Last month my cousin got married in Maui, so my wife and I went to Hawaii. We spent a couple of days in Honolulu, and then most of the trip on Maui. I'll give you one thread for each island. The Maui pictures turned out a lot better, but whatchagonnado. If you want to see more, the entire set of 540 pictures is
on flickr.
First, a few stills from the plane.
Who wants to play guess the city? This isn't Hawaii. ColDayMan will know it for sure.
This is what the Grand Canyon looks like, if you forget to take your polarizing filter off your camera.
Guess the city #2. But seriously, if you are a regular on SSP you had better know this one right away.
Finally, Honolulu:
I took this from a moving airplane. I'm pretty proud of it, if I do say so myself
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Being city geeks, we wanted to see the actual city, not just the beach and jungle. So we stayed in Manoa, near the university, and spent the first day in downtown, Chinatown, and the Ala Moana area.
Our first stop was the mandatory Iolani Palace, only royal residence in the US.
From there, we walked into downtown proper.
There's a weird little pedestrian mall. The stuff along it wasn't very interesting, but there was a steady stream of locals all along the street.
Most of downtown doesn't look that different from any mid-sized downtown. Lots of heavy late 19th Century buildings. Lots of modernist office towers. Less surface parking than most similarly-sized American cities, though.
I didn't get a very good picture of Aloha Tower. But I went up it, so here you go.
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The main spine for transit & pedestrians downtown and in Chinatown is Hotel Street, which is a transit mall. Buses are allowed, but no cars.
Honolulu has a pretty good bus system. Their first rail line is under construction now (or maybe about to be?), but obviously I didn't get to use it. We didn't rent a car in Honolulu, so we used the bus system to get around.
Chinatown is probably the most interesting urban part of Honolulu, at least among the areas we saw. It's a real functioning Chinatown. Not as good as San Francisco, but easily in the top 5 for US cities.
A good portion of Chinatown seems to be a series of outdoor markets. A lot of food, a lot of the typical trinkets you get in any Chinatown, and a lot of little convenience shops.
While in Chinatown I discovered Chrysanthemum Tea Drink. It's delicious and now I'm determined to scour Annandale (DC's suburban Asiatown) to find more of it. If Chrysanthemum Tea Drink is a 10/10 on the taste scale, all other drinks are negative 1,000,000 out of 10.
At the far end of Chinatown there's a little river. I forget the name. It's a very pleasant place to walk.
A few blocks upriver there's a botanical garden.
That is a big damn tree.
Closer inspection confirms the result. This is a big damn tree.
I did not know pineapple plants look like this.
Hawaii has weird birds. This is a Myna, which is just like a Starling except cuter.
Adorable little pigeons, half normal-pigeon size.
Waxbills.
A regal-looking bulbul...
... somewhat less regal-looking while snacking on a moth.
After the botanical gardens we hopped a bus to Ala Moana, a sort of uptown that surrounds a big shopping mall.
The road from downtown to Ala Moana:
Perpendicular to that, the main local street. Yes, that's an urban Walmart.
Behind the mall there's a public park on a peninsula that juts out into the ocean. We had dinner, then walked down the peninsula to watch the sunset.
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The next day we got up and went to Waikiki. That's the famous tourist beach lined with high-rises.
This is the view from the street in front of our airbnb room, in Manoa, looking towards Ala Moana.
Much to my surprise, being an east-coaster, Waikiki beach doesn't have a boardwalk.
The front street, Kalakaua Avenue, is lined with shops. But still, weird.
Back off the beach, in the neighborhood, it's very dense but not all that urban. Like a lot of Honolulu outside downtown. Manoa was similar.
This is a red-crested cardinal, as opposed to the typical northern cardinal we usually see on the mainland. Can you tell I like birds?
Let's go back to the beach.
I walked out to the end of a little pier to get this.
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From the pier I got a nice view of Diamond Head. It's a popular hiking destination with what I hear are killer views, but we didn't have time.
After taking that Diamond Head picture, I happened to look down into the water. This is what I saw. Really. Right next to the biggest, most popular, most famous beach in Hawaii.
It was only 3 or 4 feet long.
Back to the beach to watch the sunset.
And the moonrise.
After dark, the nightlife on Kalakaua Avenue picks up.
The next thread will cover Maui, but here's a parting shot from Honolulu:
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