked to the top of the volcano crater Diamond Head, most of the way with Jia on my shoulders. She weighed more than 30 pounds, and that hike wasn’t long, but parts of it were steep, up about 170 steps. When we started the day was already warm, if not that muggy by certain standards. Jia loved it, as she does so many things, singing the melody to her favorite nursery rhymes as we went up, slapping me on the head and grabbing my hat.
The trail took us through a tunnel, and I was reminded of last year at this time when we were in Korea, visiting the Demilitarized Zone with my old friend, Cam. That day I was wearing a hardhat and hunched over carrying Jia through a subterranean passage to see where the North Koreans had tried to tunnel into the South. Here, Nammin helped carry Jia, and at least on this hike I could stand up.
On a crowded hike I usually get one or two “Good job, Dads” from passersby, and that day wasn’t any different. I also heard someone say, “Who’s going to carry her down?” Me, dude, I’m doing it.
When the trail’s this jammed you know the top is going to be a party. You get up there and try to appreciate the view, take pictures you may or may not look at later, then go back down and go somewhere else. That’s exactly what we did.
Next stop was the Waiahole Poi Factory, where we had plates of lau lau and kalua pig and coconut ice cream sitting on benches next to the road. Chickens cleaned up our dropped food. Not the first time we saw that. Nobody seemed to love the poi. I’ve heard it’s an acquired taste.
Then on to the Nu’uanu Lookout and the Halona Blowhole. We swam at Lanikai Beach and talked about how the houses there are essentially priceless now. They’ll never be for sale, and if they were sold it wouldn’t be to the general public. Might as well try buying a Picasso.
Pearl Harbor was powerful and sad and somber. Good to see a place in real life you’d heard so much about. Jia honored it by splashing in the puddles and sitting on the ground when she didn’t want to walk anymore.
The best part of that day, and one highlight of this whole trip, were the malasadas at Leonardo’s. If someone told you that you should make a point of getting Portuguese donuts when you visit Hawaii you’d probably laugh them off. But we were heading back to Waikiki and saw an open spot in the parking lot and stopped for a dozen. I’ll just tell you they were horrible so that the next time I go they’re not any more popular than they already are.
For lunch, we grabbed acai bowls and shaved ice across the street from the Moana Boardrider hotel. While everyone ate, I walked over to the Hawaiian Island Creations store in the International Market Place. For a time, I was one of those ‘90s boys who wore surf brands and baggy jeans with a shell necklace in the summer, even though I lived in Nebraska and had only seen the ocean twice in my life. You can make fun of me. Go ahead. The closest my friends and I got to surfing was kneeboarding at the lake. But we listened to ska and punk music — NOFX, Reel Big Fish, Bad Religion, Less Than Jake. That kind of thing. It was a phase that lasted a couple of years.
Out of all the brands — Quiksilver, Billabong, Rusty, etc. — my favorite was HIC. I liked to draw the circular logo with the sun and the waves in my notebook when I was sitting in class and the wind chill was below zero. I’d wear one of the three HIC shirts I had on Friday and Saturday nights, when I really wanted to look cool. I had bought them at a surf shop — Ron Jon’s — on a trip to Florida with my FFA group. They were harder to find in the middle of the country. I liked that no one around me wore them, and they signified an escape from the brutally cold Nebraska winters. It was my version of driving around with a Salt Life sticker on my car today.
The Waikiki store was running a buy one, get one 50% off promotion, so I bought some t-shirts and a hat. The only souvenirs I’d get on the trip. The young woman who rang me up asked where I lived. “I heard you get snow there,” she said. “I couldn’t do it.”
After lunch, we posted up at Waikiki again and rented longboards from Moku Hawaii. I caught one good ride and several mediocre ones. At that point I decided to embrace the fact that I’m a landlocked kook and get on with it. I played around in the shallower break, having more fun than the session before when I was worried about the lineup hierarchy and local etiquette.
As I was trying to catch one more good ride in at the end of the afternoon, the sun softening and casting the blue water in indigo light, I was stuck in the no-man’s land of the channel between two points. The waves weren’t really breaking there, but I was hoping to get lucky. A guy, probably 18, was paddling out, coming up behind me, and said, “C’mon, man, you want the big ones, don’t you?”
“I’m heading in,” I said. “Had enough for one day.”
“Nah. You want to get one of these sunset ones.”
“You go for it.”
“I get to every day. I live here. You live here?”
“Look at this farmer’s tan. Does it look like I live here?”
He smiled as he paddled past me. “Enjoy it, man.”
I was. I was enjoying it. But not the part where I was trying to be who I was 20 years ago. The best part of all these beach trips was just floating with Jia in her lifejacket-rashguard combo and watching how happy she was to be schwimming. The best part of my life now is the dad part. In whatever form that takes in the moment.
When the sun went down we went over to Duke’s Waikiki for my father-in-law’s birthday dinner. We had a big meal, ordering about a dish per person with everyone sharing the food. Pictures of Duke Kahanamoku all over the walls.
What else did we do? Pineapple Dole whip at the Dole plantation. Giovanni’s shrimp truck. Afternoon schwims at Makaha beach and the Ko Olina lagoons. Ahi tuna poke by the pound from the Tamura supermarket. Playing in the sand at Kea’au beach when the in-laws went shopping at Marshall’s.
Hawaii was beautiful and complicated and like every place I’ve visited it taught me something about myself. I’ll spare you the traveler’s platitudes about the virtue of seeing the world and how places leave marks on your soul. It was a good trip, and I’m glad I went. I’d love to go back. Maybe Kauai next time.
