China, Hawaii style and the Lyons Arboretum

After a giant-sized cappucino and some time with my guide book, I set off on foot again this morning.  Back to Chinatown to get some more photos and wander streets I'd missed yesterday.

It's obvious that the earlier you get there, the better the produce is and the wider the selection will be.  As I walked along side streets, I saw the lei makers' tiny shops, ladies busy at tables stringing leis.

Most markets are clustered inside large buildings; several vendors sell similar items such as fish or meat or manufactured delicacies.  I found a few Vietnamese pho cafes that looked very tempting, but I kept on walking.  A dim sum restaurant where a woman ladles the delicacies into dishes from bamboo steamers stacked high in the window caught my eye.

I detected the aromas of a few herbalists and walked along the long racks of cooking equipment in another store.  Chinatown tickles all my sweet spots:  Fresh food, cuisine, foreign language, open-air markets, visual feasting.

After taking an hour or two to peer into nooks and crannies of the Chinese culture done Hawaiian style, I walked back to my car, unloaded my purchases and then turned to the Aloha Tower and pier area, which is much more commercialized.

Maybe it wasn't fair to the Tower to have come directly from bargainland where life is real, but the area felt very touristed and too similar to the Cannery Row in Monterey for me to find much joy there.  There are true commercial businesses at the pier, but much of what you see is meant to lure those who have just stepped off a cruise boat or a large tour bus, both of which dump out their human load at frequent intervals.  That's fine, everyone seemed happy to be visiting the shops, and it's scenic for sure.

I would recommend the Gordon-Biersch restaurant at the farthest end of the pier for lunch or happy hour; moderate prices, large portions.  There's a bistro right at the entrance near the parking lot that looked attractive, but I went for the Seabright Fish lunch truck parked at the curb and was very happy.  The menu is written in Chinese and English.  I ordered the special Sea Bass Plate Lunch.  It took about 10 minutes to prepare and was a box full of salad, rice, mango chutney, a hunk of bread, a bit of corn on the cob, salad and two sizzling hot fillets of fish sauteed and seasoned lightly and not overdone.  Slice of lemon and I was all smiles; $9.95, including a bottled water.

Changing gears, I headed way up the Manoa Valley to the Lyon Arboretum to see jungle foliage and endemic plants featured there.  This valley is shaped like a funnel where the wide end is just above Waikiki at about the campus of the University of Hawaii.  The valley is narrower as you ascend to the final destination:  a pretty waterfall, when it's running.  Hawaii has been experiencing a drought, so the fall was just trickling, according to a couple who'd hiked up earlier than I was starting out.

The Arboretum is co-managed by the University and affords students as well as professors a 200-acre private preserve to study plants, birds, and the ecosystem native to the area.  There are many species of non-native plants and birds, but the volunteers and hired gardeners have established a good number of specimens of natives as well.

The steep and jagged peaks form nine valleys that feed into the land occupied by the arboretum, and all the flanks of the valleys, which look like fanned blades, are covered with a dense growth of trees and brush.  I recognized a lot of plants that I would normally only see as houseplants back home, but here they are enormous and lush.  It isn't flowering season, so blossoms were scarce.

The Manoa Valley in that upper reach is unusual on the leeward side of Oahu in that it scoops up as much as 200 inches of rain per year.  Today was dry and actually mostly sunny, and the wind even cooperated, staying light and easy.  One couple walking at a very leisurely pace was dazzled by the size of the hibiscus plants, frustrated that in north Los Angeles where they live frost zaps their hibiscus every winter.  "I tried three times to grow them, but they died!" the lady exclaimed, "We had to come all the way here to see healthy hibiscus."  They do seem to grow like weeds around here, and decorate the freeways and public places, producing a pleasant tropical backdrop.

After a dinner of noodles bathed in sauteed veggies from the markets I'd visited earlier, the day has now come to a close, and a very pleasant one it was.