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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Tourism officials suffer
from statue of limitations
Living in the premier tourist destination of the world, we sometimes take for granted the attractions that cause people to visit these isles: sun, surf, volcanoes, shave ice, ridiculously expensive drinks in funny-looking glasses.Other places around the world would kill to have tourists visit their cities. I mean, they wouldn't kill as in have public executions to attract tourists, but they struggle to come up with some kind of a visitor attraction.
For instance, hardly anyone would consider vacationing in Creston, British Columbia, because most people avoid towns with names like Creston, Wilbur or Maurice. So Creston officials have decided what they need is a big statue. And the statue they are erecting is of a 9-foot-tall sasquatch carrying a case of beer.
That's taking quite a chance, seeing as how very few people believe that a bigfoot would ever be caught dead (or alive) carrying a case of beer. You see photos all the time of sasquatch trudging through undergrowth or hoofing it through the woods, but there has never been a confirmed photo of a sasquatch leaving a 7-Eleven with a case of beer.
So why would the people of Creston want a beer-toting sasquatch? For one thing, it's the kind of zany thing that tourists might get off the interstate to see. And for another, the Kokanee beer company is picking up half the tab.
If it is not a brilliant idea, at least it's better than the idea the residents of the nearby town of Nelson came up with. To honor all the Americans who fled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War, Nelson residents want to erect a statue of a draft dodger. For real. And the weird thing is that statue looks exactly like Hawaii Congressman Neil Abercrombie. And he's carrying a case of Primo beer. (Just kidding, Neil.)
Before we sneer at these unusual attempts to attract tourists, we should consider whether we are doing everything we can to get visitors to these shores. For instance, the statue of King Kamehameha in front of the courthouse is pretty boring. He's just standing there holding his hand out. Taking a cue from Creston, maybe we should have Kamehameha holding a mai tai or season tickets to University of Hawaii Warriors football games.
What would really jazz up the Hawai'i Convention Center would be a 9-foot bronze statue of a mongoose holding a plate lunch. People would race from the Honolulu Airport to see that.
The statue of Duke Kahanamoku in Waikiki is nice, but come on, he's not doing anything. There needs to be some action. What if we had him wrestling a 6-foot-long gecko? On a surfboard. Tourists would love it.
The Natatorium arch is just sitting there looking like some kind of ancient ruin. What it needs is a nice statue to set it off. Like a big granite cockroach smoking a cigar and holding a rubber slipper, like he's getting ready to swat visitors.
And to make our Canadian visitors feel at home, we could steal Creston's idea and put a statue of a sasquatch on top of Diamond Head. He'd be wearing an aloha shirt and carrying a case of macadamia nuts. The beauty of it is that the whole thing would be paid for by Hilo Hattie and Longs.