The USS Arizona Memorial

One of the biggest tourist spots on Oahu remains the USS Arizona Memorial. Located out near Pearl Harbor Naval Base, the memorial is to honor the fallen soldiers from the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941. We went there a couple of weeks back, but have only really had time now to write about it.

The first thing you see when you walk in is that no bags of any kind are allowed into the visitors center area. There is a short path to an area where they keep the bags for a nominal fee. Once inside, the first thing to do was to go to the ticket line for the boat to the Arizona. The memorial itself is a small builfing which is stationed directly over the sunken Arizona. The reason it is the first stop is that they take no reservations for this boat ride, and it is entirely first come first served. We arrived shortly after 10 am, and our tickets were for a tour at 12:45 pm. We had some time, so we wandered the grounds.





They are in the process of finishing a new visitors center, and also have a gift shop to go along with 3 other paid tours that you can take. One is a tour of the USS Bowfin, a WW2 submarine. Another is of an air museum, and the third is a tour of the battleship Missouri. Also on the grounds they have displays which talk about how the attack occurred and a video discussing the results of the attack as well. In addition, there are smaller monuments listing all those who had perished on all ships that day.


 











After lunch we were finally on our boat ride to the memorial itself. They tell you on the boat that you need to not take pictures when you first get off the boat so that everyone can get off the boat quickly. Once inside, an eerie feeling comes over you as you are reminded that this is a graveyard. It is a fairly small area, but they still manage to have somewhere between 100 and 200 people in the memorial at any given time.

Inside they have a marble engraved wall which lists all of the sailors who parished that day on the Arizona. Something I was not aware of before getting there was that some of the survivors of the attacks who have since passed on have also been interred there with their shipmates. All in all it was a very somber setting, and an interesting reminder of the past.

The Hike to the Top of Diamondhead

Last week, we took a day to go hike up to the top of Diamondhead. It is about a 20-25 minute bus ride from where we are in Waikiki, and was actually a very nice hike.

We get off of the bus, and start the short hike up to the entrance to the park. The park costs $1 per person to enter if you come in on foot, or $5 per car. Since we have no car, it's kind of a moot point. But it was nice because there really was not enough parking to handle the amount of cars that were in line when we walked through.

The path starts out as a paved walkway, but very quickly becomes a rocky path that will zig-zag up the peak to move you up the side of the mountain quickly. The sign at the start of the path states it should take between an hour and an hour and a half to get up and back, which was nice to see considering we waited to start the hike until about 10:30ish and it was already getting warm out.

The view from the bottom of the hill. Nothing but switchbacks up quite a ways.










After walking up the switchbacks for probably about 10-15 minutes, we get to a set of stairs.  According to the brochure, 74 concrete steps lead to the first tunnel. The tunnel is about 225 feet, which leads to another stairway, this time of 99 steep steps. At this point, it now leads to a spiral staircase that realistically should only fit traffic going one direction, but is still used for both directions. Once you get to the top of this, it opens into a small room that finally gets you out onto the path up to the top of the peak.

The hike is worth it. All of the following are the view from the paths up to the top, which are all open air. The city pictures are of Waikiki itself.

All in all, it was an excellent hike. We were helped on the way back down the mountain by the fact that a light rain started to fall, and the breeze picked up as well. The craziest part seemed to be the amount of tourists who had no idea that it might actually involve a real hike, as they were all wearing sandals despite it being a hike. Another thing to be checked off that we have now done here in Hawaii.

Back on the Circle Island

We decided to go back on the Circle Island bus this past weekend again, but this time the goal was to go to one of the many beaches along the route. After a stop at Longs Drugs to pick up beach mats (for the oh-so-expensive price of $1.99 per), we got onto the bus headed north through Mililani again toward Haleiwa.

Now, part of the reason we had decided to go back to Haleiwa was because when we were there last time, we had not partaken of the main tourist attraction in Haleiwa. Matsumoto's Shaved Ice. Now, you may ask, shaved ice is all the same, isn't it? I mean, it's just crushed ice and flavoring. Could there actually be anything that would make Matsumoto's shaved ice better than what we could find out in Waikiki?

The answer to that question is a resounding yes. And here's why: The key to Matsumoto's Shaved Ice is the fact that you can get it with vanilla ice cream underneath it. We were both extremely skeptical when we heard about this, and probably had similar questions to the ones above. However, when we got down to the ice cream (which was after about 1/2 of the shaved ice had been eaten and another 1/4 of it had melted), mixing the two together made for an extremely smooth taste and flavor.

Now, we actually didn't start at Matsumoto's in Haleiwa. When we got into town, we noticed that there were shrimp trucks right off the side of the road. Brynn had heard from a friend that Giovanni's shrimp truck was amazing. By some small feat, one of the truck's we saw right here were Giovanni's. We got off the bus, walked over to it, and ordered.

There are only 3 things on the menu essentially, and all of them are shrimp plates. We decided to split a shrimp scampi plate, which came with 2 scoops of rice and gravy for $13. We even had a coupon for a free soda with the purchase of the plate.

This is with about 8 or 9 shrimp left out of the 12 we started with. They were gigantic shrimp (yes, definitely an oxymoron there), and were DELICIOUS. I had never been out to eat at one of the shrimp trucks that line the North Shore, and I will definitely be back there again.

After we left Haleiwa later on in the afternoon, we still had not been to the beach. As we rode the bus, we saw Waimea Bay again, but didn't like the amount of people that were there. We understood it was a holiday weekend, but we've both kind of come to the conclusion that we're not necessarily huge crowd people. As a result, we kept riding until we found a beach park called Kokololio Beach Park. Off to the side, they were setting up for a 4th of July celebration, but the beach was much quieter than any of the others we had passed to this point. I'm sure at least part of that was related to the fact that we did not arrive at this beach until around 3:00 in the afternoon, but it was still very pleasant.

We ended up staying for about an hour or so, and then catching the bus back to town. It was a long day, as we left Honolulu around 9:45 and didn't get back until almost 7 pm, but it was a very fun day as well.