King Kamehameha was objecting to the heat. There hadn’t been so much as a flutter of breeze in Waikiki’s Kapiolani Park all morning. And now that the hour-long hula show had ended, the time to pose with tourists was at hand. Kamehameha the Great, too much the monarch to wipe his beading brow, hissed his complaint through clenched teeth, then gamely struck an expression of the warrior whose fierceness is only momentarily restrained. That’s what comes of wearing a processional cape made of red fake fur in rising temperatures.
The grandfatherly actor had my sympathy. So did the entire cast of ukulele-playing grandmothers, capricious dancing aunties, sarong-wearing male drummers, ruffle-haired and ruffle-dressed songbird, gold-and-molasses voiced emcee and the never-described-as-anything-other-than-lovely lovely hula maidens–the whole smiling, sweating cliche of the Hula Show Formerly Known as Kodak, now sponsored by Pleasant Hawaiian Vacations.
I love this stuff. The history lesson, cultural introduction, arts appreciation, linguistics session, audience participation and all-around kid’s-birthday-party feeling that is a hula show. And I’m not alone. The grassy field where the show took place that mid-November morning was so crowded with tourists wanting to learn the hula that there wasn’t enough room to keep from bumping into one another. I took that as a good omen for tourism in general, Hawaii in particular and the renewed optimism of travelers overall.
I hated for it, for the show, for the story assignment, for the trip, to end. My last morning there, I sagged into a lounger on Waikiki Beach at sunrise and returned my tears to the ocean, crying at the thought of leaving.
And yet as consumed as I was, as I always am, with Hawaii, something about the trip felt forced. I had the sense that my visit was almost right, in the way that a dress that looks so good in the shop window almost fits when you try it on.
A different trip kept tugging at me, the one I almost took.
I had started researching Oman and the United Arab Emirates in August, after my boss decided that since I would be going to Egypt for a couple of travel stories anyway, I might as well stop by Oman and UAE and write about them, too, while I was “in the neighborhood.” Piggybacking destinations this way helps the Travel section save money.
Visiting these countries that hug the eastern “horn” of the Arabian Peninsula would require more elaborate planning than most destinations. Just finding a good book on them was a job. I finally bought the “Insight Guide: Oman & the UAE” because it had plenty of good color photos to go with the text and because it was the only Oman-and-UAE title the bookstore had in stock anyway.
Like Howard Carter peering into King Tut’s tomb for the first time, I saw wonderful things in the book’s pages: frankincense trees; gold souks, or markets; the devil-may-care treks, called “wadi bashing,” through desert valleys; a private beach in Abu Dhabi for women only, staffed by women only and surrounded by a high brick wall; imposing forts with watchtowers and crenelated roofs; the site that Muslims hold to be the grave of the long-suffering biblical hero Job; the coast where Sinbad sailed. I finished it on the flight home from a visit to my mother Sept. 5. That gave me a good enough background on the region, I felt, that I could start booking an itinerary that would put me in those places seeing those things come mid-November.
Then evil men thought an evil thought and gave themselves over to the wickedness of its execution. I felt like I did that time I fell out of a tree as a kid and landed flat of my back; it took a while to get my breath back.
The travel assignments I took before seem now to have happened much longer ago. Was it really in January 2001 that I spent a snowbound night, and gave up on a second, in Wisconsin’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Seth Peterson Cottage? Only last April when I was in so much pain from a pulled back muscle that I scarcely recall Madison, Wis.?
I remember riding a tour bus through England, Scotland and Wales, but that couldn’t have been in May, could it? And I know I went to Hong Kong, but surely that wasn’t this August? Yet that’s what the ticket stubs and the receipts and my stories from those trips say.
Since September, I’ve started observing the passage of time with souvenirs.
Enough time has gone by, for example, for me to have thrown out the “year 2000” mug I was given to commemorate my January 2001 stay in the Seth Peterson Cottage. They gave me the old mug because the new ones hadn’t come in yet, and I threw it out because its photo decal of the cottage came off in the dishwasher. Sometime before the end of March, they mailed me the new one.
Enough time has gone by that I need to polish, again, the 13 silver-plated spoons I bought at a London flea market for $30.
But I haven’t gotten around to framing the decorative city map I picked up of York, England, or to finding the right dress to set off a lizard-and-leaf jade pendant I got in Hong Kong. And there certainly hasn’t been enough time for me to pack-and-post the 7-ounce bottle of premium turbinado sugar I brought back for my niece from Hawaii.
There’s no telling what I’d have brought back from Egypt and Oman, had history taken a different course. And I’ll get to those places in due time. But as a substitute, the Hawaii assignment was therapeutic. I tend to think of destinations as if they were people, and so Hawaii was the first place I worried about after, once I caught my breath. It was so alone out there, I secretly fretted. I felt the urge to go check on it, the way a parent looks in on a sleeping child just to be sure everything is OK. And it was. But only almost.
When I revealed my worries to the Honolulu shuttle driver who was taking me to Hanauma Bay for snorkeling, he told how he was searching for job No. 3. Since September, his income driving the shuttle had been reduced from 10- or 12-hour days six days a week, to 6-hour days three days a week. He had already started working job No. 2, a graveyard shift at a 7-11, and just needed to line up a third to make ends meet.
“Don’t worry about Hawaii,” he reassured me. “Things will get better. We can take care of ourselves.” How very Hawaiian. How very American. How very right, almost.
For if there is going to be a Hawaii or an Orlando or a Caribbean or a Vail for us to visit later, when things get better, we also have to visit them now, when it’s maybe not such a comfortable idea, to keep them going so they are able to take care of themselves.
I’m coming. I’ll be there. No almost about it.
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E-mail Toni Stroud: tstroud@tribune.com
