Achy-Breaky Feet
From 2007 World Tour in Oahu, United States on Sep 14 '07
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Today started with a "free" orientation breakfast organised by the company that provided our airport transport. This included scrambled eggs, sausages, pineapple, hashbrown, blueberry muffin and a sales pitch of tours to do in Hawaii (whch was entertaining and informative). They just happened to have the tour agents on hand for you to book your tours. After that we were off on the "free" shuttle to the Maui Divers Jewellery Factory where we got to see a short film on the harvesting of rare coral, then the design and manufacture of jewellery using the rare black, pink and gold coral. After this is was a guided tour through their factory (which was totally empty given it was Saturday), and then onto the showroom where you could browse (and of course buy) a wide range of their jewellery. I found a lovely teardrop shaped black coral ring that I decided to buy.
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It was then downstairs to their gift shop where the pressure was really put on you to buy something. A big hint here - just keep walking, don't stop, don't look anyone in the eye. Don't get suckerred in by their wiley charms!! I must have looked too closely at someone and was taken with a "try your luck - pick your own pearl". She said she would give us "ah-zeez" a discount and it would only be $10 - and that she could ensure that the one we got was a pink pearl. Into a bucket her hand went and up came an oyster, that when opened was apparently "a big one". Anyway, now the catch - "how would you like that set? we have lovely ring or pendant settings that the pearl would look lovely in". So after the "I won't pressure you to do anything that you don't want to to" - but really the pressure was on big time. In the long run I chose to take the pearl set in a small pendant setting and we got the hell out of there!!
Back away from the pearls...
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It was then in their free shuttle off to Ala-Moana shopping centre - one of the biggest retail centres in Hawaii. It was like an open center style version of Carindale with a lot of up-market names like Prada, Chanel, Tiffany, Louis Vuitton along with Macy's and Sears and other well known American brands. We arrived here at about noon and it was to be the start of a very long day. In and out of shops we weaved, and I must say, Joe showed a lot of patience while I tried on items.
We stopped for lunch at a place called The Island and shared a chicken salad and burger - which as usual could have fed a starving nation (but instead just two very hungry Aussies). We then pounded the pavement more - played with the new i-phone in the Apple store and found the answer to the very important question is to why there is so many stupid people in the world - The Stupid Factory!! As it approached 8pm we decided it was time to go back to our hotel, dump the booty and head out for dinner.
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It had rained on and off during the day and now the temperature was quite nice for walking the streets. After taking some photoes of the beach area at night, and enjoying the street busker entertainment, we found a place called Chilli's, where we consumed a couple of margharita style drinks and once again way too much food (especially for 10:30pm at night). A nice stroll home had us collapsing into bed at midnight, to rest our tired bodies before our 6am wake-up call for the next day.
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