The original plan for today was to hire a couple of kayaks and head out across Kailua bay, due to Baggage and Lisa still feeling the effects if their sunburn at the weekend however we decide a day where we are a little more under cover is called for.
We are therefore off to Kualoa Ranch and are booked onto this afternoons movie set tour. Kualoa ranch is to the north of the island and is the largest ranch on Hawaii, it is also still a fully operational working ranch. Because of it’s location which includes a long valley between the islands two most prominent volcanic mountans it has been used as the filming location for many movies and TV productions over the years. Possibly the most famous was its use as the island for Jurassic park, at the moment it is being used as the backdrop for the TV series Lost.
The ranch is about a 45 minute drive from here so we leave in plenty of time and plan to go via the Byodo-in Buddhist temple, an impressive building and exact replica of the 950 year old Byodoin temple in Uji Japan. This replica is itself more than 100 years old. We struggle to find the place, first because we head up highway 3 planning on picking up the Likelike highway, only to find there is no exit to it in our direction so we have to carry on through the tunnels to the other side of the island and outskirts of Honolulu before we can turn around, then because of road works we miss the turning into the Valley of Temples and have to turn back again to find it when we reach the Kamehameha Highway and know we have gone too far. As a result our time at the temple is very limited, though we manage to get a few photos and have a reasonable look around the grounds. This temple has also got a big screen appearance or two in it's past, most recently having been used as Sun's Mother's house in the TV production of Lost.
Whilst there we bump into the lady who was with the film crew doing the filming when we went out to work at Mokauea Island, they have finished filming and have just become tourists for a couple of days before returning to Texas. We exchange web site addresses and look forward to seeing their completed film of their visit to Mokauea on their web site.
The movie set tour at Kualoa is a bit of a disappointment, it is a coach based tour in a battered old bus from sometime back in the 60s, we stop at a bunker to see a bunch of movie posters for all the movies that have been made there and then tour the sets, most of which are little more than signs stuck in the ground telling you filming happened in this area. I did not expect much more than this, though the tour was advertised as an hour long tour of the sets and the ranch, we only saw bits of the ranch we needed to drive through to get to the sets and were back where we started within 40 minutes.
On the way back to the house we travelled via Waimanalo, the home of the house that was used as Robin’s Nest for the filming of Magnum p.i. I took a few photos and then Baggage and I waded along to the houses tidal pool where Baggage had a swim. I recorded enough material to make my own version of the Magnum p.i. intro, replacing some of the original scenes with those of my own making, including pulling off the grass verge relatively fast in my Charger as Magnum does in his Ferarri!
Back at the house we had a fish and chip supper, well Tilapia pieces, a bit like cod fish fingers, and waffle fries.
A bit more of the wheat beer tonight.
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