On Saturday, our last day, we had a few specific goals in mind: north shore shave ice, which were closed yesterday when we were there; more raw fish; more mangoes; and as little sun as possible. We got up at seven and watched the teams competing in canoe races on the canal on a weekend morning. By 8:00, after eating the last of our Hilo mangoes and cigar-shaped sticky rice sticks, we drove straight to Honolulu’s Chinatown, at last, to get mangoes. We got a little sidetracked by all the other delights, though: after walking through several butchers and ogling the whole pigs, several fish markets with beautiful, fresh, inexpensive fish, an odd combination fish market and pet fish store, and many fruit markets, we had four or five Pirie mangoes in various stages of ripeness, a little pyramid-shaped leaf-wrapped cone of sticky rice, some baked butter mochi (made kind of like a butter cake with mochiko flour), and some freshly dried ahi “candy” (all right, they called it jerky, but it was so sweet, chewy, and tempting that I thought of it as candy), we were enticed by a Golden Dragon (Palace?) dim sum parlor where every dish was $1.50. Dim sum was good, with exceptional eggplant and beef short ribs, and we made a final stop at a fish market for two different kinds of ahi poke. “Breakfast dessert,” I told Robert, but my traditional-minded husband ate very little of the cubes of creamy raw fish.
I contented myself with the ahi poke and ahi jerky as we drove over to the Aloha Stadium swap meet. The heat was intense, but we were able to wander around fairly happily, buying shell necklaces for Christine and Aurora as well as a carved wood wall hanging for Grandma Helena. From the stadium, we headed north through the Oahu central plains.
We stopped at the very neat, though completely unmarked, Kukaniloko Birthing Stones (above)—a sacred stone formation used as a Stonehenge-like calendar as well as, back to at least 1200, a birthplace for future Hawaiian chiefs. The oldness and the femaleness rose in waves from the site—although I may have been mistaken, and they may actually just have been the heat.
Though
we wouldn’t have gone out of our way for it, the Dole Pineapple Plantation
was just a little ways up the road, so we stopped for mango ice cream, free
cubes of mango and pineapple, and a nice walk around their gardens. In addition
to learning all sorts of fun pineapple facts, we got to have the following conversation.
Me (pointing): Look at the cute pineapple!
Robert: Hey, that is cute—they just placed the pineapple there on the
bush so it would look like it’s growing.
Me: Um, it is growing.
Robert: No! Really?
From
Dole, it was just a short drive up to Haleiwa town on the north shore, where
we went to the famous Matsumoto’s shave ice. I go li hing mui (which is
red) and lilikoi (which is yellow) on the same cone; Robert got coffee and cotton
candy. We both had beans and ice cream underneath, and all of the syrups were
crisply, deliciously flavored. The ice wasn’t as finely shaved as it could
have been, though, and the cones were extremely messy to eat in the heat.
Across the street and down the road from Matsumoto’s, we saw a Huli-Huli (rotisserie) chicken fundraiser by the side of the road. Whole uncut rotisseried chickens with the salty, moist glaze were $7.75, but they happened to have half a chicken, cut up and keeping warm in a cooler for $4, so we ordered that and ate on a bench under a giant umbrella to keep off the sun.
We took another pass by Sunset and the other surfing beaches, and though foot traffic and car traffic was higher, it being a weekend day, the waves themselves were just as low as yesterday. By 2:30, having parked by the side of the road and eaten a couple mangoes, we turned around and headed back to Honolulu.
On our way back to our hotel, we scoped out Sam Choy’s Breakfast, Lunch, and Crab restaurant as a possibility for Sunday morning breakfast, then we showered and changed and got ready to go out again for the evening.
back ------------------------ next