Prematurely blowing this mid-Pacific Poi Taco stand–and blowing it my way–came to be my birthday present to myself today. That is to say, I stood on my lanai late last night, watching the clock tick over, and growing increasingly keenly aware of all the stuff I've really got to do back in the Land of Geeks and Dreams (i.e. Silicon Valley), and I started thinking about going back early. When I attended, this morning, the most technically promising looking session in this whole blighted conference (titled "JavaBeans, Java, and Java Servlets, and CORBA Revolutionizing Web-based Enterprise Application Development") and found that my aggregate learning for the week still stood at zero, I made my decision to blow off the final day of the conference (as well as my post-conference Servlets tutorial on Saturday); I dashed back up to my room; called AmEx to move my flight up two days (to Friday morning); packed a bag for the road and the beach; and ran down the street to that budget jeepney rental place I found in the yellow pages last night.

And I rattled and hummed out of town on a mad and enlivening circuit of the East O'ahu Ring.

First the ride: For $29.95 these guys let me a gorgeous ramshackle purple piece shit Suzuki Samurai, complete with holes in the floor plating, a shot electrical system, and highway speed handling characteristics like an hourly motel vibrating bed. It was fabulous. And it let in a great deal of air. Cruising around the coastal edge of the island in this thing, sunglassed, shirtless, wild-maned, fielding birthday calls on the ole cell phone... this was far from the worst way to spend a b-day I've experimented with. (The last one, when I turned 28, the whole day spent deeply drunk and inconsolably sobbing through a major clinical depressive episode springs to mind, just for starters... (apologies for the slight TMFI).)

Out of town on the H1, and the first and foremost stop was Hanauma Bay, the vaunted natural park and beach/snorkling mecca. For a ridiculous 6 smackers I got snorking gear (another 5 for a locker for all my stuff; the jeepney didn't approach lockability in any way, down to not having a glove compartment door), and in minutes I was swimming (though, happily, not sleeping) with the fishes. Snorkling I've found, and if you haven't done it, takes a delightfully short amount of time to get used to. It's low pressure. Whereas with swimming, there's this constant mindfulness of expending enough energy and attention to keep your head in the familiar realm of breathable air... with snorkling, your body floats in just the right place by itself, and all you have to do is sort of flipper yourself in various directions and take in the views. There was coral, and fat floating tourists, and hundreds of fishies, many of them big and colorful, with no discerbible fear of man. I followed one for a while which must have been 2.5 feet long, and whose fuchsia and lime colorings made it look like an aquarian toucan. I didn't spring for the disposable underwater camera, but here are a few from the surface. A short relaxing flop in the sand, and quick rinse, a farewell "I Was Here Dammit" shot, and I was back in the wind.

"I just don't get you, Crowe."
"Nobody gets me, baby.... I'm the wind."

- Joel and Crowe T. Robot, MST3K

Turning the southeast corner of the island, the road continued to hug the coast, a fair simulacrum of, say, CA Route 1 (the PCH): all curves and cliffs and surf. Stretching it out up the north coast, it then cut inland a bit, and through the quaint coastal farming town of Waimanalo, towered over on the inland side by the precipitous and grooved and ominously misty Ko'olau Mountain range. A sharp left took me onto the Pali Highway, one of two mountain pass roads that cut through the range. (Cue involuntary horrendous mountain pass flashbacks.)

Another rogue rain came. It goes without saying the wipers on the jeepney were non-starters, and I still have no idea whether the headlights ever came on. But at my last stop, just off the Pali, at Nu'uanu Pali lookout, I buttoned up the cloth roof, and swung out for a view up and down the windward coast–a view that Sam Clemens (in what was probably an uncharacteristic fit of generosity) called the most beautiful in the world. [Not to annoyingly dwell on it, but living in the Bay Area does really inure you to stellar natural vistas; I can't remember the last view I saw anywhere that compares that favorably to most of my weekend bike rides through the middle S.F. peninsula mountains.]

In a final coup, I even managed to get the purple monstrosity back on the lot before 5pm, so I don't have to screw with it in the morning. Tomorrow, I'll be back on CalTrain from SFO to Palo Alto in time to go zipping by rush hour traffic, and back to life such as it awaits me. Now that's efficiency. I'm not sure what lessons, if any, Hawai'i's had for me; maybe it was just a jaunt, and my tummy feels a lot better. I'll take it. And I'm excited to see what another year is going to hold in store; hopefully the fruition of some things I've been working toward for a while now. At any rate, love to all, thanks for reading along, and hope you liked the pictures–more than the "belly-aching," at any rate.

Michael
Official Whiny Old Guy^TM

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