Finding the real WAIKIKI
Discover the real Hawaii beneath the glitz and glamour, writes Ann Hood
SWaikiki,ince my first trip to Waikiki Beach in 1977, I have travelled all around the Hawaiian Islands. And I’ve loved each one. But I love too. Not the hordes of tourists, of course, or the highend shopping malls that have taken over Kalakaua Avenue and earned it the nickname Vegas on the Beach. What I love are the remnants of a different Waikiki, a beautiful, tropical paradise that inspired songs and movies and dreams and romance. When I come here, with some time and patience, I can still find that Waikiki.
Lately, it’s become fashionable to dismiss Waikiki as a playland for tourists and not the “real” Hawaii. When I posted pictures of a gorgeous sunset and the waves crashing on Waikiki Beach on social media last March, I got vehement comments like: “Get out of there and see the real Hawaii!”
But Waikiki is no less the real Hawaii than anywhere else, said T. Ilihia Gionson, the public affairs officer for the Hawaii Tourism Authority. “From the beginning, Waikiki has been a very special place that captured the hearts and souls of many,” he said. “The land is the land, and it will always have that certain energy and life force that comes through, no matter what we put upon it.”
According to Gionson, in pre-pandemic 2019, Hawaii had 10.4 million annual arrivals, its highest ever. Numbers this year are running at about 92 per cent of that number, or close to 10 million.
The strain of so many visitors on local neighbourhoods led the Hawaiian Tourism Authority to ask itself how it can do tourism better and reinvest economic resources into communities and resources. With its emphasis on local culture, traditions and products, the Malama Hawaii campaign, which kicked off in 2021, invites travellers to learn how Hawaii residents care for their home.
Waikiki, once home to royalty, was an agricultural centre, rich with taro fields and rice paddies, and eventually a seaside neighbourhood for local families. The Mahele, a land distribution plan that changed the islands’ communal system of land ownership to a private one in 1848, brought Western land barons and the beginning of tourism with hotels built for wealthy tourists.
With the opening of the luxurious Moana Surfrider in 1901, Waikiki’s reputation as a popular tourist destination began. Promoters advertised many of the things still synonymous with Waikiki — lu’aus, lush leis, and beach boys who taught water sports. Wealthy businesspeople saw an opportunity to develop these wetlands into a tourist mecca. The Waikiki Reclamation Project drained and dredged Ala Wai Canal, its surrounding fish ponds, taro fields, rice farms, banana and coconut groves, then filled them with material on which to build hundreds of hectares of new hotels and upscale homes.
Old Waikiki was gone — again — and a new Waikiki of luxury hotels and tiki bars emerged.
Movies like Blue Hawaii, starring Elvis Presley, and singers such as Don Ho brought Hawaii into our living rooms. This was the Waikiki I arrived in on a United Airlines Friendship, one of three million tourists who visited in 1977. As my friends and I disembarked from our flight, where stewardesses in flowered uniforms served us mai tais and macadamia-crusted chicken, saronged women placed plumeria leis around our necks and welcomed us with that magical word, “Aloha.”
Unable to afford a beachfront hotel, we stayed at the Miramar, four blocks from the ocean. But we didn’t care — we were in Waikiki. We bought tatami mats and Hawaiian Tropic suntan lotion at the ABC store and happily walked across the street, through the lobby of a hotel and on to the beach. There was Diamond Head, and surfers and the Pacific Ocean, everything we had hoped for.
When we weren’t sunbathing, we roamed around the International Marketplace, the outdoor market that Don the Beachcomber, the father of tiki culture, opened in 1956, the year we were born. Around the 18m-tall banyan tree in the centre were kiosks that sold all things tropical and Hawaiian. I bought my mother a handwoven grass skirt. Why I thought a middle-aged accountant in West Warwick, Rhode Island, would want a grass skirt, I can’t say. Except that I was bringing Hawaii, a place she would never visit, to her.
The Miramar Hotel, Chuck’s Cellar and the Wailana Coffee House are all gone now. The International Marketplace was razed in 2013 and reopened three years later with only the name and the banyan tree remaining. Today, instead of the dangling vines and footbridges, the International Marketplace is a three-storey mall with a Burberry shop and a Christian Louboutin.
With an influx of international tourists in the 1990s, high-end retail shops arrived along with more hotels. The well-known San Francisco department store Gump’s, which opened at the corner of Kalakaua Ave and Lewers St in 1929, became a Louis Vuitton store in 1992. Thirteen years later, buildings were bulldozed or repurposed to create Luxury Row with stores such as Chanel and Gucci.
Except for the happy hour at the piano bar at the Moana Surfrider, where they make strong real cocktails like martinis and Manhattans, skip the Blue Hawaiis and sugary mai tais at hotel bars. Instead, walk down Saratoga Rd, past the tattoo parlour and Eggs and Things (serving eggs with Portuguese sausage or pork chops since 1974) to Arnold’s Beach Bar, a tiny bar not actually on the beach, but full of regulars, like a Waikiki Cheers.
One morning, I woke up early, got a kona coffee and a li hing mango morning bun from the Honolulu Cafe, and sat on Waikiki Beach. It was quiet and, except for some surfers in the water and a mother and daughter building sandcastles, I was alone. The sky was pale pink. The palm trees swayed in the breeze. Diamond Head watched me sitting there. I was smiling, happy in Waikiki.
It is still there, if you look hard enough.