Circle Island Bus

The Circle Island Bus, the cheap tourist's best friend. For just two and a half bucks, you can ride around the entire island of Oahu, seeing the farms, mountains, jungles fly by. If you have a bus pass, you can get off whenever you like, spend a half hour or so, get on the next bus in the procession and continue on. The actual ride takes about four hours. We saw the ocean on the south, east and north sides (the west is inaccessible) and actually traversed a major city in the time it takes to watch a football game. In short, on the scale we are accustomed to, Oahu is tiny! Not that it seems so when you're standing right here. The mountains are damn well mountains, the seashore stretches out as far as you can see, it's just that you can get to all of that with indecent speed. San Diego and Denver within a mile and Florida all around.

Drawbacks to the bus are that it's almost impossible to get a good picture out the windows (see below). The driver isn't about to slow down to give you a chance to take a picture, and the windows could use a good wash. If you do step off the bus, you're stuck for a half hour or more. You have to follow the map closely to figure out where you are. Your only guides are your fellow passengers and tourists. Good and bad there. We struck up a conversation with a local, a self-proclaimed surf bum (one of many we met) who entertained us with stories about surfing and working in the islands before he got off to go to his second job. (Working 2 jobs is commonplace here too.)

The bus changes at Turtle Bay, a wildly luxurious and expensive resort with lots of helicopters landing and taking off. Bus 55 goes back the way it came and Bus 52 continues west then south. Past North Shore. Okay, I know nothing about surfing, but I have heard of this surfer's paradise. Literally miles of rolling surf. Enough surfboards to floor a factory. If you take off your glasses it looks like the ocean has measles, the surfers are so thick. We struck up a conversation with one of them who decided the surf wasn't up to his standards that day and there were enough people out there to make it too hazardous. After 50 years on the pipeline (yes literally -he started at 7), he could pick and choose. Very interesting, so much so that I clean forgot to get his name or a picture. Damn! His proudest possession is a picture (he showed us on his cell phone - the original is at his place) of him riding out from under a huge wave that was on the cover of a 1975 Surfer Magazine cover.

Best of many out the bus window

Turtle Bay

And now, North Shore

The pictures I didn't get are of miles of farmland with exotic stuff like coffee trees, pineapple, sweet corn (!), lots of horse pasture (still can't figure that out.), other stuff I flatly couldn't identify on the fly. Still, Oahu must be about half urban and a quarter military base with just a little left over for agriculture and the mountains left mostly natural.