Day 6: Luau

Today was a take-it-easy kind of day. No driving around, no hiking, no guidebook.

After breakfast, we toured the swan garden and the rest of the hotel lobby. It's often not clear where the boundaries between inside and outside are, so the lobby is difficult to define. It contains a coy pond and a penguin habitat, as well as several exotic birds.
There are other animal areas that we have yet to stumble upon, too. For details, see Hyatt's website. I should turn on Google Adsense and make some money...

Next, we headed to the pool for a bit, and inspected the water slide. It's about 150' long, and is an enclosed tube, so it's dark.


After that, it was time for a nap in a nearby hammock. Then we walked down the beach for a while, and took a brief dip in the ocean. It started getting cloudy, so we fled to the hotel balcony to research travel plans for this week, including booking a helicopter ride over the volcanos on the big island.

Around 5, we grabbed a taxi down to Lahaina, to attend the Old Lahaina Luau. This place is apparently considered the best and most-authentic luau on the island. (3rd google result for "lu'au", 5th for "luau".)


I was struck by the difference in weather facing west vs. facing east.
This luau was incredible. Before it started, there were arts and crafts along the beach wall, ranging from wood carving to fresh coconut splitting and net-making, if that's a word.
Cost of admission included an open bar and buffet dinner, the focus of which was roast pig, freshly dug up from the fire pit.
The performers told the story of the history of Hawaii, and did some impressive hula dancing. It was (mostly) too dark for photos, but we got some video.


After the luau, we grabbed a cab back to the hotel. The first guy we found led us to his cab, which was a green, convertible, Ford Model A. The cabbie was nice enough to take some pictures for us, and then we rode home with the wind in our faces. Everyone passing us on the road waved.

A quick trip to the huge hot tub, and the day is over.

It appears that I somehow managed to corrupt the filesystem on my camera's memory card, losing a few photos and a lot of video. I'm going to take a "forensic quality" snapshot of it, and deal with this mess later.

Pictures start on page 75, but I think I lost the pictures of the Ford Model A taxi.