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 Sunday, 06 July 2008 |
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Written by David Ellis
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Monday, 09 April 2007 |
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WAIKIKI HOTEL LEANS TOWARDS YESTER-YEAR
David Ellis
There is, in this travel writing game, an inherent risk of madness brought about
by an occupational hazard known as TSI.
TSI is The Site Inspection, a professional encounter that’s been known to reduce
granite-hearted men to tears, morph otherwise normally rational human beings
into gibbering idiots, and in worst-case scenarios, have travel-hardened scribes
pass-up free drinks to avoid a TSI ambush.
TSI is what these writers engage-in in the hope that they we will splash enough
ink around their pages about the hotels or resorts they visit, to in fact pay
for their stay ten times over.
Every stay invariably begins, ends, or is interrupted by TSI. The occasion is
generally conducted by a smiling young thing who has done it twenty-something
times already that week for travel agents, writers, meeting organisers, wedding
coordinators and anyone else who can help put bums in beds.
And they have it down so pat that if they miss a floor in the elevator they’ll
happily be describing what a beautiful ballroom we’re in, whereas in fact we’re
in the dunnies on the level above.
So it was with horror that fellow scribes learned that in Hawaii recently, we
occupied a couple of spare hours voluntarily taking a TSI.
“He’s finally lost it,” was one colleague’s summation. “Keep it up, and you’ll
go blind,” warned another.
But we convinced the sceptics that roaming Waikiki’s oldest hostelry (the
Sheraton Moana Surfrider, circa 1901) and learning its little-known history, was
time both professionally and personally rewarding.
And there was no trim young thing leading us, but rather a happily overweight
bloke (the result, he says, of a ritual of fried Spam and egg breakfasts,) who
sported an Aloha shirt and a lei in place of a clipboard.
His name was Tony Bissen, a likeable out-of-the-ordinary Moana Reception Clerk
who is so proud of his historic hotel that six times a week for the past
seventeen years he’s walked guests and other visitors for free hour-or-so
journeys amidst its corridors of memories.
And there are no dunnies in place of ballrooms, no comparisons of twin-bedded
rooms with single-bedded rooms, rooms with garden views as opposed to one’s with
beach views, rooms with spas compared to rooms without… or the obligatory Royal
Suite that king someone-or-other once slept in.
Rather, Tony begins with a flickering black-and-white film of old Waikiki, talks
us through a fascinating collection of historic hotel paraphernalia including
bulky woollen neck-to-knee bathers, century-old dinner-ware, postcards, old
steamer trunks and their fashion contents – and a room key recently returned by
the family of a guest who’d forgotten to give it back it after a stay in 1920.
He then shows us lop-sided windows caused when the half-built hotel started
sinking in the sand 106 years ago and had to be propped-up, and a corridor with
a decided downhill slope caused by that same sinking feeling.
He points out the massive banyan tree in the garden under which Webley Edwards
broadcast Hawaii Calls every Saturday afternoon for nearly 40 years through 650
radio stations world-wide.
And takes us into a yester-year of old-world charms supported by 21st century
technology and indulgences, rattling off homilies along the way: Mickey Rooney
took surfing lessons here, Admiral Byrd rested at the hotel before going to the
Antarctic, Clarke Gable became mates here with legendary surfer Duke Kahanamoku,
Shirley Temple sang The Good Ship Lollipop under the banyan tree, Sinatra
crooned From Here to Eternity… and Amelia Erhard called it home for a night or
two.
And what about the Mystery of Room 120? Was it murder, or was it misfortune?
Tony says that’s another story for another day…
To join Tony’s free tours – he shows over 6000 visitors a year around the hotel
– simply turn up at the Sheraton Moana Surfrider on Waikiki at 11am or 5pm any
Monday, Wednesday or Friday; you don’t have to be a hotel guest – most
participants actually come from other resorts.
Hotel Website: www.moana-surfrider.com
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 21 April 2007 )
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