A sprawling city, highways and that sweet damp heat, Honolulu was both a stranger and an old friend. My mind quickly calling up a flood of childhood memories of Jakarta to quiet nerves in a new place. A place where beauty and desperation are entwined in a lover’s embrace. The tide of homelessness after the GFC washes around the towers of affluence, both starkly alien and disquieting. The ubiquitous Starbucks is our first port of call, the traveller’s bastion of free wi-fi. We hear someone order a tall 5 shot, caramel, frapuccino extra sugar, we’re not in Melbourne anymore.

Then out on the bus to the leeward coast, out the window resorts give way to ramshackle housing, many half built and then locked up with tarps and pieces of plywood. Roosters, dogs, chainlink fences, rusted cars and behind them the most glorious craggy hillsides moss green and rich red earth. Ocean to the front, hills to the back, but people are struggling. We go a stop too far, no one is on the street. We walk past houses and see everyone gathered around TVs drinking beer, there are even people watching TV in the park. What is going on? Then it clicks, it’s Superbowl Sunday, Americans on couches everywhere unite under one love. Suddenly it doesn’t seem so eerily quiet anymore.

We don’t realise we have been holding our middle class breaths until we reach our accommodation, a simple but lovely double storey weatherboard with a lush garden. No one is there yet so we explore, there are at least six cats sprawled around, which is oddly comforting, and a garden full of ripening papayas, bananas and star fruit, a temperate dwellers dream. There is a dark pool and we peer in and are met with the sleepy gaze of one, then two tortoises, all long nails and shimmering neck, scrambling to reach us, they are disappointed when we don’t have any food to offer them. After our enthusiasm blanches when we try a “gathered” mallow meal from the garden, we venture out, jet lagged and lazy, we get as far as a 7Eleven to cobble together a meal. On the way back, locals smile and greet us as we wander along the highway, we are getting the feeling that Hawaiians might just be the friendliest people in the world.