Hawaii 50 - O'ahu Part 1

The was our first ever experience flying with Hawaiian Airlines and whilst the planes were old and our seats basic (most without any inflight entertainment), the cabin crew were the happiest people and the chilled out Hawaiian music seemed to melt away the usual stresses when boarding and disembarking from an aircraft. 

Our approach into O'ahu was spectacular and luckily, we were on the right side of the plane to see the view of Diamond Crater and Honolulu. 

We landed, picked up the car and checked into our hotel, The Surfjack in Waikiki beach. We chose the hotel for the free parking, which was a couple of blocks away in the Hyatt multistorey carpark. Walking to the car park wasn't an issue but driving to it was a nightmare. The amount of one way streets in Waikiki beach meant that we were often driving around for ages trying to find a way of turning left, or right, or anyway but forward. It also became comical how we managed to forget which level we had parked the car on every time, not helped by the 1/2 and 1/4 levels within levels adding to the confusion. Most days we were walking around listening for a beep to signal where our car was, even one of the cleaners felt sorry for us one day and helped with the search. 

The hotel itself had an amazing pool and bar area, clean rooms with balconies, and lots of little touches that made it seem a little different from your usual city hotel. This included live music every night around the pool, free sun cream, beach towels, beach chairs, tote bag, coffee, and bikes. It was close enough to the Waikiki beach area to walk but far enough away to have some distance from the hubbub. 

The Waikiki beach area is hugely touristy, with designer brands everywhere, up-market bars and restaurants, and very expensive looking hotels. If you search around, you can find some more chilled out and reasonably priced places to go. We just so happened to be walking along the beach as the sun was setting and with the kite surfers in the foreground, it was a breath-taking view and so lucky we had the timings just right. We also stumbled on one of the Waikiki's Banyan trees just after sunset and the sound of the birds was almost deafening, as you'll see from the video. 

When we arrived in O'ahu, there was a big storm coming in but we were able to get out and about between the down pours to check out the Waikiki beach area. The next day, the storm was still hanging around but there was a break in the weather so we decided to keep with our plans to visit Pearl Harbour and the northern end of the island. 

We were incredibly lucky. The weather held for our entire trip around Pearl Harbour, including the trip to the USS Arizona memorial which was cancelled later in the day due to the intensity of the storm. We were also lucky to get tickets. We had been trying for months to book them but they disappear within seconds of being available online. Our only option was to join the standby queue and hope to get a space. Thankfully our jetlag helped us out. We were up early, and arrived not long after the park opened so we were 2nd in the standby queue and we managed to get on the second boat of the day. 

There is lots to do at Pearl Harbour but we had read reviews beforehand and given our time constraint, we decided to just see the Arizona memorial and to look around some of the smaller museums and memorials. The museums told the story of what happened before, during and after that day. It wasn't one sided or biased but showed the impact to people from all sides involved. The Arizona memorial can only be reached by a Navy-run boat and you have about 30 minutes on the memorial itself before they take you back. Despite all the people on the memorial, the atmosphere was poignant. You are standing on top of a mass tomb for over 1000 people and everyone was respectful and thoughtful whilst they spent their time there. 

We left Pearl Harbor and the big storm clouds opened up into pelting rain with thunder and lightning. We kept with our plan and headed north to the Dole Pineapple Plantation for lunch.

It was a little disappointing that the storm had closed so much of the plantation, including the highly anticipated Pineapple Express train, but we made up for it by eating so much pineapple, we were starting to feel sick. We ran through the monsoon level rain storm back to the car back, struggled to find the car (which was becoming a bit of a habit!) and ended up completely drenched. We were just about to head off to our next destination when an emergency announcement came on the radio telling everyone to stay inside due to the storm. We sat in the car for 30 minutes debating what to do - do we drive back to the hotel, on the freeway which was probably quite treacherous by now with all the rain, do we carry on heading north and hope the weather improves, or do we try to eat more pineapple. We decided there was only one option, carry on North. 

We stopped off in the surfer town of Haleiwa where we should have been watching international surfers take on 4 foot waves waves. The 40 foot swell had put off even the professionals. 

We carried along the Kamehameha Highway and had just about dried off when we reached the beautiful Waimea Bay Beach Bay. After a big sigh, we decided there was nothing for it, we were going to need to walk the short distance from the car to the beach and returned soaked after another drenching.  

The Kamehameha Highway took us to the most northern point of the island, and then we headed down the east side of the island. At this point, the beach views turned into scenes from Jurassic Park, literally as Jurassic Park was filmed here. You might recognise some of the landscape from the films in our video. 

We eventually headed back east towards Honolulu but before reaching the hotel, we took a short detour through a residential area to the car park for Manoa Falls. It was a 1.7 mile roundtrip through bamboo and rainforest (used in the filming to Lost), to the 150-foot-tall waterfall. Normally this trail is super busy but thankfully the poor weather had kept most people away. 

In the evening, we headed to Downtown Honolulu to check out the Christmas lights and some of the local breweries.