6 December 2007 - Cough up for the Buskers..

We visited Honolulu city center by bus but were pretty disappointed to be honest-it's mainly just a business district with little other than tall glass skyscrapers set in a fairly unpopulated concrete jungle. We checked out the 'Aloha Tower' which is surrounded by a fairly nice market area, but after about an hour got the bus home.

We were so poor at this point-down to our last 9 bucks (most of the birthday money Vick had received unfortunately had to go on rent food and flights!). We knew we had to do something-we made a list of things we would have to pay for and arrived at the conclusion that we would have to cut our time in Hawaii short by 9 days. We weren't distraught about that-we'd much rather have had a great 3 weeks than a fourth where we couldn't afford to survive.. We rang Quantas and managed to get our flights changed to arrive in Canada early for free which was a great relief (remember how much we had to pay to change flights in Oz!).

That night we decided to give the busking one last heave-ho. We had a bottle of wine in the room for some dutch courage and headed down to Waikiki Beach hell bent on making this work. As soon as Matt started strumming he was approached by a yank called 'TJ'. He too was a guitarist/singer and asked if he could sing with us. It was awesome, the three of us singing our hearts out attracted our first US dollar donations! Some legend even put one of the cans of beer he'd just bought in our bucket! We sang for about 2 hours, the much repeated set-list included: 'Greenday-Time of Your Life', 'Goo Goo Dolls-Iris', 'Elton John-Tiny Dancer', 'The Fray-Over My Head', 'Maroon 5-She will be loved', 'Oasis-Wonderwall' and good old Blunty's 'You're Beautiful'. Vick was surprisingly vocal and certainly played her part in a total of $9.25. We were over the moon. It was such a laugh. We drank our well-deserved Bud before hitting the sack-knackered!

In the morning we got the bus to Pearl Harbor to check out the remains of the doomed 'USS Arizona'. It was an incredible if a little eerie experience. We were shown a short film about the attack and events leading up to it and then got a boat out to the memorial viewing deck which has been built over the sunken ship. Inside the memorial is the names of all the 1,100 who died. Oil is still leaking from the ship which still entombs the bodies of the ill-fated crew. It was a very sombre but touching experience.

We were lucky enough to be spending our last week of Hawaii in another timeshare courtesy off the Ashenden elders. The timeshare was in the neighboring island of Kauai in a place called Princeville. After a few calls we learned that there was no airport shuttle to Princeville from the airport in Li'hue. This presented a problem-we couldn't rent a car as we don't have a credit card for a deposit and we were quoted a taxi price of $110. Y'ouch! Luckily Ashenden elders assisted our predicament after a much feared phone call home..(love you both!). We did a bit of a photoshoot that night as it was our last night in Waikiki and took some belters (see results below). We also snapped the various beaches which are so pretty here including our favorite-Magic Bay. The water here is so clear and warm-its almost like a giant spa!

We packed up for our flight and went to the land of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz