The Pineappleman's Tiki Blog: When you tell people you are going to Tiki Oasis and they ask “What is Tiki Oasis?”

When you tell people you are going to Tiki Oasis and they ask “What is Tiki Oasis?”

How do you answer that question to people outside the Tiki community?

This year will be my 8^th year attending this event – so I guess 8 years ago I was asking that same question at a surf show in San Diego. How do you describe the event to someone that has never been before? Trying to describe Tiki Oasis to someone that has never heard of it is like trying to describe Fantasmic at Disneyland to people the first week it opened and no one knew what it was. ( I’ve done since I worked crowd control on Fastasmic opening weekend). Describing Fantasmic went something like this “Well it has large screens of water that they project movie images on them and there are floats and a battle on a Pirate ship with fireworks and a Dragon that sets the river on fire” ---wait a 15 seconds and repeat to the next guest.

Trying to describe Tiki Oasis is almost as difficult.

I guess I usually would say something like this. “It Is an event that happens in San Diego every year where people wear Hawaiian shirts and retro clothing and drink Mai Tais while listening to surf/exotica music. There is retro shopping in the daytime and bands and rum tastings and things called room crawls with more bands that are sometimes even better than the bands on the main stage. It is a place where strange things happen like Fire Eating Mermaids swimming in the pools or a burlesque dancer hanging out with a guy in a gorilla suit in an elevator.” I guess basically it is like Fantasmic -- if Captain Jack Sparrow was putting it on and handing out free rum (tip your bartender).

Maybe the correct answer when someone asks “What is Tiki Oasis?” should be not to tell people about Tiki Oasis. In the eight years I’ve been it has become bigger and bigger every single year. I remember the first year I came when I was lured by the Haunted Surf music theme of Voodoo Island. I think I just booked a pool view room logging onto the website casually one day. Last year was the first year we couldn’t get a pool view room ---as we sat down the night the site went live to try and refresh like a nerd trying to get into Comic Con. This year we were lucky to get a room at the hotel at all. So maybe we should treat Tiki Oasis like Fight Club and not talk about it. I came with one friend the first year---now our group could charter a short bus.

How would you describe the Oasis that is Tiki?

I’m running out of words so here are a few pictures from each year I’ve been so far.

2008 Tiki Oasis Newbie

First Mugs --mine is the Terminator one