Hawaii - First few days

After a year of anticipation, we finally got to Hawaii. It was just as good as we remembered from 25 years ago.

We stayed at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, which we still reckon is the best place to stay in Honolulu. Here is the view from our room.



I wish I was there now. Outside it's only 10 degrees and raining.

The Hilton is about a 15 minute walk to downtown Waikiki and an equal distance the other way to the Ala Moana shopping centre. So you get the benefit of being away from the main drag in a more peaceful area without also being too far away from the excitement.

Waikiki is a very busy place, with a lot of hotels crowding one another for a piece of beachfront. The beach was surprisingly small, with only about 30' from the buildings to the water. In fact, while I was standing there taking a photo one day, a big wave came in and swamped some people sunbaking on what they thought was safe territory.

You can see from the picture above where the sand is wet - to the left of the girl. She was lying on a towel and got hit by a wave. I read in the paper that locals are concerned about the loss of sand.

We didn't do anything in particular for the first few days, just enjoyed being away from work, and explored the Waikiki area and got our bearings. And drank lots of cocktails. I'm not a big drinker, but it just seems to be the thing to do there.

Hawaii trip approaches

Only 5 sleeps to go before our trip to Hawaii.

I’ve just got a new camera for the occasion, a Canon 450D with a set of 18-55 and 55-250 image-stabilised lenses. This camera is quite different from by previous 38-380 Kodak digital camera as there’s a lot more to worry about in the settings department.

And now I have to decide which lens to keep on as default – the short or the long range one. Murphy’s Law says that whenever I have the short-range one on, I’ll need the telephoto one on. Mark reckons that when travelling in Thailand recently, he just kept the short-range one on.

I went to the botanic gardens this weekend to try out some high-contrast photography. A few months ago I went to a rainforest (with my previous camera) and I was disappointed at the quality of the photos that I took – in the rainforest it is dark green with the occasional splash of intense sunlight – sometimes reflecting brightly off leaves. The Kodak camera didn’t handle low light-level situations well. Most of my photos ended up being either too dark, or overexposed where there were patches of sunlight. So yesterday I took myself off to the rainforest area of the botanic gardens to try again.

I guess that it was a learning experience, without much to show for it. While the camera handled the environment better, I still wasn’t able to capture that dark rainforest look with a million shades of green all around. For Father’s Day today Matt gave me a polarising filter that I think might help with the reflected light off the leaves. Surprisingly, the best ones were taken when I used the flash. And the ones where I got the camera settings right were the ones with the worst compositions. Anyway, as I said, a learning experience. After we get back from Hawaii, I’ll try again with my new polarising filter.

I hope to be able to take a lot of shots in Hawaii. I’m taking a large USB drive to copy them on to. Karyn’s taking her netbook for me to use to upload and store the photos. I don’t know what the hotel charges for internet access – certainly up in Sydney it was too expensive for casual browsing. It’s probably costed for business people who can just add it to their accommodation bill.

Today was Father’s Day, so Karyn and I went to the Bella Vista restaurant on the lake at Belconnen where Matt works. He was working there today because of Father’s Day. As usual the food was terrific. Karyn had lasagne, and I had a prawn and calamari entree and a pasta dish with strips of veal, mushrooms, chilli, olives, and other yummy ingredients. We washed it down with a lovely bottle of sparkling shiraz. Karyn finished off her meal with a dessert made from champagne blended with lemon liqueur, cream, and lemon sorbet. With 3kg left to lose on my diet, I gave dessert a miss.