2018-12-23 Oahu, Hawaii

So today was the first day since we recovered from our jet lag.

We found out that Hawaii is pronounced "Ha-vai-ee" by the locals here.

We went on a tour today. Not something we normally do but we were short on time and it was a lot easier than organising transport across the island.

The "shaka" sign... Which means aloha, sorry, thanks, shark-attack, and everything else in between.

This is a famous location for movies and modelling magazines.

We did a whole circle around the island, exploring Diamond Head, Makpu'u, Dole Pineapple Plantation, a macadamia nut farm, amongst others.

We cancelled snorkeling the day before because we were worried about our travel sickness still affecting us as well as the wind chill. Turns out today was actually sunny day.

Sometimes.

You see, we were told that Hawaii experiences 11 out of 13 possible climates. It's so mountainous and there are all sorts of winds, hurricanes, volcanoes, tsunamis, earthquakes hitting from all over the place that you get this weird 'everything' climate. Rain and wind might be slamming you, but you cross the road and its sunshines and lollipops. Melbourne has nothing on this.

Our tour guide (Mark) was pretty great. He showed us a map of Hawaii, tattoo'ed on his chest. He joked that his nipple is the 'Chinaman's Hat' island. We thought he was joking because this particular tour guide always makes things up as a joke. But then we saw Chinaman's Hat and indeed, it looked like a giant nipple.

We didn't have a photo of it because it was raining and foggy at that very second (Hawaiian weather), so here is a picture from Google.

We came across a couple of monk seals. Apparently sightings are rare, and sightings of two monk seals together are even more rare as they are solitary animals.

Had some good garlic spicy "shrimp" (known as prawns to us) along the way.

The beaches in Hawaii are very nice and comparable to Perth.

We grabbed some coral from the beach as souvenirs (for Steph's American friends anyway - We know Australia wouldn't let us smuggle them into the country). But apparently it's now also illegal to remove anything from the Hawaiian beaches...Sucks because we spent a lot of time looking for them (not that there were anything else to do while we waiting for others in the tour to finish snorkelling). Apparently our tour guide had to save one of the girls from drowning, but we missed all the drama.

We visited the Dole Pineapple Plantation. Pineapples (and spam) form a large part of what Hawaiians eat! You can get everything pineapple here and we had the soft serve. An absolute unit of a soft serve too.

This bird was trying to dig itself a little ditch for some reason.

Rest time

We chilled out with Karaoke before eating dinner. No multibangs here, have to settle for less.

Leaving

We ate at Maruyame Udon before we flew out. It was fantastic actually, the udon is hand made at the shop. The only problem is the long wait. The price is surprisingly cheap, but there are all these value add options for tempura, so by the end of walking down the tempura aisle, we racked up $40 worth of food for the both of us.

With our stomachs now full of udon and tasty tempura, we're ready to tackle our big flight plan coming up.