Postcard from Hawaii: The Aloha Festival

I’m sitting at my desk in my ordinary house on the ordinary mainland, listening to Israel “Iz” Kamakawiwo’ole’s “Wonderful World” disc, a gift from the Hawaii Convention and Visitors’ Bureau.  They invited me to visit Honolulu last weekend for the 63rd Annual Aloha Festival, and lucky me, I was able to go.  A week later, in my ordinary life, the trip feels like a dream.  Iz helps take me back there, to where aloha is a state of mind, people wave with the “hang loose” hand gesture, and hurrying to get somewhere on time is a foreign idea.

Kim Tracy Prince, blogger on Uptake and House of Prince had the good fortune to attend the Aloha Festivals Floral Parade in Honolulu in September. She sent this digital postcard about her time behind the scenes and on the curb watching the pageantry unfold.

Every year since 1947, the islands of Hawaii have held the Aloha Festival to celebrate their culture.  Sometimes one week, sometimes a month of events, the festival is graced with an epic finale parade through Waikiki.  This year the parade consisted of 13 floats all hand decorated with flowers, plants, and other organic materials, 14 marching bands, and 4 entire hulu halau, or schools, to highlight the festivals theme:  “Hula, Let the Story Be Told.”  This year as Hawaii also celebrates its 50th year of statehood, the celebration was expected to be even more meaningful.

Each of the eight Hawaiian islands is represented in the parade by a team of of pa’u riders.  There is a princess for each island, with a court of maidens and cowboys.  The queen of the parade also rides in a special pa’u unit as well.  Each pa’u team wears a different color to signify their island (Oahu’s is yellow) and in the intricate leis and hairpieces that each rider wears, that island’s signature flower is featured.

At dawn on the day of the parade, I was escorted around the parade preparation area at Ala Moana park by a local publicist, herself a lifelong hula dancer with impossibly long hair, and her fiance, a native of the island of Kauai.  He pointed out the mokihana berries in the floral arrangements for that island’s equestrian team, and told me that these buds are only found on the slope of a certain mountain on Kauai and they are very hard to get.  Like these florals weren’t hard to make in the first place.

We wandered through the groups of different pa’u units, marveling at the costumes, the flowers, and the silent and regal princesses, patiently standing straight and still while they were being dressed.  Their costumes include a skirt made of yards and yards of fabric that are tucked, draped, and wrapped around the woman’s legs in a very specific fashion, using small stones to wrap and tuck the fabric in place.  As I watched, one wrapper was showing a young cowboy how to do it.  “All cowboys who work for me know how to wrap,” she said, “because if something happens during the parade, they are the ones who have to re-wrap you!”

The horses who carry the riders also get the royal costume treatment, with color coordinated saddle blankets, enormous leis, and even a team to handle their less pleasant offerings.  Every unit has a team of pooper scoopers who pull a wagon to store what they scoop.  The wagons, of course, were also decorated, and there’s a competition for the most creatively decorated one.

While I love parades – I mean really love them – I was especially entranced by this one because of the history and culture that it represented.  The island accent in the participants’ speech hypnotized me.  The rich colors of the flowers and the costumes dazzled my eyes. The hot sun, under which I sat for quite a while as I waited for the parade itself to start on island time, baked me into a sleepy dream-state.  Every parade attraction, from the marching bands to the royal guard to the military units to the delightful hula and pa’u units, represented its own specific place in Hawaii’s story, whether it be the legend of the nuns who rode in barrels to get from their ships to the island and they eventually started the Sacred Heart school for girls, or the simple beauty of song performed by the Hawaii Youth Opera Chorus.

As immersed into facts and figures of the Aloha Festival as I was, my short time on the island of Oahu was infused with a peculiar mixture of exotic and ordinary.  It wasn’t like being transported to an alien place.  It’s an American state, after all.  What I felt was the mystery of the culture, the feeling that spirits were watching me, and I felt a respect as I stared wide-eyed wherever I went, even into such mundane places as the neighborhoods behind Kapahulu St.  It felt like something strange and wonderful waited for me just below the surface, and in some places, I actually broke through.

• There are more photos in Kim’s Flickr stream.
• More about the Pa’u Riders on Hawaii’s Big Island
• Want to send me a digital postcard? Get in touch.