My Journey to “The Island”

It’s been quite a while since I’ve blogged, so you’ll have to pardon all the little bits of dust that flutter around here as I get back into my groove. As some of you probably realized, we were trying to move. Eventually, we were able to make an attempt at moving and I began to paint the inside of the house to help with the terrible lead paint issue that came up eventually (amongst a ton of other things).

Mr. Pikko and I had to do do-it-yourself lead abatement in the kitchen due to peeling paint on the cabinets and that’s definitely one thing I never want to do again. I totally understand why professional lead abatement costs so much now. It’s to offset the cost of feeling like you’re going to die while doing it.

Anyway, back before my Hilo book signing at The Book Gallery, Jenn had stopped in Honolulu and we had decided to go on a LOST Hummer tour at Kualoa Ranch. We invited my brother and got 10 bucks off for the Kama’aina rate.

It was awesome.

I mean seriously, what LOST fan wouldn’t totally freak out at being able to stand in front of the Jughead tower?! My only complaint is that I’ve seriously porked out since I last took picture of myself. Time to go back on the bento portion control diet.

Before I get to the tour though, I need to backtrack a bit. There’s a ton of LOST locations situated all around the island of Oahu, but I found that with them being spread all over the place, there’s not a whole lot you can go see in just one day, especially if you need to be at the ranch at 12:15. Eventually, we chose to go see the beach camp the Losties called home, which in reality is a place called Police Beach in Haleiwa on Oahu’s North Shore.

This place is seriously gorgeous. We parked at some hard-to-find road and then walked a public beach path down to the shore.

Once there, we had to head left and walk about 200 yards through the sand (which kinda sucked cause it was so freaking hot) and then we got to the spot that was familiar to all of us.

To anyone else it’s just a boring stretch of pine-covered sand, but to a LOST fan it’s like Mecca! Unfortunately, you can’t walk in there, as it’s roped off by some orange plastic fencing with a sign that says Private Property.

Can’t you just picture Jin and Sun’s little tarp hut there? Or their food pantry? I remembered later that Jenn had said she wanted to see the Others Barracks, but it turned out we didn’t have enough time to backtrack to Camp Erdman. Next time!

We checked in at the ranch and found ourselves on the tour with some French Canadian guy who was also a serious LOST fan. Our guide noticed we were all really only there for the LOST stuff, so he took us to an extra place off the ranch called Moli’i Pond. Do you recognize the place? It’s where the sub was parked in Season 6. I took this picture right around where Locke switched backpacks with Jack. I mentioned to the guide that this was where “Claire got ditched” and he thought that was funny.

Here’s a better view from the dock. Awesome, right? It was seriously surreal standing there. It also made me realize what a serious LOST dork I am. Watch the scene I’m talking about here.

One more picture…

The guide then took us to another location at the same pond. Do you know it?

This is the dock that Ben as a kid and his dad arrived at the Dharma Initiative. It’s where we see that big NAMASTE sign.

This next location was used in two different episodes. The first was some Eko episode with drug dealers. The second was when Locke comes to visit Sayid as he’s helping build homes.

This place was supposedly the location of The Tempest, but after watching YouTube videos, I’m pretty sure this outside bunker place is NOT The Tempest. They did use the inside corridor for the first six seconds of this video of Juliet inside the station (I have pics, but didn’t upload them) and the outside area is used for Juliet and Jack’s kiss. The actual door of the Tempest must be located elsewhere. It’s funny how locations are used in so many different ways in that the outside is the outside while looking from the inside (last part of that scene) but the outside from the outside isn’t.

This was by far one of the coolest places for me because Ab Aeterno ranks in my top 3 favorite episodes. Know what this is? It’s Richard Alpert’s old house with Isabella!

Here you can see the whole background, where he comes in with his horse. Ahhhhhh!

This is just a random shot of the mountains. Looks crazy doesn’t it? Battleship is currently being filmed here, with Alexander “Eric Northman” Skarsgaard being on island. *swoon*

As we rode in the hummer, we got to see the Jughead tower from afar before we got to take pictures in front of it. That was really exciting.

The guide had a joke he kept running with about “famous logs” around the ranch. This one is where Ana Lucia and Goodwin sit eating an orange while she reveals she’s on to him. Then they beef and stabbings with sticks ensues.

Same picture I posted earlier, but isn’t that awesome? Me and my brother are holding our LOST musubis, which I made for the tour. I gave one to our guide and he was extremely happy. Here’s a video that includes Faraday walking around on top the platform with the warhead hanging down.

Now this looks like an ordinary hill, but surely you know why it’s not? It was used in a very intense scene in The End, when Flocke’s team meets up with Jack’s team and Kate busts out the gun and starts blasting away at him before Jack and Flocke begin their peepee measuring contest. As soon as the guide stopped I knew what hill it was. And my god, look at the background?

Turns out, that hill is also the hill that Hurley drives the Dharma van down and the guide tells us that we’ll get to push the Dharma van down the hill too. He brings out this tiny little toy Dharma van and we’re all looking at him like he’s had one too many days trapped in the Kualoa hatch. Turns out, he wanted us to pretend like we were pushing a van and he lined the little van up to the camera for some trick photography. We all laughed, because really, we were worried about him.

While we were up on that hill, we looked down to a few coconut trees. Recognize it? When Locke, Sawyer, and Juliet were time jumping, they came across a military camp where they met Richard Alpert and a very young Charles Widmore.

This was the finale of the tour and boy was it a Season 6 doozy. I had my brother sit down in his black shirt for the complete creepy effect. This was the log that the Man in Black sat on when speaking with Jacob, who offered him a bottle of wine. Look at those mountains!!

Many thanks to Jenn, as some of these photos are hers. I had some other pictures of Hurley’s golf course and stuff, but they didn’t turn out that great. We got to see sites that were used for Jurassic Park and Godzilla, too. We all had a really great time and I’d highly recommend this tour to any serious LOST fan. There are longer tours, but they’re something crazy like 10 hours. To find out information about the tour, head over to the Kos Tours website.