Whale watching

 We expected some noise for New Year’s.  We went out to the Waikiki beach in the evening on New Year’s Eve, and it was very crowded.  We had heard there would be fireworks around Diamond Head.  But most of the crowd seemed to leave when the sun went down.  You could see it get lower and lower and went it finally dipped below the horizon, a cheer went up from the crowd.  We stayed a bit longer, but headed back for the room, arriving just so that when we got the TV to work again, the ball had just dropped in New York City.  We were in bed by 9:00 PM.  (It’s 2 hours to California; 2 hours more to Texas, and so 5 hours to New York.) There were occasional sounds of fireworks, but not much.

But at midnight, all hell broke loose. The noise was deafening.  And that’s even without my hearing aids!  Fireworks.  Horns. Yells. Screams. It went on, at full volume at least until 12:45, and then at a lower level until at least 2:00AM.  And with the louvered windows in our room, we could not shut out the noise. By the time it quieted down, I was too awake to go back to sleep; I stayed up and read for a while.

But come 6AM, the alarm went off and we had to get up.  Whale watching was on the calendar for 8AM.  But they asked you to arrive 45 minutes early (15 would have been plenty).  And we had planned out taking the #2 bus would take another twenty minutes, so we had to leave the room by 6:50.

The whale watching was on a double hull catameran.


There were about 80 people in our cruise.  We sailed out of the harbor into the waters off Waikiki.  The captain, who had done this many times, knew about where the whales might be.  Mainly they were off the coast of Maui, but he said they would sometimes come over to Oahu.  Particularly the mother whales with their calf, as the mother taught the calf how to be a whale.

While sometimes the whales would “breach” and leap out of the water, mostly they just came up to the top of the water and blew air out of their blow holes.  They have two blow holes, one for each lung.  So what you would see, if you looked real hard, was just the spray from their blow holes.  

So for most of the two-hour cruise was just the ocean.


But if you were lucky, you might see


See the difference?  In the middle of the photo, near the horizon, 

That’s a whale.  Or at least evidence of a whale.  There was an occasion where, we were told, the actual whale was at the surface.


The white smudge at the right of the photo is the spray from the blow hole drifting away with the breeze and the black shape at the left just up from the bottom is the whale.  At least that’s what we were told.  It could be Nessie as near as I can tell.  No.  Nessie is more recognizable.

Anyway, that was whale watching.  A pleasant way to spend a couple hours, as long as your expectations are set appropriately.  Back to shore.  Back to bus #2 to our room.  

We spent some time trying to plan out tomorrow’s trip to Diamond Head.  Google maps refused to get to the park trailhead unless we either drive or take a Lyft. We know you can take the bus to just outside Diamond Head park — we did that by mistake the other day. And by repeated attempts, we could get us to go closer and closer to Diamond Head, right up to the Diamond Head Tunnel (take the #2 bus to Diamond Head Road + opp 18th Avenue, then walk 0.5 miles to Diamond Head Tunnel), but if you try to go any further, there is no route to get there.  If you drive, it shows it is only another 0.4 miles to the trailhead.  And we found other pages on the internet that talk about walking thru the tunnel, so this just seems a glitch in Google maps.

Kat had commented that we should find a more Hawaiian place to eat than IHOP, so after recuperating and planning, and checking out some other places near our room (all those places were closed for New Year’s), we found a food truck where we got Italian Shaved Ice. (Linda was hot.)


On our way back to the room, Linda got some “garlic poke shrimp” to eat with her left-over udon noodles.  I had some left-over tempura and brown rice.

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