On Wednesday, February 13, we began our visit of Oahu with a "round-island" tour. Our pre-conceived notion of the island was that Honolulu was a place to see once, but not return, and Oahu equaled Honolulu. This tour quickly demonstrated that nothing could be farthern from the real Oahu.
Over a million people live on the island, all but about 300,000 in the Honolulu area, which is a huge city with skyscraping buildings--both in the Waikiki hotel area and the downtown business area. Within about 30 minutes, Honolulu and Diamond Head recede into the background, and no other large city exists on the island. Residential areas flank the southern side, some extremely exclusive and quite exquisite--but as one travels the loop northward, typical Hawaiian residences can be seen--the average home price on Oahu is about $600,000, but the typical entry home price is about $300,000, according to our tour drivers--which is still expensive given the tourist economy wages.
The tour took us up along breathtaking coastlines, past blowholes and dangerous surfing beaches (like "Sandy Beach" and less dangerous but still challenging surfer beaches like "Sunset Beach"), and everywhere was a sense of history, both the more ancient Hawaiian history and the more recent 20th Century World War II history.
The Byodo-In temple, shown above, is in a cemetary, and was beautiful, a replica of a temple in Japan, complete with Koi pond, black swans, and basking turtles:
A working ranch, turned eco-tourist attraction, the Kualoa Ranch, took us on a tram ride up the hillside where we could overlook the bay below, spotting the two off shore small land masses, Chinaman's Hat and Turtle Islands:
We were being cautious of Helen's back--she only recently recovered enough for this type of excursion, but she was an intrepid traveler:
One of iur last stops of the day was at the Dole Pineapple plantation, where sadly they no longer grow much pineapple, having shifted to coffee and corn. We tasted the smooth, soft whipped pineapple dessert known as Dole Whip--delicious, and a "must" for any visitor, and enjoyed the beautiful planted grounds. Their garden tour (free--they have a maze and other tours, for which they charge) showed several species of pineapple, including the one below:
Tired, but happy that we had seen so much of the island, we ended back at Waikiki about nine hours after we had left. We decided after the tour that we may indeed return, but if so we would find a rental outside of Honolulu in one of the small towns.
On Thursday, we have an early tour of the USS Arizona Memorial.
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