It’s been years since we’ve been to a Luau, and I wanted to try something different. Our hotel recommended the Nutridge Experience, saying that it was a smaller event and an amazing venue with beautiful views of Honolulu and the bay. I did some additional research and learned that they have a maximum of 80 guests for each Luau (instead of 200-500 at the big shows), market themselves as a more authentic experience and the location looked very interesting. The long story is below, but the short story is that they did a lovely job and I really enjoyed the Hawaiian cultural education/experience of the whole event.
The Luau was held at the Nutridge Estate, which is located in the Puu Ualakaa State Park way high up on the hills overlooking Honolulu - getting up to the estate was a bit challenging, lots of traffic and a long and winding road, but the views from the lookouts at the top were AMAZING. We were a little early, so we stopped and took some photos:
When it was time, we congregated with the other 78 guests outside the main gate, and were welcomed in by the hosts/performers, led by MC, who asked us to call him Uncle Reno. He asked us to consider ourselves part of their family, and that we had come over to their house for a family dinner. Uncle Reno also told us he would be explaining, and they would be demonstrating, a lot about the island and their culture. I learned a lot of fun facts, some of which I even remembered so I could share them with you.
Fun Facts:
The Puu Ualakaa State Park means hill of rolling sweet potato
The Nutridge Estate was the first macadamia nut plantation on Hawaii
The Hawaiian Language (my favorite set of fun facts):
Has only 13 letters, including all 5 English vowels
The letters are mostly pronounced like they are in Spanish and each vowel is pronounced individually
A “W” is pronounced like a “W” at the beginning of a word, but like a “V” in the middle - that’s right, it’s really “Havaii” (all these years, I just thought my parents were being weird)
The Kukui nut is the state nut of Hawaii, and is one of the acceptable nuts/flowers from which you can make leis (and my favorite because there are no bugs hiding in the flowers 😎):
We also enjoyed an explanation of how the pork is roasted in the Imu (the fire pit you can see in the above photo and the first three photos below). In the third photo, they asked some volunteers to help with the banana fronds, and then they had to do an impromptu hula dance, about the experience 😱. Next, a lot of wonderful dances, including ones from the other two islands in the Polynesian triangle (New Zealand and Easter Island):
Another part of the experience - some traditional games! The first one we tried was rolling a stone between 2 stakes in the ground (the original version was done using a 30 lbs stone, but the one we used was more like a hockey puck):
The second game was tossing a spear at a hay bale - fun! I was much better than Craig and killed the hay bale good (lol), it’s too bad I looked silly doing it in a dress:
Then, it was finally time for dinner - and, shocker, there was no poi! Everything was yummy.
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