Diamond Head

Strange as it may seem, after a year in Honolulu, I never went to Diamond Head, the large igneous formation towering above Honolulu. So I took advantage of the free afternoon and extended subtropical daylight to head out there.

It's in a giant bowl, perfect for a very crowded football game. You can see it above. If you can play it again and again and get a head rush. It's kind of fun.

The main thing to do there is to hike up to the top, some 750'. This takes you through some really steep stairs (the picture to the right is not exaggerated), and through some very scary dark tunnels that go on and on into Mordor.

But once you reach the top, you are rewarded with some breathtaking views.

On the return trip, from below in the bowl, you can see native Hawaiian Avian life- or what's left of it, after the rats came in with the Europeans, and then they brought in the mongeese to eat the rats, not realizing mongeese live in the day, and rats at night, and both eat songbird eggs...

And speaking of extinction, Diamond Head was also used as an observation post during WWII, as the highest point in the area. Some of the posts still remain.

In the remains of the evening I also saw a bit of a hula. You never see things when you live there. I didn't go to Knotts or Universal Studios until I was about to leave LA after living there for a decade. I rarely saw hulas while I was there.

It was a relaxing day. Then I realized it was all a dream, and a great light appeared at the end of the tunnel, and I realized I had died...