An enjoyable two hours was spent at Waimea State Park on the north of the island, where I walked up a gentle incline amongst gardens and views of the surrounding forest, to a large flat area where rows of seats had been arranged at the base of the towering Waimea Falls. Here, we watched a cultural show which began with Hawaiian music and traditional Hula dancing by beautiful girls in grass skirts and was followed by a cliff-diving display in which two hulki...

I had a free day yesterday, so I decided to find the Shopping Center and have a browse for some Hawaiian memorabilia at a reasonable price. American shopping centres are unlike anything you've ever seen before - they're nearly always huge complexes outside town miles from anywhere, meaning that if you haven't got a car then you're going to have a problem. Of course, if you haven't got a car in America then people generally seem to think there's something wrong wi...

Today I had booked a tour to take me across the island to the Polynesian Cultural Centre in La'ie on the northern coast of Oahu, not wanting to spend my entire stay here browsing shops and lying on the beach. Back in the sixties, the island of Oahu was hit by a huge unemployment problem and thousands of bright young students were coming out of the Hawaiian campus of BYU (Brigham Young University) with no jobs to go into. To help solve this problem, the island spe...

I am staying on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, about the most luxurious area I could wish for. When my travel agent told me that she had booked a hotel in Waikiki I'd imagined it would be the cheapest thing she could find, probably on some backstreet between a pornographic cinema and a sex shop or something - after all, my budget had to be spread over several months and I've already stayed in some pretty fantastic places. Much to my surprise, I am right on the sea fr...

Unfortunately, as I am writing this travelogue out of order, a little confusion creeps in here - you see, when I wrote these entries I was flying in the opposite direction, coming in from the direction of Fiji rather than the mainland US. Normal service will be resumed shortly! Aloha. Somewhere between Fiji and Hawaii my plane crossed the International Dateline, travelling back in time by twenty-four hours in the process. Technically, this means that I am curren...