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 hulking great warrior guys covered in tattoos repeatedly hurled themselves from increasingly higher ledgeschipped into the rock above the falls into the water below. It was quite an incredible spectacle to watch these men surface from the water, haul themselves up onto the bank and climb hand over hand like Spiderman effortlessly up the cliff face to the next impossibly high point to throw themselves off again. Apparently this display is a recreation of the tests of skill and courage (not to mention stupidity) warriors used to have to take part in, and the more these guys hauled themselves up the cliff the more impressed I was with how fit they obviously were.

I might have been able to climb up the cliff a single time over the space of about an hour, as long as I was allowed to pause for breath every couple of minutes, but these guys were able to spend fifteen minutes repeatedly throwing themselves off ledges well above a forty-five foot waterfall and then scaling the cliff to a higher ledge each time with apparently no need to pause for a moments rest.

After the show we were able to take a dip in the pool, constantly looking up to make sure nobody was about to jump onto our heads from sixty feet, before walking back to the coach by a different route. This alternate path took well over half an hour to get us back to the car park, but wound through tropical gardens in which peacocks were roaming everywhere and I constantly turned corners to find myself faced with large wooden Hawaiian statues which made me jump a foot in the air. If I wasn't on an organised tour and limited for time I could also have chosen to go horseback riding or kayaking within the park - but unfortunately our coach beckoned.

Three months after my visit, on the 9th May 1999, nearby Sacred Falls State Park was closed to the public indefinitely. A group of seven hikers standing under the falls, including children, were crushed to death by an unexpected landslide and many more standing nearby were taken to hospital with serious injuries. This is not the first time the park has been in the news - on our tour, we stopped briefly to look at the waterfall under which the tragedy would later take place and were told how a group of tourists had previously been held up at gunpoint by a madman while camping in the park.

David Copperfield's understudy has been performing his own brand of Illusion for some time in Waikiki, in a big budget spectacular called The Magic of Polynesia. I've always been a fan of magic since I was a small boy, and there was just no way I could possibly stay away from a show by a magician good enough to understudy such a well known illusionist, especially as I was lucky enough to have seen David Copperfield live in London on a previous occasion - so I booked the late night show and went along to see if it was everything it was cracked up to be. The Magic of Polynesia is performed by award winning magician John Hirokawa every night at the Waikiki Beachcomber hotel, in its multi-million dollar showroom. As I queued up with hundreds of others outside, the man himself came out to delight the crowd with tricks and to have his photograph taken with fans, which I thought was a genuinely nice touch. Of course as soon as all the scantily clad showgirls appeared behind him he suddenly found himself no longer the first choice for photographs, at least amongst the men - but I don't suppose he really expected anything else. The guy behind me in the crowd was the spitting image of Santa Claus, complete with full white knee length beard. He was obviously aware of this fact and spent much of his time in the queue producing business cards with SANTA CLAUS written on them for startled small children who looked delighted and ran around telling everybody they'd met Santa on his day off.

The Americans really don't do things by halves. John Hirokawa's show is a non stop showcase of lasers, pyrotechnics and electronic wizardry which holds the audience spellbound for two hours. It would be far more accurate to describe the show as The Illusions of Polynesia because the word magic still sums up memories of relatives performing bad card tricks over dinner when I was seven, and these huge stage productions are a whole world away from that. From the very first moments of the show when John Hirokawa bursts out of a helicopter apparently flown onto the stage, to the moment the curtain falls, the audience is gasping with disbelief throughout. I was sitting at a table with a small group from Vancouver and a woman with her grand-daughter, and the young girl spent the entire performance holding onto her grand-mother and burying her head in her bosom as explosions erupted overhead. At one point, John Hirokawa built a huge monster on stage from aneighteen foot pile of fruit and it magically became animated and charged around the auditorium belching fire and roaring, at which the poor girl was just reduced to tears. The illusions came fluidly with no breaks in between to set up the next, and I found it incredible that Hirokawa had any time to think about what he was going to do next - and yet I never saw any slip ups and haven't got the faintest idea how any of it was done. The backdrop for the stage was a realistic landscape of erupting volcanoes, waterfalls and lava flows, all apparently real and totally believable. To say that this was a world away from the show I went to see back in Fiji would be an understatement of the highest order. I actually came out of the theatre with my mind totally blown, and can honestly say that I found the show even better than anything I'd previously seen from David Copperfield. In a couple of weeks time, I have every intention of watching the world famous Siegfried and Roy spectacular in Las Vegas - and lets face it, that's probably going to be even better than this was. I really can't wait.

Waikiki comes alive at night. I walked back from the show along streets lined with street artists and vendors, jugglers and men on stilts, Hollywood style prostitutes on every corner bringing down the area but looking glamorous nonetheless. I wandered through the International Market which was so massive and reminiscent of the markets in Fiji and Thailand that I was able to immerse myself in the colours and smells and forget for a moment that I was in the United States of America. I wandered briefly into the nightclub next door to my hotel and found that as soon as I ordered a drink I was surrounded by girls wanting to know where I came from in Australia. By the time I got back to the hotel and made my way up to the top floor, I was absolutely exhausted and couldn't wait to sink into a deep sleep.

I like what I've seen of Hawaii very much. It really is a pity that I don't have the time or budget to visit some of the other Hawaiian islands - the entire chain is made up of Oahu, Hawaii, Maui, Molokai, Kauai, Nihau, Lanai and Kahoolawe. It's possible to take helicopter trips out to some of the mostly deserted islands, or a coach and boat tour of Maui or Hawaii (The Big Island) - but these run into hundreds of dollars and I just don't have that sort of cash free with much of my journey still in front of me. I would like to return at a later date and do some real exploring, especially as some of the outer islands are supposed to be covered in rainforests and volcanoes as far as the eye can see. In fact, I've been told by locals that some of them are quite remarkably like the island depicted in Fantasy Island - and if that's not a reason to come back, I don't know what is.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.