Honolulu, Oahu - January 31

submarine, partly submerged, leaving us

Overcast, 28 degrees


We are still in Honolulu today – we overnighted in port which is quite unusual.
This meant that people had the opportunity to stay out late in

over 100 feet depth

port, going out for dinner etc. We didn’t do that, it was a bit quiet onboard last night for dinner…nice.

Aloha!

 Our tour this morning wasn’t until 10, so we had a relaxing morning of room service and deck time.


Once we did get on with the tour it was on a submarine! The idea of this was super cool and it was cool. We got to a depth of 100 feet which apparently is something only 1% of the population can say they’ve reached. After a short shuttle ride to

turtle...can you see it??

the Hilton, we boarded a short boat ride to the dive site, where we boarded the submarine. The submarine held about 30 people, each of us having a port hole to ourselves to checkout the marine life passing by. We saw some human made reefs – a sunken plane, a ship some Japanese seaweed growing contraption (although not used to

plane, now a reef

grow seaweed here) and another thing I can’t quite remember. All of these reefs were intentionally sunk. The coolest thing we saw were huge turtles – they wedged themselves into the wrecks so that the current/tide wouldn’t move them. We saw a shark and a ton of fish. These submarines are battery powered pulled to and from the dive site in Honolulu harbor each day. We’ve seen these being pulled each morning.

We could have returned directly back to the ship but decided to walk down Waikiki beach. We walked through the sand and surf until we couldn’t really walk further and hit Cheeseburgers in Paradise for

ship, now a reef

lunch. While we were here a group of about 20 Asian tourists came in…they ordered cheeseburgers without cheese! This reminded us of talking to a tour guide in China who said when she brought Chinese groups to North America they would mostly eat in Chinese restaurants because of the lack of dairy…they don’t tolerate it well.

sort of shows the  size of the port hole

Then a long walk (5km) which we needed

bubbles on rising

back to the ship.


Another interesting thing about being docked in the Honolulu harbor was the fighter planes that flew over. We

could hear these before we saw them, usual in 3s or 4s.

surf and surfers

Honolulu is definitely the Hawaii that is our speed. We’ve been to Maui before and thought that was very, very sleepy. This is more like a big city in a tropical beach setting. I could see us coming back here for a week or so. Many of the hotels along Waikiki have a very Vegas vibe…big and sprawling.