Circumventing the commercial epicenter of a city seems to be a trend in Lewis’s life,
even as he travels. Enter his recent trip to Waikiki: “At first I was really depressed
[to be there]. I was like, ‘What is this place?’ Waikiki really does feel like this sort
of sad, really clean mini mall. It’s just mall after mall after mall.” That’s why he and
his cohorts decided to venture beyond the “obnoxiously clean” parts of the islands.
“We set out to try to see as little hotels and cafes as possible and to really go to
see some nature. Once we got out to these places, I started to feel that there was a
sense of native people.”
But straying from the path wasn’t without its challenges.
“Right underneath this towering mountain there was this tiny little broken down and
poor town, Kahuku, and it was amazing. We didn’t see a single soul, we [only] saw all
these mean dogs, running up and down the street. All of the dogs in the neighborhood
just ganged [up on us]. There were like 20 of them all chasing our car, with me driving
slow trying not to run them over. They literally ran us out of town in our car.”
But he tells the story with a laugh, just like when he describes not being let into a
bar by huge, intimidating bouncers because of his short-shorts and leather jacket
combo, of facing 18’ waves — what he describes as a wall of water — when they
pulled off at the island’s North Shore, or of his friend almost breaking his arm during
that strenuous, eight-mile hike through a muddy jungle in Kaliuwa‘a. “He swang from
a tree like Tarzan — and the branch broke, of course.
“Finally we reached this waterfall after two hours of hiking, and of course, it was
underwhelming,” he admits, laughing, though he’s not at all disappointed. “We swam
in the swimming hole. This family came with their dog and they all were super
courageous. They just started cliff jumping into the river, which was really shallow.
The mud was insane.”
As for the Jack Purcell’s, “They just got destroyed.” You’d think because of his
supreme sense of style, a pair of muddy white shoes might upset him. But Lewis is
THIS PAGE CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT:
North shore ruins; Jungle mud; Cock;
Sketchy rocks= No Swimming
not a man who fights against nature. “We bagged up everything that was dirty. We
basically rode back to Waikiki buck naked,” he says, and the photo is suddenly illuminated with the warmth of that day back in December. And then, not as a lamentation
but rather the ending to a good story: “We had no clothes, I had no shoes.”
56 . TRAVEL WITH PURPOSE
OPPOSITE PAGE FROM TOP:
Kaneohe bay; Surfers in the bae