hawaii "picture" diary: honolulu

many of their routes connected remote rural airports with no other passenger service to nearby hubs, subsidized by the government under the "essential air service" program. the airline's patchwork structure made the inflight magazine content eclectic, almost cursed, with articles about the prospects of the university of hawaii football team running next to articles promoting unlikely tourist destinations like lancaster county, pennsylvania. an article that was supposed to list seven things to do around jonesboro, AR (the fifth largest city in arkansas!) gave up halfway through and only listed three things as far as i could see. the whole magazine felt low-effort, although with a quaint human sloppiness to it that will probably die out as ai writing gains popularity. i wonder if the whole thing was just a cynical scheme to extract money from underutilized advertising budgets of rural tourism bureaus, like that of clearfield county (also pennsylvania) that ran a full-page ad alongside an article about the area. the most absurd thing, though, was that the mokulele's inflight magazine carried the SAME JANKY AD FOR A RANDOM PLASTIC INJECTION MOLDING COMPANY that i remembered seeing in hemispheres, united's inflight magazine. it's got to be one of the most bizarre marketing strategies i've seen, going in heavily on inflight magazines.

the mokulele airlines "terminal" at honolulu international airport was a portable office building in a distant corner of the airport, certainly a far cry from maui's commuter terminal or molokai's entire airport (where they are the only airline). i hopped on a shuttle bus to the main terminal, conveniently synced with mokulele arrivals and already waiting there. my ultimate destination was waikiki, where i had arranged to meet up with an unlikely character who had reached out to me while i was on molokai. no, not kit anderson (he is too busy "in the arena" to go on any trips), my brother, who had somehow ended up in hawaii not even two weeks after i'd rescued him up from an extended stint in a seattle-area "behavioral health" facility. he wasn't doing very well when i picked him up but since then it seemed he got it together enough to take a semitranspacific flight to hawaii for whatever reason (i am not sure he even knew about my own trip). it's a mystery where he gets the money for such shenanigans, i suspect my father is secretly supporting him, though there may be some cosmic trickery going on that occasionally turns his delusions into money on the stock market, which he's always been obsessed with. for example, last year he randomly started babbling about buying "orange juice futures", which sound entirely made up. then, a couple of months ago i looked it up and not only are they real, their price had nearly tripled since he had talked about them. maybe i should start a finance newsletter based on his ramblings, it's not more absurd than some things that have happened, like those japanese bankers during the bubble era that would get investing advice from consulting a toad statue.

my brother didn't deign to meet me in the hotel lobby, he has a very particular reclusive mode of travelling in which he hides in his room most of the time vaping weed and scrolling on his phone (the same thing he does at home most of the time). he only leaves the room to go out and eat at fancy restaurants, never for anything that might be termed a "tourist attraction". luckily the hotel elevators didn't require any sort of keycard authentication, so after i finally found them i headed to my brother's room on the eighth floor, tucked away in the west wing down a long curvy hallway. his room was extremely messy as usual, empty takeout containers and honolulu cookie company packages strewn throughout (he rarely gets housekeeping because he's always in the room). this was a good sign because it meant he was taking at least some of his meds, while not on them he is often borderline anorexic. when i arrived, he gifted me a little pot, by which i mean a le creuset mini cocotte that he had bought on a whim at sur la table. earlier, he had also offered to let me crash in his room for free, but neglected to mention that his room had only a single king bed that he wasn't about to share. fortunately, this proved to be no problem at all because i had a suitcase with a full complement of camping gear with me. even if he barred me from the room itself, the balcony looked big enough to set up a tent on.

unfortunately my brother only stayed one more night after i arrived, so for my last night in hawaii i was forced to pursue alternative accomodation. prices weren't awful due to the enormous supply of hotel rooms in the area, and i ended up at a comparable hotel for a reasonable price. i say it's comparable because my new hotel was actually the OTHER sheraton in the area, the sheraton princess kaiulani, to which i wheeled my bag down one block and then across the street. it was one of waikiki's original highrise hotels, and was probably so cheap because it's start to show its age. the tower my room was in, for example, still had a mail chute by the elevators. i had a cheap "city view" room, which isn't so bad because at night you get to see gridded glowing lights in all the surrounding highrise towers instead of the boring dark ocean. it even had a balcony, although it was absurdly loud on it because it was right by the roof of a neighboring mall, where a bunch of big boxes labor noisily throughout the day to keep the shop interiors at a brisk 65 degrees.

of course the hotel didn't end up being as cheap as advertised online - taxes and a mandatory "resort fee" i paid at check-in added an additional 40% to the total price. it's a common racket in tourist areas, a way for hotels to squeeze out some extra cash that can't be skimmed by booking platforms, travel agents, and other miscellaneous middlemen. the pretense is that resort fees are for a bunch of extra perks and services, which are listed if you read the fine print and are always stuff that's definitely not worth $40 per day, like the two "free" bottles of water housekeeping leaves in your room every day, or the wristband thing that acts as a room key, or "cultural activities" like the daily lei-making class in the lobby at 4:00 pm every day. i wasn't too torn up over it because i knew every hotel in the area does the same thing, so the cheapest hotel before the resort fee is still going to be the cheapest hotel after resort fees.

reading the fine print, though, i noticed that at the princess kaiulani one thing you could do thanks to the resort fee was borrow a gopro for 24 hrs, which i immediately requested at the front desk. i haven't really used one before so i spent a lot of time fooling around with it, walking around holding it using the specialized holding stick attachment pretending i was filming a "4K HDR 60fps ASMR Waikiki Ambiance Walking Tour (reupload w/ sudden car crash at 8:43 removed)" youtube video. i wasn't the only one content mining in waikiki, i saw quite a few people who looked like "influencers" in the wild, filming videos of themselves walking around or eating at restaurants. most of them were from japan and korea, impeccably styled with perfect makeup and hair, filming everything on phones sporting grotesque outgrowths like additional lights, microphones, stands, and rigs.

i would have posted some of my gopro videos, except that none of them turned out any good. i tried to mix things up by experimenting with some setting called "hyperlapse" and a lot of odd angles (putting it in my pocket facing sideways, putting it in my backpack facing backwards, etc.), but i had no idea how any of them looked until i got back home because my poor little laptop started melting whenever i tried to open any of the massive video files. naturally, the best angle ended up being the most basic, holding it by the stick facing forwards at chest height, which i barely used.

having explored waikiki to my satisfaction while shooting my fake walking tours, i decided to set off on an expedition to a distant destination: bookoff, the japanese secondhand chain with a handful of US locations. as the name suggests, they're primarily a bookstore, something that waikiki seriously lacks within its extensive retail lineup. of most interest to me, however, was the possibility that they might stock used manga in japanese. kinokuniya is the only US store i know of that sells japanese manga (luckily, they have quite a few locations), but they only sell new manga which limits options when it comes to older manga that aren't enormously popular and constantly being reprinted. although i had been to a bookoff in LA's little tokyo a few months ago that didn't have any japanese manga, i had a good feeling about this one because of how many japanese people live in hawaii. plus, the tropics seem like the best bet if you're looking for a good harvest of mangos.

i started my walk along a part of waikiki i hadn't been through yet, along the canal on the backside. i was surprised to discover that people still live in waikiki, and that the backside mostly a residential district: quieter, less touristy, with some lowrise apartment buildings and even a handful of detached houses. there were still quite a few highrises back there, some even rivalling those along the beachfront in height, but they were mostly condos. unlike the painstakingly-maintained tourist area, quite a few of the backside buildings look a little shabby and the rents probably don't run that high at some of them - you can still imagine that perhaps there's a broke surfer bum who lives in one of the rundown apartment buildings back there, waking up bright and early every morning to hit the beach, making a little money giving tourists surfing lessons. there were even a handful of undeveloped lots and small parks, in which i discovered that yes, even waikiki has feral chickens like the rest of hawaii.

bookoff was approximately 3 miles up the coast from waikiki, towards downtown honolulu. on the way, i passed by a club promising "裸の女" in neon, went through an outrageously large mall (the ala moana center) surrounded by enough parking garages to possibly accommodate the entire island at once (an electric display indicated there over 2000 available spots in one area), stopped by whole foods to use the bathroom (despite its distance from waikiki, it seemed to be a popular tourist attraction for japanese tourists), and got lunch at a hawaiian barbeque chain (despite being my first meal of the day after walking 2 miles, the portion sizes were so excessive that it was the only meal i was unable to finish during my entire trip). one difficulty i did encounter is that i may have become a water addict from my maui water binge, i drank and i drank and i drank and it was never enough, i was still thirsty and always hunting down another water fountain or salivating while staring into the beverage cooler of every abc store i passed.

the next morning, i went down to the front desk to inquire about a free shuttle to the airport, only for them to tell me that not only was the shuttle not free, it was far too late to make a reservation. this is something i've noticed about "resorts" or "luxury" hotels, you usually have to pay outrageous prices for stuff that is free or cheap at less expensive hotels. the sheraton even made you pay for wifi, which i suppose wasn't included in the "resort fee" because they knew people it was something people would actually use (and thus be willing to pay for). meanwhile, the ramshackle ramada inn i stayed at for a fraction of the price near the seattle airport at the start of my trip offered both free wifi and a free airport shuttle (a generic white van with "RAMADA SOUTHCENTER" printed on several sheets of letter-sized paper taped in the window). i guess expensive resorts know you've got money to spend and aren't ashamed to nickel and dime you. what's another $20 per day for wifi when you're already dropping $500 a day (excluding taxes and fees of course) on the room?

having spent my final $5 on the bus to waikiki, i didn't have any cash left for a return trip (they seemed to be cash-only) and every atm in the area wanted to charge extortionate withdrawal fees (another tourist area hazard, being frugal in a tourist area is like playing on hard mode), so i gave up and used the nuclear option, uber. man, it was so smooth and seamless, i hate it. for a long time i didn't even have it installed, but ever since the oakland incident it's been burning a hole somewhere deep in my phone's memory banks. the uber driver didn't speak very good english though seemed to be in a conversant mood, so i talked very slowly and deliberately about the most relatable thing that came to mind, the horrible traffic, and how i recently found out honolulu is supposed to have the worst traffic in america (an impressive feat). as we pulled onto the main highway, which i hadn't been on yet because the bus took the surface streets, i noticed that the signs still labelled it an "interstate" just like on the mainland, even though it certainly did not go to any other states, let alone any of the other islands in the archipelago.