I've heard there are 4 fun tournaments that every ultimate player should go to: Potlatch, Kaimana, Poultry Days, and Paganello. (I would put Nationals and Lei Out on my personal list, too)
Kaimana certainly lived up to the billing. The hawaiian ultimate players really do a great job putting it together. I was super impressed with how well prepared and thought out everything was. At 32 teams, they can provide way more for you than at a huge tournament. Your tourney cost gets you camping, breakfast and dinner, and endless beer all day and night for three days. On top of that, you're camping on a picture perfect white sand beach.
Fei agreed to come along and make a week long trip out of it, and I'm really glad she did. We were there from Wednesday night to Thursday afternoon. We stayed in hostel in Waikiki the first night. Fei met some interesting travelers during the day at the hostel and hung out with them until I got in later that night. On Thursday, we started the day off walking around Waikiki and swimming at the beach. Waikiki is kind of crazy. It's a little bit like Third Street in Santa Monica combined with the Vegas Strip. Great people watching. We walked to a traditional Hawaiian lunch place, which was awesome, and followed it up with some shaved ice. This was my first trip to Hawaii so all of it was new to me.
What surprised me about Hawaii is how different it is from the rest of the US. It's thousands of miles away out in the middle of the huge pacific ocean, and it really has a unique feel. The weather is the first thing that you notice. It's pretty humid and it rained a little bit almost every day, but it never bothered me because it was always pleasantly warm. The next thing I noticed was how Asian it is. Asian is the largest ethnicity by good amount, followed by white and native hawaiian, and there are tons of asian restaurants and foods. The culture is a little bit different too. Between the hawaiian language everywhere and assorted oddities it just feels different. It really made me feel I had gone somewhere far away from home, which I liked.
We then took the bus over to Pearl Harbor to take some tours. Unfortunately, the last boat to the Arizona Memorial was booked, but we took the submarine tour and checked out the museums. It was cool, but definitely a long bus ride from Waikiki. That night, we got together for pre-tourney team dinner at SOUL, an upscale Hawaiian/Soul food place where Dukes' girlfriend works. Afterwards we went to the "pre-tourney party," which was really just all of the UCLA teams at a hot, sweaty bar. A solid first day, if not a little hectic.
Friday morning we walked a couple miles to meet up with everyone for a group breakfast and game plan. We decided to catch the bus to the fields early to make camp instead of doing more touristy things around the city. I was ready to get out of the Waikiki and relax, which is exactly what we did. We had almost entire the Stanford men's team on our bus to the fields, and their rowdiness definitely upset some of the old ladies who were riding the bus. Other people were very friendly, tho, and helped us find the right stop for the campsite. I was blown away by how awesome the field/campsite location is. There are huge, jagged Jurassic Park looking mountains on one side, and the tents go right up to the sand on the beach. We basically had the whole place to ourselves. We spent the rest of the day hanging out, swimming, and playing double disc until dinner time and the first night of partying. There was a live band with kind of a ho-down, flddle-y sound. More and more people came in as the night went on, and every was really excited to get playing the next morning.
Because so much happened, I'm going to omit the tournament part of the write up and save it for the next post. Instead, I'll skip to Tuesday morning when we bused back to Honolulu and picked up our rental car for the next couple of days. The only thing that's important about the tournament time is that I sprained my foot on Sunday morning so walking was a little difficult for the rest of the week. I wasn't able to really go on any hikes because of it. Anyway, we ran into a Balls and Kate, Hennessy's friend from Alaska, who were left at the campsite with no real plans, so we invited them along for the trip. It helped that we got upgraded from an economy car to a full size car. Sweet! Not sweet - everyone in O'ahu drives 25 miles an hour everywhere. Getting around the island takes forever.
We met up with Fei's friend from St. Louis and he brought us to his favorite beach in Kailua, where we did some snorkeling and hanging out. At late afternoon, we dropped off the girls at peoples' houses and headed up to the North Shore where 15-20 UCLAers and friends had rented a big beach house with a private beach. We basically filled every available space in the house with people, and it still wasn't cheap, but it was worth it. There was a hot tub right next to the beach where we hung out, and Jamie and the Sultan cooked up a ridiculous 4 course meal for everyone.
On Wednesday, we set out with the intention of finding sea turtles, but it turns out that Turtle Bay isn't very accurately named. There was some pretty good snorkeling, though, and we spent some quality time at the beach there. We stopped the much hyped Giovanni's Shrimp truck for lunch, which was really tasty. I got garlic/olive oil/lemon and Fei got the spicy shrimp, and we split them up. While I'm mentioning seafood, one of my favorite things about the island was the omnipresence of Poke, raw tuna salad, which you can get everywhere from gas stations to liquor stores, and is usually pretty good.
After lunch we headed further north to check out the famous surf spots, Sunset Beach, Pipeline and Waimea Bay. The surf wasn't very big, but it still looked pretty impressive and there were big crowds watching the surfers in some places. Waimea Bay much smaller than I expected. I think you could run along the entire beach in a minute or two. It was so nice there, though, that we spent the rest of the afternoon playing volleyball and trying to bodysurf and getting smashed into the sand. A storm was rolling in, so we headed back to the house for some barbecuing and games while an incredible lightning storm happened all around us. We sat out on the back deck and watched it until some rain drove us inside.
The next morning was a little sad as everyone said good bye and went their separate ways. We picked up Arby, Biclops and Knuckles for the ride back to Honolulu, and we made them come on a short hike through forest since we had spent all our time on the beach and hadn't actually seen anything inland up until that point. We returned the car a couple hours late (which they didn't charge us for - score!) and caught the bus to the airport.
And then it was all over and I'm back to my regular life, which isn't nearly as fun or exciting.
I wish we had stayed for a day or two longer. I didn't get to hike up to any good views or go snorkeling at Haunauma Bay, which is supposed to be really great. I would love to go back. It would also be great to check out some of the other islands, like the Big Island or Kauai. Maybe next year...
d turn for us.