Day 9: Explosion of Polynesian Culture

So we woke up kinda early today and headed out in our swim-gear to head to Hanauma Bay to go snorkeling. Unfortunately, when we got there, the parking lot was completely full, to the point that they had two guys turning cars away.

So much for that.

Instead, we decided to hike a nearby trail that leads to a lighthouse called the Kaiwi Shoreline Trail.

Kaiwi Shoreline Trail

Which apparently is really, really dangerous:

Nature kills.

We started going up the trail, which was fairly steep since it more or less went up a mountain. Of course, at this point, we’re still in our beach gear.

View off the trail

At some point, after climbing about half a mile in flipflops, we decide to forget it and turn back.

We made our way back to Kailua and headed to the nearby Lanikai Point beach.

Lanikai Point beach

The beach here is beautiful and there surprisingly wasn’t that many people given how nice the beach is. We stayed here and played in the waves for pretty much the rest of the morning. I did some swimming for the first time in a long time by swimming out to a buoy twice. Not being able to open your eyes in the saltwater and having to keep your head above the waves makes it pretty difficult (and I’m years out of practice). But, it was really fun nonetheless. My sister also got stung by a jellyfish on the way back from one of these swims, prompting a guy who apparently grew up around here to stop by and tell us about Portuguese Man-of-War and demonstrated how to use them as bait to lure out other sea creatures (my sister was not nearly as amused as I was by this).

After a light lunch, we headed to our destination for the rest of the day: the Polynesian Cultural Center

Polynesian Cultural Center

Outside the center

The Polynesian Cultural Center is more or less an open-air cultural park where different Polynesian islands are represented such as Somoa, Fiji, etc. in different parts of the park:

Map of the Center

There’s a “river” that runs through the middle of the center, where different events happen. For example, when we first arrived, there was a barge parade for each of these different islands:

Hawaii Barge

After watching that, we headed to the Samoa area and sat down to watch a show. Apparently, each of the island areas have a unique show that entertains and explains something about the culture.

Samoan show feat. Chief Pipi

As dry as this sounds, these shows were actually really entertaining. The Samoan show featured a Chief Pipi that was hilarious, cracking jokes constantly while showing how to do things like build a fire and get milk from a coconut. They also had people demonstrating how to climb a coconut tree (and they were really fast at it):

Climbing the coconut tree

They had a great bit where after the climbers climbed to the top, Chief Pipi told the audience that they had climbed in vain, since the tree had no coconuts. No worries, they could just jump to the next tree. “Are you ready? Let’s ask the crowd… ARE YOU READY?” “YEAH!” “Are you ready?” “YEAH!!”

And it’s at this point the climbers yell back: “ARE YOU CRAZY!?” and climb back down.

Besides the shows, each of these areas has various activities related to the island to do. For example, teaching you how to climb a coconut tree.

The next island and show was Aotearoa (aka New Zealand), which had a very musical bent to the show. An interesting thing that the show had were balls attached to string that were flung around called Poi.

Poi Dancers

The cool thing about these Poi is that they were used as percussion instruments. While swinging them around in circles and the like, the dancers would also let them hit parts of their body in a rhythm, creating a thumping beat while swinging.

One thing I should also mention is that there were a whole lot of people in this park. Each of these shows more or less took all of the available seating (which there were a lot of):

People watching the shows

A lot of these people seemed to be part of tour groups, as they had tour guides after each show raising their hands and gathering their group together to head to the next destination.

The next show we watched was for Tonga. This one had a great audience participation part where 3 men (“warriors”) were selected from the audience. The last one was specifically selected to be from Japan.

Tonga, Arkansas, Michigan, Japan

The Tongan chief running the show asked them where they were from and addressed them as such: “Arkansas”, “Michigan”, and “Japan”. The Japanese dude in particular was hilarious, with perfect mannerisms and just the right lack of shame. I’m also fairly convinced that he was intentionally acting clueless. For example, when the chief would ask him “are you ready?”, “Japan” would respond with a “are you ready?” in a perfect Engrish-y way. “Japan” also accidentally knocked over a drum during a particularly intense bit of call-and-response drumming due to his belt pack.

There were also a number of activities that made use of the river in the park, you could both paddle a canoe or ride a barge down the river:

River activities

We did both. When paddling the canoe, we made sure to go as fast as possible, in order to overtake the nice Korean couple in front of us (who had a dad, mom, and a little kid). We also rode the barge down the river, which was piloted by a student from Taiwan who called himself “Maverick”.

This is a good time to mention that the Center seems to have some sort of system in place with the nearby Brigham Young University: Hawaii. Apparently, a lot of the people who work at the center are actually students. They mentioned it off-hand in a lot of the shows, but there seems to be some sort of program in place where you can work at the center and get… something in exchange, I’m not really sure what exactly.

Also, duck.

No context necessary.

Around this time, it was time to eat dinner at the Center. Apparently, this place seems to have a number of phases: go through the different “islands” in the afternoon and watch the individual shows, go to the dinner and show in the evening, and then watch the big show at night.

Our dinner course was apparently a Samoan-themed one. There seems to be three dinner courses: a normal one, a “Prime dinning” one (no idea what that gives you), and this Samoan-themed one. After everybody was seated at their tables,

Dinner tables

they then started to do a lot of performances in a row while tables were one-by-one allowed to go up to the buffet line.

Dinner show feat. FIRE

One of the shows that they did had this really young-looking kid twirl around what they called a “fire knife”, which seems to be a torch with two lit ends that is twirled around the body and tossed up. Then, they gave the kid a second fire knife and had him twirl both at the same time. All this while I was stuffing my face.

After dinner, we made our way to the main auditorium, which seems to actually be open-air (like the rest of the place). This auditorium is the stage for their main, big show: “Ha: Breath of Life”.

Main auditorium

The show is about 1.5 hrs long and features an overarching story of a man’s life from birth to fatherhood while mixing in the different Polynesian island cultures. It was pretty impressive, with a whole bunch of dance numbers and performances, even a fight scene.

And fire. Lots of fire.

(Cameras and camcorders weren’t allowed, but I took some pictures before and after the show.)

After the show, we fought our way out of the packed parking lot and drove back to our lodgings. At this point, it’s around 10pm or so, so we just called it a day right there.

Overall, this day was surprisingly fun, got to enjoy the beach for quite a bit and the Polynesian Cultural Center was much more entertaining than was expected (I didn’t have high expectations to be honest but it was genuinely a good way to spend most of the day).