Like Scotland with its clan tartans, shortbread, bagpipes, and haggis Hawaii all too often feels like a place of manufactured myth, a theme park dedicated to sustaining mass tourism, with its own mash up of Polynesian folklore. Brand Hawaii may be as pervasive and as wearying for the locals as Brand Scotland, but on most of the islands it’s surprisingly easy to escape and it can be fun to have a foot in both worlds as we recently did in Honolulu. We spent our nights in that ultimate expression of luxury Tiki tourism, that pink dowager the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki beach, which is dwarfed by the high rises you see in that classic helicopter tracking shot in the ‘Hawaii Five O’ TV show credits.
This beautiful pink relic may have been overrun with upscale Japanese wedding package celebrants (the lovely back lawn by the ocean was seldom without a gazebo or its adjoining lanai and rapidly melting ice sculpture), but the hotel’s Monte Cristi hat shop, where you can pay up to $20,000 for the finest woven wide brims, still opens its doors daily in the adjoining Palm Grove, the deckchairs are still laid out in neat rows behind a velvet rope on the Waikiki sands by white uniformed beach attendants at dawn every morning and outrigger canoes still ferry excited passengers from the beach. I found a marvelous sepia photograph in the hotel of a peak-capped Bing Crosby; sporting the biggest grin, you’ve ever seen, he’s surfing a wave in a two-seater outrigger canoe while the oarsman grits his teeth and knots his brow in rapt concentration.
By day we’ve explored the real Honolulu that starts just a few blocks inland from Waikiki beach. This is the most remote major city on the planet and sports a multicultural miracle of cuisines from the many different Asian ethnicities which make up Honolulu’s population. The Japanese influence is especially strong and we enjoyed an amazing Yakisoba a few blocks from our hotel.
Yakisoba: Serves Six
2 pkts Yakisoba noodles ( serves 6)
1 whole pork tenderloin, thinly sliced
Small bunch of Nira ( Chinese garlic chives), cut into 1 1/2 ” lengths
1/4 Napa cabbage, cut into 1″ pieces
2 Carrots, cut into 1 1/2″ match sticks
1 medium onion, cut into thin slices
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
In a very large fry pan or wok, heat 2 tablespoons of oil, add the onion and carrots, cook until fragrant, add the pork and a pinch of salt; cook until the pork is almost done. Add the cabbage and the nira, toss to combine, cook until the vegetables are done. Remove to a dish, add 2 tablespoons of oil in the same pan and 3/4 cup of water; then add the noodles. Using chopsticks loosen the noodles, return the pork and vegetables to the pan, gently stir-fry, making sure not break up the noodles too much. Make a mixture of the 2 sauces together, pour over the noodles and toss to combine. Taste and adjust the seasoning.
To mix things up, we’d pack the rental car with a picnic and sunbathe on one of the remote beaches past Kailua on the East coast, visit one of the island’s half dozen Botanical Gardens or walk through a fragrant frangipani forest.
Happily we have found over several earlier visits to the archipelago that this mix and match approach to our days can easily be achieved on any of the major islands, where the windward or rainier side and the interior always contain the roads less travelled and if you are anything like me you will probably take enormous pleasure in driving your rental car along all the remote and narrow byways marked in red or ‘forbidden’ on rental car companies’ maps, but those are stories to come.
A great guide to the Hawaiian islands. I’ve always been put off by hoards of tourists but this narrative shows the way to enjoy Hawaii.