Honolulu airport looked like a 1970s basement. It had a greeter: A frumpy woman in an aloha shirt said aloha to each arriving passenger as they passed. It turns out that the aloha shirt is basically a mark of bondage in Hawaii. The people who wear them wear them because they have to -- they're uniforms for people in low-level service jobs, while tourists wear them because there are sinister forces in the universe that bring that kind of thing about.
In the immigration hall, there was a 2-hour queue. Outside, the wait for a taxi was half an hour. The driver I got was a wizened but sprightly man of about 120. Traffic coming out of the airport was heavy; when we were stuck, he would sigh and hand me a packaged Chinese cookie. He did this twice, and then I passed out until we got to Waikiki. It was an overnight flight.
Waikiki's not great, but I had uncharacteristically good reasons for staying there. I wasn't going to have a car, which would have made life on the other islands hard; and I needed somewhere comfortable and uncomplicated, because I was sick. It started on Gili Trawangan. In Hong Kong airport, where I spent a night between Bali and Tokyo, I felt awful. I had chills. Part of the problem that night was that Hong Kong airport is air conditioned to about 10 degrees. The principle that governs A/C in East Asia is not that the temperature should be comfortable, but that people should be compensated for the excess heat outside -- so if it's 30 outdoors, it should be about 10 degrees inside. Still, it was obvious that I had some kind of fever. It came back a couple of times in Tokyo, and the first few days in Hawaii weren't great, either.
I'd paraded a soft and naive immune system around Asia for a couple of months, so it was probably inevitable that at least some of the local diseases would have seen me for the opportunity I was. Immunologically speaking, it was like strolling around 1970s New York in short pants carrying a huge lollipop. So it seemed like a good idea to stop, take stock of the things that were wrong with me, and rest. I spent a few days sleeping, reading, watching awful television, and trying not to think about how much cheaper it would have been to do those things at home.
The most exciting thing I did in Hawaii was to get tested for malaria. There's malaria on Lombok and Gili Trawangan, I hadn't been taking antimalarials, and I had a mysterious, recurring fever -- so it didn't seem out of the question. A clinic in waikiki shuttled me into Honolulu, where a lab filled half a dozen tubes and bottles with my blood. The original clinic sent a car to pick me up, which I thought was pretty remarkable. There was another passenger on the return trip, a melted-looking old man in shorts and an aloha shirt. He moaned "oh, I'm in Hell. I thought Hawaii was supposed to be paradise." He nagged the driver to stop at either Safeway or McDonald's, and then there was silence for about five minutes. Then he turned to me and yelled: "I'm 92 years old!"
I still haven't gotten any results, but after I'd gotten the test I began to feel much better. After another day or two, it was pretty clear that the fever wasn't coming back, and I started to feel a bit ridiculous for having gotten tested. I was well enough to look around a bit.
A few hundred years after the extinction of the human race, Waikiki will be a really beautiful place. Right now, it's a stretch of beaches and a lot of high rises - apartments full of extremely old retirees, and hotels full of extremely unimaginative tourists. Little kids walk around with sodas you could drown a piglet in. A man wearing a sandwichboard advertising the gun range at the Hawaii Gun Club ("shoot a real gun!") chats with a Greenpeace canvasser. A skinny woman of about 60 drives by in an open jeep, screeching along with very loud classic rock and pumping her arms. Bearded, scraggly-haired guys with open shirts and big, suntanned potbellies sit down by the beach weaving reed hats. Very similar bearded guys wander around with parrots. Renting out parrots for photographs is an important cottage industry here. One of the parrot guys has worked his way up to a permanent spot in a shopping mall; he has a slot on the directory board ("Bird Guy") and manages five or six birds and a blond assistant.
What with being sick, looking around Waikiki and Diamond Head, and trying to sort out Oahu's bus system, the week went by pretty easily. Today, I fly on to LA, then I stay there for two days for no good reason, and then, on the 23rd, I come back to Canada and try to remember where I live and what I do for a living.
In the immigration hall, there was a 2-hour queue. Outside, the wait for a taxi was half an hour. The driver I got was a wizened but sprightly man of about 120. Traffic coming out of the airport was heavy; when we were stuck, he would sigh and hand me a packaged Chinese cookie. He did this twice, and then I passed out until we got to Waikiki. It was an overnight flight.
Waikiki's not great, but I had uncharacteristically good reasons for staying there. I wasn't going to have a car, which would have made life on the other islands hard; and I needed somewhere comfortable and uncomplicated, because I was sick. It started on Gili Trawangan. In Hong Kong airport, where I spent a night between Bali and Tokyo, I felt awful. I had chills. Part of the problem that night was that Hong Kong airport is air conditioned to about 10 degrees. The principle that governs A/C in East Asia is not that the temperature should be comfortable, but that people should be compensated for the excess heat outside -- so if it's 30 outdoors, it should be about 10 degrees inside. Still, it was obvious that I had some kind of fever. It came back a couple of times in Tokyo, and the first few days in Hawaii weren't great, either.
I'd paraded a soft and naive immune system around Asia for a couple of months, so it was probably inevitable that at least some of the local diseases would have seen me for the opportunity I was. Immunologically speaking, it was like strolling around 1970s New York in short pants carrying a huge lollipop. So it seemed like a good idea to stop, take stock of the things that were wrong with me, and rest. I spent a few days sleeping, reading, watching awful television, and trying not to think about how much cheaper it would have been to do those things at home.
The most exciting thing I did in Hawaii was to get tested for malaria. There's malaria on Lombok and Gili Trawangan, I hadn't been taking antimalarials, and I had a mysterious, recurring fever -- so it didn't seem out of the question. A clinic in waikiki shuttled me into Honolulu, where a lab filled half a dozen tubes and bottles with my blood. The original clinic sent a car to pick me up, which I thought was pretty remarkable. There was another passenger on the return trip, a melted-looking old man in shorts and an aloha shirt. He moaned "oh, I'm in Hell. I thought Hawaii was supposed to be paradise." He nagged the driver to stop at either Safeway or McDonald's, and then there was silence for about five minutes. Then he turned to me and yelled: "I'm 92 years old!"
I still haven't gotten any results, but after I'd gotten the test I began to feel much better. After another day or two, it was pretty clear that the fever wasn't coming back, and I started to feel a bit ridiculous for having gotten tested. I was well enough to look around a bit.
A few hundred years after the extinction of the human race, Waikiki will be a really beautiful place. Right now, it's a stretch of beaches and a lot of high rises - apartments full of extremely old retirees, and hotels full of extremely unimaginative tourists. Little kids walk around with sodas you could drown a piglet in. A man wearing a sandwichboard advertising the gun range at the Hawaii Gun Club ("shoot a real gun!") chats with a Greenpeace canvasser. A skinny woman of about 60 drives by in an open jeep, screeching along with very loud classic rock and pumping her arms. Bearded, scraggly-haired guys with open shirts and big, suntanned potbellies sit down by the beach weaving reed hats. Very similar bearded guys wander around with parrots. Renting out parrots for photographs is an important cottage industry here. One of the parrot guys has worked his way up to a permanent spot in a shopping mall; he has a slot on the directory board ("Bird Guy") and manages five or six birds and a blond assistant.
What with being sick, looking around Waikiki and Diamond Head, and trying to sort out Oahu's bus system, the week went by pretty easily. Today, I fly on to LA, then I stay there for two days for no good reason, and then, on the 23rd, I come back to Canada and try to remember where I live and what I do for a living.
