I am le sleepy.

In fact, I am completely and utterly exhausted, and I have no idea how I am going to manage to stay awake for another five hours in order to try and get my body clock synced up with my present location.

On the plus side, my present location is totally on the ocean side of the thirty-third floor in the Hilton Waikiki Beach, which means I have a spectacular view out over the ocean from my position on the bed. So in the end? I may be tired, but I am going to do my best not to complain too much. Things could certainly be a lot worse.

Our flight left at 7:40pm yesterday. Sadly, it was pretty full, and even more sadly it seemed as though a good number of people on the flight were on their way to a wedding, or some other group holiday. In short, there were some very loud and enthusiastic people who didn’t exactly make me feel all that relaxed. We were on an older aircraft, the kind that doesn’t even have individual screens in business class let alone in economy; I hadn’t really intended to watch movies the whole way, but it would have been nice to watch something while I tried to drift off. In the end, I think I did get a few hours of sleep, but not all that many. Not enough, certainly.

We arrived in Honolulu soon after 9am local time, though it took us a good long while to actually get through customs and immigration, unsurprisingly. It was fascinating, really: we were asked all kinds of in-depth questions (where are you visting, how long in each place, are you meeting up with any friends, have you ever been to the US before, when was your last visit, etc, etc), but it didn’t seem as though anyone’s bags were getting checked for quarantine items. This means I have successfully brought Milo into the country (I didn’t think this would be a problem, but since I had to declare I had chocolate…).

Waikiki Beach

Needless to say, we arrived many hours before we could actually check in to our hotel. I booked our first two nights using Hotwire (and, ok, Hotwire Revealed), and scored a pretty good deal – not that that particularly helped us at the time! We dumped our bags and went for a walk, working on the basis that moving around would help us stay awake. Honolulu is fascinating, in a way. You go from these polished, super clean resort hotels to really grungy ones, just around the corner. There’s an ABC store (and not the kind we’re used to in Australia) on almost every corner. The water is blue and green and stunningly beautiful, but Waikiki Beach doesn’t seem especially amazing to my eye.

‘Jellies’, at the Honolulu Aquarium

Still, it was lovely and warm (for me; Rohan was a little less impressed), and after all those hours on a plane, it’d be hard not to enjoy the ability to just walk. We wandered down the beach for a ways, and then went to the aquarium. Probably the most interesting part of that was listening to a pair of British tourists bitching about the over-enthusiastic loudness of two children there with their parents. The kids certainly were noisy (“Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, come look, come look, come look!”), but there’s rolling your eyes at it and then there’s… well, this. On the whole, it seemed as though most of the marine life they had at the aquarium was stuff we have in the Sydney Aquarium (which is, admittedly, both enormous and excellent)… actually, there are an enormous amount of similarities between plants and animals, it seems. I guess that’s not all that surprising, but it was a pity not to see all that much that was truly unusual.

But it was still too early to go and get our room; what to do now? We ended up getting frozen yoghurt and eating it out on the beach, which was lovely. I really like the idea of selling yoghurt by weight: we filled the cup with what we wanted, to share, and didn’t have to worry about it being less than a full cup. And yoghurt is awesome. Just, you know, FYI.

Yoghurt (yum)

So we’ve wandered the streets, we’ve scoped out places we want to eat out, and now, finally, we’re safely in our room. Showers are amazing things. So are clean clothes.

And so are stunning views out over the ocean – unexpected stunning views (honestly, I thought we’d get a city view room, the cheapest kind possible). We do have two double beds instead of a king sized one, but since I generally find that king sized beds are two doubles pushed together ANYWAY most of the time, I’m not fussed. Oh no, we’ll have to get snuggly. How will we possibly cope?

Besides, after ten hours on a plane, it’ll feel luxurious.

In five hours. When we can finally, reasonably, sleep.