Hawaii – Arriving

So where are the Hula girls, grass skirts, garlands of flowers, ukuleles, bad shirts…ok, so there are lots of bad shirts, still no Elvis impersonator or Hawaii 5.0 music playing, there’s not even a slightly mad Brian Wilson telling me that ‘Everybody’s gone surfing’!! There is however lots of beach bums, tourists with money ready to burn in Honolulu shops and some of the biggest people you are likely to ever see!
Landed in Honolulu midway through our groundhog day and got through the stringent immigration process wishing that I’d shaved and convincing the official that Laos is a very nice country and completely non-muslim. It seems wierd landing in Hawaii but it actually being American, doesn’t quite seem right somehow – bit like visiting England and ending up on the Falkland Islands, bit more exotic but in no way English! Anyway, we’d long decided that Honolulu wasn’t really for us so we jumped straight on an interisland flight and headed for the Big Island, a lot less touristy and built up and more volcanic than beaches. We arrived at the same time on the same day as we’d left Sydney 20 hours ago, thanks to the International date line, very confusing. Picked up a hire car as to see the island you have to have your own wheels and they don’t do mopeds here…so this was our first hurdle, well Shona’s anyway, all I had to do was remember to get in the wrong side of the car. Shona had nicely volunteered to drive thinking she was going to get a Mustang or Caddi, instead she had to quickly familiarise herself with a Hyundai, about half the size of everything else on the road and about half the rental cost. For some reason though being on the wrong side of the road she instantly lost all sense of co-ordination and got very confused over her lefts and rights! Next on the agenda was finding a supermarket to get some supplies – Oh My God! (you have to say it in an American accent for it to really sound right!) Safeway has never been so big, made Tescos seem like a small convenience store! After 2 hours, lots of random conversations with some very friendly people and finding the whole thing hilarious (sleep deprevation for yoU!) we finally made our way out of Safeway and to the campsite, stopping on route at 2 other shops to try and buy camping gas – guns, amo and hunting knives as big as your arm, but not the gas we needed! I know you shouldn’t be shocked to see guns for sale in America, after all we all know they are a little gun-toting happy, but its still kinda wierd when you actually see it for the first time! Got to the campsite around dusk, according to the Lonely Planet we might get harrassed from drunk locals all night, cool. Set up the tent on the black volcanic sand about 20m from the sea, ate our cold dinner as we couldn’t use the stove and then promptly fell asleep vaguely worried about locals and tsunami’s having seen the excessive amounts of evacuation notices!