First Impressions of Hawai'i
Spend a day in Honolulu and you’ll understand why everybody calls Hawai‘i a paradise.
The weather is as perfect as it gets: in the 70s all the time, year ’round, and trade winds blowing all the time, year ’round as well, to keep the humidity down. It’s lush and green; it doesn’t get hit by typhoons as regularly as Guam does, so palm trees grow taller and flowering things more profusely. (Greenery on Guam, as rapidly growing and lush as it is, is kind of stunted compared to that on Hawai‘i.) Like on Guam, there are no seasons. Everything is always in bloom.
The setting is nothing short of spectacular. Honolulu is ringed by mountains that are volcanic, of course, and weathered away by the tropical rain to a pleasant, slouchy gentleness. They are still nonetheless a real presence, high and steep enough to make themselves known, and covered in greenery and little houses climbing up their slopes. Often the tops of the mountains directly north of the city, close enough that you could actually hike to them, are shrouded in clouds. Rain is light, misty, and frequent in Honolulu. Because it’s so often accompanied by sunshine, rainbows are constant. The mascot of the University of Hawai‘i sports teams is the Rainbow Warriors. It fits.
The beaches are equally spectacular. Waikiki is so (over)built that it’s a bit hard to imagine it not ringed in by one high-rise hotel trumpeting its importance after another, but imagine living on that near-perfect, broad swath of white sand overlooking the collapsed volcano that is Diamond Head, as Robert Louis Stevenson did, in a little Victorian cottage by the ocean. Actually, Waikiki was formerly a swampy set of taro fields that got drained, but you wouldn’t know it looking at it today. If you could design the perfect beach, it would look a great deal like Waikiki, though maybe without the high-rise hotels.
The downtown and Waikiki areas of Honolulu are the usual maze and street canyons of nondescript high-rises that announce that you are in a Modern and Dynamic City, but the domestic architecture is low-slung and in the Hawai‘ian vernacular “plantation” style: built in wood, with low sloping roofs, overhanging eaves, lots of windows to catch the cross breezes, and set up off the ground so that air circulates all around and even under the buildings. Houses are airy, small, and charming, on little postage-stamp lots. You just want to move in.
Honolulans are an enormous ethnic mix. There are native Hawai‘ians, of course, as well as Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, and other Pacific Islanders; haoles and other Americans because of the large military presence; and a fair number of Hispanics. The state has no ethnic majority, which is highly unusual, and relatively harmonious relations among everybody, which is also highly unusual for polarized America.
Alas, paradise has its price. Because it’s remote, even more so than Guam (Hawai‘i is the most isolated place on earth that is permanently inhabited), prices are high, about 20% over what anything costs in the States. This is roughly equivalent toGuam prices, until you come to real estate. The median house price in Honolulu is a whopping $600,000. And climbing. There are two primary reasons for this: 1) very rich people constantly moving there and jacking up prices to an astonishing degree because they can, and will, pay anything for the privilege of island life; and 2) the fact that Honolulu is hemmed in by mountains so that there’s just no more land to build on, and even if there were, there are still severe limits to the amount of available land on what is, after all, an island. The downside is that people in lower-paying jobs, such as the service industries that support the mammoth tourism trade, who need to live there, frankly, can’t. (You can’t commute from somewhere else, or at least not somewhere else very far. O‘ahu is an island.) Actually, all sorts of people can’t live there. Property taxes have gone through the roof, fully doubling in the past two years. Rents are out of control. Older homeowners are being forced out of the place that they’ve lived in and loved for decades. Native Hawai‘ians are being forced literally to leave their own land. An article in the Honolulu Advertiser grimly suggested that the median price of a house could climb to near $700,000 by year’s end. Nice place to visit, really nice place to visit, but . . . I couldn’t possibly afford to live there. And I’m not alone.
This is too bad, because Honolulu is seriously seductive. The Pacific island lifestyle is seductive on general principle, but Hawai‘i might have it down the best. What a beautiful place. People I know on Guam like Guam a lot, are fond of the Philippines, enjoy Japan and Korea, but they invariably love Hawai‘i. I get it now.
A Note on the Funky Little Punctuation Mark You Keep Seeing
It does have a name, but I don’t know what it is. In Hawai‘ian, the mark ‘ indicates a glottal. Thus “Hawai‘i” is properly pronounced “ha WA ee ee” (double the “ee” at the end, and don’t elide the vowels) and “O‘ahu” is properly pronounced “oh AH hoo” and not “owe WAH hoo,” with the “w” elided. Notice that it looks like the single quotation mark that precedes a word rather than follows it; it’s the opposite of an apostrophe. There are other diacritical marks that mark long vowels, but you don’t see them as consistently; in fact, you don’t see this one much outside of Hawai‘i, either, and if you did, I wouldn’t be explaining it to you.
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