NUDGING 80, LARRY’S LIFE IS MUSIC, MUSIC, MUSIC…

david ellis

WHEN he was little more than knee-high to a grasshopper, and not even at school, Larry Rivera would watch and listen in awe to his mother pickin' the ukulele at their home on Hawaii's paradise island of Kauai.

And when other family or friends dropped around with their own instruments to play and sing island songs, the young Larry would get hold of one of the many spare ukuleles that lay around the place and copy-cat their every movement.

Still not old enough to go to school he was soon playing simple tunes on his own, and already sensing that music would be a part of his life, took ukulele lessons as soon as he did start school... and by 16 had written his first song.

All that was before Japan invaded Pearl Harbour and America became involved in the Second War, and today the near-octogenarian – he's 79 this year – entertains holidaymakers when they arrive at Kauai's Lihue Airport every Tuesday to join a cruise from there, has a spot on a local TV station, and puts on a weekly lunch show at a popular local restaurant entertaining a delighted 400 guests at a time.

Somehow between all this he finds time to compose his own words and music – he's recorded sixty of his compositions on seven CDs and another is about to be released – and joins-in promotions of his island at shopping centres, trade shows, on radio and TV on the American mainland, Canada and Japan.

And as something of a grand finale, he also organises weddings and renewals of vows, and sings, picks his ukulele and plays a guitar at these.

And they're anything but your ordinary wedding or vow renewal: his are conducted on a replica of the barge and on the same lagoon at Kauai's Coco Palms Resort on which Elvis Presley married his sweetheart, Maile (Joan Blackman) in Blue Hawaii. 

Larry, who has six children and 16 grandchildren, also manages to find time to conduct tours six days a week of the historic Coco Palms that was trashed by Hurricane Iniki in 1992, telling the history of the now-derelict resort and the making of much of Blue Hawaii there, singing and ukulele pickin' along the way…

Larry and the Coco Palms, one soon learns, are virtually as one: his got his first job there in 1951, and apart from a stint with the Army during the Korean War, has been associated with the place ever since... a whopping 58 years.

When he first started in 1951 his mum would drive him to work at 4pm, he'd serve cocktails 'til dinner, wait on tables through dinner, collect diner's payments as they left, put on a little show for those who stayed on, sleep in the office after that (if anyone turned up late and wanted their key they'd wake him and he'd walk them with a torch through the palms to their bungalow)… and then he'd serve breakfast in the dining room for early departers before his mum would pick him up and take him home at 9am.

Phew! Just listening to all this has you wanting to sit and take a deep breath. And understand why the Governor of Hawaii and Mayor of Kauai got together and declared this extraordinary one-man-show, Kauai's Living Treasure of Music.
 
After his Army stint Larry was returning to Kauai in 1954 and on the plane sat next to Lyle Guslander, who mentioned he was the new owner of Coco Palms. Larry told him he'd like to get his job back there and Mr Guslander said "Tell the manager I sent you."

Larry did, starting all over again tending the bar, waiting at table, serving breakfast – and singing to guests, including two who asked one night if they could join him on stage: their names were Elvis Presley and Patti Page.

Today he's still there and showing no signs of easing up. If you'd like to visit Kauai and meet Larry, see one of his shows or tour the old Coco Palms Resorts get details from Canada & Alaska Specialist Holidays on 1300 79 49 59, or email sales@canada-alaska.com.au

(NEXT WEEK: Like to get married or renew vows where Elvis tied the knot in Blue Hawaii? We'll tell you how.)

                                                      …………………….

[] LARRY Rivera during one of his many stage shows on Kauai.

[] DESPITE many plans to restore it, the historic Coco Palms Resort is still derelict and boarded up from Hurricane Iniki in 1992.

[] LARRY sings, strums the guitar and picks his ukulele on historic tours of the old Coco Palms; he does tours six times a week.

New 2 day Whitsunday Sailing Adventure

Barefoot Cruises Australia has just increased their range of sailing and cruise products in the Whitsunday’s with the 18 metre ex racing yacht Apollo III. Launched in January this year this sailing holiday operates a 2 day 1 night experience and is aimed at the time poor traveler who still wants to experience the highlights of the Whitsunday’s, those on a budget and those who are not sure that 3 nights at sea is for them.

The cruise visits Australia’s famous Whitehaven Beach and guests also have the opportunity to snorkel the magnificent fringing coral reefs of Hook Island. Being a fast ocean racing yacht she is able to cover these distances fairly quickly and therefore is able to offer a number of different experiences over a short time period. Catering for a maximum of only 12 guests, this is a small group hands on experience. Guests are encouraged to participate with setting the sails, grinding the winches and taking a turn at the helm.

Costs for a single berth is only AUD$319 with doubles available at AUD$339 per person. Price includes meals, morning and afternoon teas, linen and snorkeling equipment. There are 3 departures per week from Abel Point Marina in Airlie Beach on Tuesday, Friday and Sunday.

Further information is available from

Barefoot Cruises Australia. PO Box 519 Airlie Beach Qld 4802 Tel: 07 49461777
website: www.barefootcruises.com.au or by e-mail res@barefootcruises.com.au

Magical Melanesia - Cruise International - destinations, port guides and cruise reviews

Papua New Guinea is a wild, untamed land full of sorcery, magic and bizarre rites and practices. Some tribes are yet to see their first white face. Take this scene, add the luxurious expedition ship MV Orion, and you too will fall under the spell. WORDS AND PICTURES: RODERICK EIME

Dobu Island, part of the D'Entrecasteaux Islands

Fergusson Island, a prehistoric landscape of boiling lakes and the site of the famous Dei Dei hot springs, is just one of the numerous excursions we enjoyed during the expedition ship MV Orion's 11-night "Highland Cultures" cruise along the "spine" of Papua New Guinea's mainland. Located between the tropical north coast of Australia and the Indonesian archipelago, Papua New Guinea, or PNG as it's known, is a mysterious, mountainous land of tropical landscapes and amazing coastal scenery.

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BOUTIQUE NEW ZEALAND HOTEL A CLASS ACT

david ellis

Students of New Zealand's one-time Miss Gibson's Private School for Girls would have trouble coming to grips today with the new-found life of their old alma mater.

For rooms in which six, eight or even more young ladies of the rural well-to-do of New Zealand's South Island once crammed into to sleep, are now individual suites for guests in the plush and re-named Charlotte Jane Boutique Hotel.

And no more are there the communal toilets and showers that would run cold after the first few pupils drained them on shivering winter's mornings; in their place are now vast walk-around ensuites serving each luxury air-conditioned suite.

And gone too are the school-day dining routines that forbade anything but the devouring of meals in strict and stoney silence: In their place today is dining of grand proportions, with 5-star gourmet cuisine shared at a leisurely pace over suitably talkative reds and whites from the best of New Zealand's vineyards and others around the world.

The story of Miss Gibsons Private School for Girls and the 5-star Charlotte Jane Boutique Hotel provides a wonderful step back in time in the history of Christchurch, a time in the 1880s when an Englishman, Captain Frederick Gibson and his wife Mary settled with their family at Lyttleton outside Christchurch where he took up the position of Port Officer.

As the family grew to ten children, the Gibsons moved to a more spacious block, and with 640-pounds given by their two elder school-teacher daughters, built a large and rambling home, part of which they turned into Miss Gibson's Private School for Girls.

In 1891 eight students were enrolled. This quickly doubled, then trebled and by 1922 with nearly 70 pupils – and classes often having to be held outdoors – the Gibsons decided to relocate to a new site at Christchurch's Merivale that their now-historic buildings still occupy today.

Around the mid-1920s Captain Gibson, a stickler for good manners, became increasingly liverish about the name of his school being referred to colloquially as "Gibbies," and called on an old friend, the once-feared Maori warrior Paoro Taki to ponder a more suitable, traditional Maori moniker.

Paoro Taki thought about it for a while and came up with Rangi-Ruru – meaning Wide Sky Shelter – and as the school continued to grow it moved yet again.

The Gibsons sold the newly-located Rangi-Ruru (that today is one of New Zealand's leading church schools,) and with their family growing up and moving away, also moved out of their home-cum-schoolhouse, and the twin-buildings became a womens' refuge, and then flats and finally abandoned.

Then in the mid-1990s Moira and Siegfried Lindlbauer discovered the still-hauntingly gracious buildings and set their hearts to turning them into a fine guest house. Moira, from Singapore and Siegfried from Germany, spent two years  ripping out make-shift walls, tearing-down tacked-on classrooms – and  discovering priceless, century-old handcarved Kauri and Rimu timber-work from which they painstakingly removed coat upon coat of garish green and pink paint.

They also found in every room intricate cast-iron fireplaces that had been boarded up… and behind cupboards, old newspapers and postcards sent from holidaying students to their teachers.

In 1997 the Lindlbauer's opened Charlotte Jane Guest House (named after one of the first ships to sail from England to Christchurch in 1850,) offering twelve vast guest rooms, each with a gas fire, walk-around ensuites, furnishings of recycled rare timbers, and most with views over the landscaped gardens.

And a tradition of fine dining that continues to this day: gone are the Gibson girls' breakfasts of porridge and toast and tea, replaced with fresh fruits and cereals, warm breads and croissants, fruit juices, eggs and bacon and lamb cutlets and grilled tomatoes…

Gone too are the girls' night meals of mutton chop stews, cold silverside and slabs of bread – and in their place such choices as prawns marinated with Moroccan herbs on a bed of tabbouleh, goat cheese soufflé with red pepper coulis, Canterbury lamb shanks on sweet potato and carrot mash with Cognac peppercorn jus, beef Bearnaise, Grand Marnier crème brulee with almond biscotti, sticky date pudding with vanilla bean ice-cream…

(If such suite life appeals, Charlotte Jane Boutique Hotel prices start from NZ$280 per night for two people, including full-cooked breakfasts; book through travel agents or www.charlotte-jane.co.nz) 

PHOTO CAPTIONS:

[] CLASS OF ITS OWN – the one-time Miss Gibson's School for Girls, now a 5-star boutique hotel

[] VINTAGE offerings: the wine cellar at the Charlotte Jane Boutique Hotel

[] SUITE LIFE in one of the hotel's luxury suites

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 Bird 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.

                                                        ……………

TWISTED view of Waikiki: Tony Bissen and just some of the Sheraton Moana Surfrider's lop-sided window frames, re-cut to fit after the hotel got that sinking feeling.

YESTER-YEAR charms with 21st century technology make for stay to remember at Waikiki's oldest on-the-beach hotel.

Wallace Family Celebrate 30 Years of Cruising

Jim and Jo Wallace, the Cairns-based owners and operators of Big Cat Green Island Reef Cruises, are celebrating 30 years of cruising to the Great Barrier Reef.

The couple recognised the importance of the Great Barrier Reef long before it was inscribed on the World Heritage List, first sharing it with visitors on June 9, 1979 when they started daily cruises to Low Isles, off Port Douglas, on the Martin Cash.

“We have had 30 wonderful years in an industry we love. Sharing the magnificent Great Barrier Reef with others is simply the best job in the world,” Jim said.

“Our challenge as one of the early reef operators has been to set new standards for our competitors to follow and we have done this on many counts.

“In the late 80s we changed the ‘face’ of the reef cruising industry by introducing the revolutionary, comfortable and fast wavepiercer vessels. This year, we are the first reef operator to achieve a Zero Carbon Footprint and as a result have been awarded the highest level of certification under Eco Tourism Australia’s inaugural Climate Action Certification Program.”

The Wallaces operated Quicksilver Connections at Port Douglas for 10 years before selling in 1989 to the current owners.

However, it was only a year before Jim and Jo were back in the cruising industry, buying Big Cat Green Island Reef Cruises in 1990.

They expanded the company’s capacity to Green Island from 200 to 320 in 1997 when they bought Reef Jet and merged the two permits. In 1999 they built the Reef Rocket to replace the Reef Jet vessel and the following year purchased the original Quicksilver III, refitting it and renaming it Big Cat.

The next major expansion was in 2004 when Jim and Jo bought Terri Too and changed the name to Cairns Habitat Cruises. This expanded the business from half and full day trips to Green Island to include day trips on Trinity Inlet to the Cairns Crocodile Farm and sunset cruises in the evening.

Big Cat Green Island Reef Cruises truly is a locally-owned family business with Jim and Jo’s daughter, Paula Wallace, appointed Managing Director of the company.

The Wallace family’s winning formula of friendly and helpful service has earned Big Cat Green Island Reef Cruises an induction into the Tropical North Queensland Tourism Awards Hall of Fame after winning the Best Major Tour and Transport Operator in 2004, 2006 and 2007.

North Star Cruises Special Offers

Travellers offered unique opportunity to experience ultra luxury adventure cruise ship True North with special ‘beat the economic slowdown’ incentives.

North Star Cruises has unveiled a raft of special incentives to battle the economic slowdown.

For a limited time, consumers can take advantage of three 10% discounts.

North Star Cruises General Manager Peter Trembath said there had never been a better time to experience the luxury and adventure of a True North cruise.

“If you were ever thinking of experiencing the iconic True North, now is the time, with discounted special deals that are never likely to be repeated,” said Mr Trembath.

Specials include:

Previous Guest Discount: All previous guests will receive a 10% discount on repeat arrangements.

Early Bird Tariff Discount: All guests will receive a 10% for bookings outside 12 months.

Early Bird Deposit Bonus: All bookings received for departures outside 12 months will be subject to a 10% deposit only. The balance of the normal 25% deposit will become payable 12 months from departure.

The special deals are valid for all new bookings and will continue until further notice.

Mr Trembath said incentives could be combined meaning some excellent savings for those who qualified for more than one special deal.

“For many people, the True North is that once in a life time experience – so if you’ve ever dreamed of experiencing one of our cruises, it’s time to take advantage of these unbeatable special offers.”

“We travel to some of the most exotic locations in the world including the stunning Kimberley coastline, and into the Pacific Islands.”

Highlights for the rest of the 2009 season include:

• The Kimberley Photographic Workshop with renowned photographer Christian Fletcher onboard the Kimberley Wilderness Cruise departing Broome August 29
• The West Papua Discoverer cruise which explores an untouched paradise of hidden culture and incredible natural scenery departing Darwin in October.

For more information visit www.northstarcruises.com.au or phone 08 9192 1829.

True North Background

The multi award winning adventure cruise ship, True North, allows discerning guests to experience wilderness in surroundings more akin to one of the world’s most exclusive hotels. Lavish features include:

• A sundeck, forward observation lounge, ship’s lounge, alfresco bar, internet café, plasma screens with interpretive information, lower deck dining room with large panoramic windows, and fine dining.

• All cabins feature enhanced décor, en-suite facilities, in-house entertainment and satellite telephones.

• Multiple expedition boats allow passengers to do “what they want, when they want”.

• The True North is the only Kimberley adventure-cruise ship that sails with its own helicopter.

• The purpose built True North is able to explore the upper reaches of shallow river systems.

• Adventure cruises and expeditions operate along the magnificent coastlines of Australia and the South Pacific.