Day 3 cont'd: Wild, Exotic and Dangerous Hawaii

The first part of the tour was trying to find the rest of the tour party. I'm not quite sure how the tour company managed to lose a third of the party, but we drove around in circles for about an hour before finding them all.

Of course it's poor form to stress about things like this in Hawaii: "hang loose". So we hung loose.

The official tour started with downtown Honolulu, including the place Barrack Obama lived until he was fifteen, and then went into Wild, Exotic and Dangerous Hawaii (as advertised).

First stop was Pali Lookout, probably the second-windiest place I've ever been. I can't say I enjoyed the cold wind, but I'm sure I coped better than Emma.

Emma, being the hardcore surfing fan she is, was looking forward to the surf beaches: Waimea Bay, Banzai Pipeline, Sunset Beach. These are the beaches that get the 30 foot waves that look like this:
This is what we got:

Frauds.

My theory is that there aren't any 30 foot waves. The images we see on TV? Digitally produced, just like in the movie "Surf's Up":

The walk up the Waimea Valley was gorgeous. Hawaii has a large number of introduced plants, and the valley has different sections dedicated to plants from all over the world: South America, Guam, East Asia, Madagascar, and Finland. I may have made the last one up.

Emma fell in love with the orchids, which the photos don't do justice to. But here's one anyway:

The Waimea Falls themselves were - cute. There hadn't been much rain so they were quite small. Still, being Hawaii, there were two lifeguards just in case someone tried to surf them. Or something.

On the way back we passed the plant nursery. You can't see them in this shot, but the staff were busily doing their part to wipe out the last of the indigenous plants.

The camera battery died on the way down the east side of the island, so there are no shots of the side of Oahu where all the films and TV shows are shot. Kind of ironic, really.

So no piccies, but we saw the valley where "Jurassic Park" and "Lost" were shot, as well as "Fifty First Dates" (which was on TV that night - kind of cool playing "spot the place we saw today"), The Cove, where the famous beach-kiss scene in "From Here to Eternity" was shot, or Hanauma Bay, where the Elvis movie "Blue Hawaii" was shot, and the studios where Hawaii Five-0, Magnum P.I. and all the other Honolulu-based TV shows were and still are shot.

However the battery did recover enough for me to get a very fuzzy shot of Dog the Bounty Hunter's house:
It was a long day, but time well spent.

When we finally made it back to our hotel we were exhausted, and too tired to go out for dinner. So we ordered in pizza, as you do. The pizza was surprisingly good, but would want to be, because with the combination of Honolulu food prices and delivery fees it cost about $US35.

Our early night was delayed due to Emma switching on the Discovery Channel. Damn you, David Attenborough, and your unreasonably interesting documentaries.

We finally switched off the TV around 10.40 so we could get some sleep in before the 4am wake-up call. So much for a rest-break before hitting the mainland.