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| Aloha! - Pearl Harbor and the Submarine Tour |
| Monday, January 08, 2007 |
Aloha!
Aloha! - The Journey
My body clock woke me up at 5AM inspite of being tired. It was still dark outside, and DH was sleeping soundly. I was rolling in the bed for an hour and by 6:30AM I forced DH to wake up. We pulled the drapes of the patio to look outside, the day was just breaking, we were able to see the ocean from our patios! Our Hotel was only two blocks from Waikiki beach, as were most Hotels, we were to realize later in the day, it had a moderate ocean view amongst other tall hotels in front of us.
We had bought the 3-day Go Oahu Card, in advance. This card gave us access to major sight seeing tours. I knew the tours started pretty early in the morning, so while DH was having his bath, I called up the different tours to ask for timings. The Pearl Harbor Tour was in our agenda for the day, and I realized in dismay that the tour started at 7AM! It was about 7:15AM when I called them up and asked for a reservation for the day. The guy was nice enough to accomodate us in the tour for the day, the only catch was we had to be down at the lobby in 15mins. We hurried through the getting ready process, and went down.
Oahu is the most visited of the islands in Hawaii, looks like. It has excellent public transportation system, compared to the other islands. Most tours pick up and drop off at your hotel if you are in the Waikiki area.
This was one reason why we decided not to rent a car and drive around ourselves. Besides, we didnt want to waste time trying to find our way around, and worry about parking while trying to visit places. This turned out to be a good idea after all.
The tour guide was funny, I realize all of them are, given they have to do the same thing day in and day out with different sets of people. Pearl Harbor was a 20 minute drive from Waikiki on the west side of the island. It is an active navy base even to this day. This was DH's must-not-miss place in Hawaii, I was not too excited in the beginning. We learnt quite a bit about Hawaii in this tour.Most Hawaiians are not pure Hawaiians. In the sense that, most of them had varied heritage. One can very well understand this, given Hawaii has over a million tourists every year. Our tour guide himself was apparently less than 1/8th Hawaiian. It is a big deal if a native is at least 50% pure Hawaiian. Hawaiians actually migrated from French Polynesia, mostly Marquesas somewhere around 0 - 600 AD, after a fight apparently. Of course it still amazes me that these travellers has enough guts to travel all the way in the lonely Pacific in search of another place to live. Many failed in the search and died.
Only Oahu in Hawaii has Interstate System. The standing joke about the Interstates in Hawaii is that, obviously enough, the three interstates, H1, H2 and H3, do not connect to any other State in the US :--) The speed limit was 50mph on these higways. The State wanted money to build these roads, and to be able to get money from the Federal Govt, they had to call them InterState. Me and DH learnt long back during our super long drive from East to West on I-80, that these InterStates were built in the US mainly for faster transport of military equipment and man power. The same was the reason for building the interstates in Hawaii, for faster transport of naval equipment.
We were going to visit the USS Arizona Memorial, one of the many navy ships that were bombed during the Pearl Harbor attack. There was a huge long line outside, but our guide reassured us that the lines movied faster than they looked. We saw a real life sized anchor from a real ship just outside the Memorial. It was huge! To think it was actually used by a ship to harbor, was fascinating.
 In the next one hour, as we waited for our turn to watch the 15 min video. then take the ferry to the memorial, we took the boring Audio Tour, as we looked around the small museum. It had imitations of real navy ships, and planes, and the torpedo that hit the Harbor etc etc. We saw some real navy ships in the harbor, clicked some pictures. We proceeded to watch the video, a movie on the attack and all the politics involved, I will save you the headache of having to read it here. We proceeded to the Ferry which took us to the Memorial. The Memorial itself was actually right on top of the sunken Ship, USS Arizona. The Memorial was very small, built along the breadth of the sunken ship. On a clear day we should have been able to see the ship itself at the bottom. We were asked to maintain silence as a mark of respect to the brave souls on the ship who died in the attack, about 1200 of them on this ship, for most of them the ship itself was a burial ground. We could see some parts of the top of the ship, all rusted and old. The US flag was flying high from the stern of the ship underneath, supported on the Memorial. We saw other navy ships docked at the Harbor. In 10 minutes the next ferry came by and we went back to the mainland to return to the tour bus.
The next couple of hours were the most boring of hours during our whole vacation. The guy took us on a Honolulu City Tour! We visited the Punch Bowl Cemetery, which is also an old dormant volcano, where brave men were buried. We visited the Iolani Palace, the only Palace,per se, in US Soil. It was about 2PM when they dropped us back to our Hotel.
We had our Submarine trip scheduled for the next day at 10AM which we realized was hindering a lot in our other activities, hence we called them up and asked if it can be preponed to today. Luckily they were able to accomodate us at the 3PM trip. Then without having lunch, just grabbing some junk food, we made to the lobby where they picked us up at around 2:25PM.
 We were near the beach for the first time. The beach looked refreshing, but too crowded. Waikiki Beach is supposed to be famous, and safe at the same time, so it was pretty crowded. It had a pretty long shore considering the other beaches in Oahu. We saw the Diamond Head crater from the beach for the first time. It looked majestic. I was to learn later that it was a tiny crater compared to some other craters on the other islands. We waited in line at the pier for a boat to come and pick us up.
Initially we thought that the submarine would come to the shore and we would get into it. But that was not the case. A boat took us from the shore to the middle of the ocean, and then the submarine shot up from under water, and then the folks tied the submarine to the boat, to facilitate safe migration of us folks into the submarine. We were among the first few to get into the submarine. A friend of mine at work had warned me that sometimes they cheat you by calling a vessel that doesnt actually really go fully underneath the water as a submarine. I was kind of sceptical in the beginning, but my doubts were cleared when the Captain said we would be going to about 150 feet under sea level.
 Our excitement knew no bounds as we entered the little vessel which had only 64 seats for us passengers. Each of us had a window to ourselves, we could see the blue water, and the rudder of the boat we came in, along side, above us. It was so cool! Once all of us were in, the top openning from which we came in was closed tight. If the woman did not go a god job closing it, the submarine would have been flooded with sea water within the next few seconds! Slowly the captain took us down under, we could feel the sub moving in an inclined angle. We also saw an indicator of the depth of the Sub, it kept on increasing from 0 to about 90 ft, when we got the first view of the reefs. These were artifical reefs put under the ocean to attract fishes and other sea beings. It was a wonderful sight, as we watched multicolored fishes swimming and feeding at their habitat, more so, their home.
We proceeded to see a crashed sunken air plane on the ocean floor, all rusted and decayed, with algae or whatever growing all over it, the fishes had made it their home. So this is how the ocean underneath looks! I marvelled at the ocean for the first time during my trip. We proceeded further deep to about 140ft, to see two ship wrecks, real ships, huge ones, wrecked on the ocean floor. Notice a green sea turtle on the wreck in the picture on the right. The ship was home for a hoard of fishes and turtles. Seeing the wreck reminded me of the wreck of Titanic. It was similar, only smaller. It did have a ghost-like appearance.
The Captain was driving the sub really close to the wreck. I realized why he did that, later in time. The ocean water was pretty dense, like it was not easy to see through the water. Also the ocean floor is supposed to be really dark. After all we are about 150 ft below the surface. The Sub had som special lights outside its body which helped us see things clearly. It was a spectacular ride.
It was an hour long ride, totally worth it. When it was time to go back, the Captain explained to us about how he needs to be really careful about the speed with which he takes the Sub out of the water. Since the friction in water is more than in air, if we came out in the open in the same speed as in the water, the Sub would just shoot out of the ocean. DH said he saw a Sub shoot out of the ocean in the movie, The Hunt for Red October. I am yet to watch the movie, but I can imagine how it would have been. Thanks to our Captain, he brought us safely out of the water without any mishaps. The top door was openned and water sprayed from the top on the few who were close to the door. We went up and as was obvious, most part of the top was all wet. To think this was a 100ft below the ocean just a few minutes ago! Goose bumps again. We got back into the boat, which took us back to the shore.
We decided to walk the distance back to our Hotel along the beach instead of taking the ride back. We wandered along the beach, watching the waves, the playing kids, the sun bathing men and women. The beach was a very protected beach, made safe for people by having structures on the beach to reduce the force of the waves. How boring. I would like to be in a real beach, not a man made one. I had the next couple of days to see the fierce ocean.
Waikiki had two major roads, one right by the beach, and one just parallel to it. These major roads had the hep hotels and restaurants and shopping centers. Chanel, Gucci, Prada and the other hep shops, whose names I remember from Paris were here, only to go window shopping. We stopped at Starbucks to have a cuppa hot coffee and to satiate our grumbling stomachs, we hadnt fed them proper food the whole day. We entered a market place where I got my Hula girl costume of artifical flowers to wear on my head, and DH for a huge chain to look like a Hawiian boy. There were these grocery store kinda place called ABC stores, literally in every block. You just cant miss one if you are in main Waikiki area. We got some bread and jam for breakfast and some snacks for the next day. By the time we reached our hotel we were tired yet again, with all the exposure to the sea, and the walking. I had already called up the tours who were to take us out the next day. We watched some movie for exactly 10 minutes before drifting to sleep.
I personally think this day was the most boring and wasteful of all the days spent in Hawaii. Sorry dear DH. I mean who wants to see Pearl harbor and of all the things, Honolulu City, in Hawaii, when there are a million other things to do? ;--)
Aloha! - Diamond Crater and Hanauma Bay |
posted by SK @ 9:37 PM  |
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| 3 Comments: |
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BTW, I wanted to add - I liked your description of the under-water world a lot :-)!
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Submarine???? Oh WOW!!!