The great and the good may wax eloquent about Maui no ka oi, or the glories of Hualalai on the North Kona coast, but for us, the quintessential vacation is a week in Honolulu at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, in the midst of Waikiki. No argument, the approach is via the expanse of high rise condo and hotel developments that line miles and miles of Ala Moana Boulevard and then Kalakaua, but once on the beach, with the infinite Pacific in front of you, and the outline of Diamond Head beside you- well, the composite makes for something iconic that could be dissembled, but why? We love it, and for us of course, that’s sufficient. For over 20 years, we’ve made Honolulu, and usually the Royal Hawaiian an annual, sometimes twice annual, pilgrimage site. As times being the way they were in 2009, we gave Honolulu, and indeed any sort of time off, a miss. Consequently, our break last week we enjoyed inordinately- once we got into it. That’s a problem for us, as for most people, I think- the necessary break in routine takes a few days to take effect, and, really, despite the week’s length, the first two don’t count. I suppose they do count, though, being an essential segue between keyed up, and relaxed.
Relaxed, yes, but brains not entirely gelatinous, we were keen to take the measure of Honolulu, given how dependent the entire state of Hawaii is on tourism. We presumed that as the state’s capital and commercial centre, any dearth of tourist dollars would manifest itself there, and we were on the lookout. We aren’t disaster groupies, but our fondness for the place makes us realize it can’t exist as a time warp, and requires a certain amount of change as evidence of vitality. But not too much. Indeed, our own interests in the Hawaiian natural ecology seems to match an increasing trend in the larger world. As a younger man, it seemed that the Hawaiian landscape was more properly to serve as an exotic backdrop for mainstream western culture. Now in my sixth decade, the natural world increasing informs my consciousness and feeds my spirit- or perhaps it always did, just that now I’m sufficiently meditative to hear what the world is actually saying. Age is magically and happily compensatory, isn’t it? What one loses in strength and pulchritude, one gains in wisdom and spirit. More than compensatory- for there is nothing that I’ve lost in physical vitality that I would trade even one scintilla of wisdom to regain.
Certainly in Waikiki, the small numbers of tourists was noticeable, even outright startling. We were told by visitors transiting through that in the neighbor islands the dearth of tourists was even more apparent. While not exactly a ghost town, we did see a number of building works, some of considerable size, that had come to a halt- not slowed, but stopped, including a massive residential and commercial complex in the Ward Estate, just behind Val Ossipoff’s timelessly rendered IBM Building. When the larger adjacent, and now mothballed, structure is complete, if it ever is, it will visually engulf the entire vista along this particular stretch of Ala Moana. The scale of the building is so inappropriately large it can only be described as decadent. The use of the term ‘decadent’ to describe any building always puts me in mind of the first use I had ever heard, to describe the overblown baths of Caracalla in Rome as a hallmark of the decadence of Roman architecture. One can only hope, then, that this decadent structure, if it isn’t razed, represents the final end of the line. More tomorrow…