Hawaii

While I was visiting the West Coast I decided to make a brief trip to Honolulu as I managed to find a reasonably priced flight on Hawaiian Airlines. Going down the walkway to get onto the aircraft I was surprised to be walking towards the Union Flag, I wondered if I was on the wrong flight. The answer was that the Hawaiian flag was painted on the aircraft door and with it open only the left side was visible.

The flag was designed at the request of King Kamehameha I when Hawaii was an independent kingdom. It has eight stripes of white, red and blue that represent the eight main islands. The flag of Great Britain is emblazoned in the upper left corner to honour Hawaii's friendship with the British.

Flying to Hawaii was a strange experience as Seattle to Honolulu is nearly as far as London to New York (2700 miles against 3500 miles) and the flight is largely over water. However, when you get off the plane there is no Customs or Immigration to get through and the money is the same!

Finding a hotel was a problem as most seemed to be designed for families or large parties so the cost of a room was rather high for a single person like me.

Eventually I found a Holiday Inn just to the west of the Waikiki Beach area on Ala Moana Boulevard that was reasonably priced and well located to get around,

Getting around in Honolulu is most easily done using “TheBus” which was efficient and went everywhere I wanted to go. Best of all there was a reasonably priced 4 day bus pass which could be bought at the numerous convenience stores and eliminated the need to carry lots of cash. TheBus pass had the advantage that when you passed something that looked interesting you could hop off and on without worrying. The hotel had a bus stop outside and there was a major transit terminal just a short walk away.

Another advantage of the hotel was that it had plenty of shops and restaurants to hand and was not far from the Ala Moana Centre which was a shopping mall but due to the climate consisted mostly of open air walkways rather than being a closed box. There was also a park a short walk from the hotel so you could take an after dinner stroll.

The weather was warm without being uncomfortably hot so walking around was pleasant. Very strangely in the late afternoon the sky would cloud over and you would brace yourself for a thunderstorm, but then the sky would clear without anything happening.

I happened upon an old National Geographic magazine from July 1960 that had an interesting article on Hawaii at the time it became a state. Transportation to the islands still largely depended on ships, jet aircraft were just coming into service and the majority of flights were carried out by piston engine propeller aircraft taking around 10 hours to reach Honolulu. I recommend tracking down a copy (library?) to get a view on how things changed - according to a web site in 1959 there were 250,000 visitors and in 2011 around 17 Million!

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