Hilo and Honolulu in Hawaii

Look at the size of these trees - they get lots of rain in Hilo

We visited two of the Hawaiian Islands on Monday and Tuesday this week.  First, we visited the Island of Hawaii, or Big Island – because it is.  However it has a much smaller population than the Island of Oahu where Honolulu is the capital.

There are seven inhabited islands in the Hawaiian group which were only unified in 1810 by King Kamehameka in 1810.  Thirty years earlier in 1779, Captain Cook had been killed on the Island of Hawaii.

Craft and material shop in town

By 1819, missionaries had arrived and began converting the Hawaiians to Christianity. As always happens, diseases came with western civilisation and decimated the population before it started to grow again in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Hilo where the ship docked is the main town on the Island of Hawaii and services a population of 43,000.  The island was formed from five volcanoes and two of them, only 25 miles apart are quite active.  The others are dormant.

Our bus

We had no plans for Hilo, since the ship didn’t mention any wheelchair accessibility, but once on shore we discovered the Hoppa On, Hoppa Off buses which stopped at various designated stops from the black sand beaches on the left of the port to the town on the right hand side.  Two of their three buses had wheelchair access, only one spot, but both John and Fred squeezed in on the way back to the port.

We decided to take a ride right around the route, so first we went to the beaches and

Rainbow Falls

then to the Rainbow Falls where water cascades over a lava edge.  Then back into town where we wandered around the town, stopped to have a (ghastly) American coffee and nearly got caught in one of their 10 minute downpours.  We had a lovely chat with the owner who spent his adolescent years in Perth with his geophysicist father.  As you can imagine there are lots of scientists come to this island to study its fascinating geological makeup.

Farmers' market in Hilo

We were unable to take advantage of the tours on Hilo – we would certainly have loved to see the volcanoes.  Many fellow cruisers took a helicopter ride, but sadly our days doing that are over – John’s skin can’t handle the damage these days, that’s even if he could find a helicopter pilot willing to lift him onto the seat…

Hilo is rather depressed, with low cost housing which attracts many retirees.  It is also subject to tsunamis and has endured some bad ones in modern times.

Twin towers in Honolulu

Overnight we travelled to Honolulu which supports a far larger population on the Island of Oahu.  Unlike Hilo it has many high rise buildings, and a much more multicultural population.  The most popular religions are Catholicism, Buddhism, Protestantism and Mormanism, in that order.  It is known as a crossroads to east and west, with many Japanese, Filipinos, Anglo-Saxons as well as indigenous Hawaiians, now inter-married.  In recent years, land has been set aside for people who can prove they are 50% Hawaiian. 

At Pearl Harbour

When Pearl Harbour was bombed, 37% of the population was Japanese, so not all of them were interned, only those who were influential or who had been educated in Japanese territories.  Our guide’s father had spent his childhood in Okinawa, although born in Hawaii, so he was interned, not in Hawaii but on the mainland of the USA.

The ship’s tour office was able to offer us

John and our Japanese Hawaiian coach driver Roy.

an accessible tour of a number of places, so we chose Pearl Harbour and City Sights.  This proved to be a mainstream tour in a wheelchair accessible coach which had two wheelchair spaces.  Jenny and Fred had also booked this tour, and the seating was quite adequate.  The tour was well worth the money as well, unlike that in Auckland.

We travelled about seven miles out to Pearl Harbour, which is on the next bay from where the ship was docked.  Once inside the precinct, there were two free museums then we were taken like clockwork into the theatre for a 35 minute presentation about the attack on Pearl Harbour.  From there we were taken via a flat bottomed boat to the USS Arizona Memorial, across the bay.  The memorial is above the “graveyard” of the warship which was sunk during the attack by the Japanese.

USS Arizona memorial

The tour was fully wheelchair accessible.  We even stopped a mother tipping her daughter with a broken leg out of her wheelchair – had to explain about tipping the wheelchair backwards and use the bar at the back of the chair to make that easier.  The daughter nearly ended up with two broken legs.

Looking towards the north east of the Island

After that, we were taken on the motorway through a tunnel and along a bridge through the volcanic range and up to a lookout to view the northeast side of the island.  The scenery was like nothing we’d seen before.  All these vertical ridges covered in vegetation, the result of lava flows hundreds of thousands of years before.  Magnificent.

Royal palace

Then we were taken back to the centre of the old town to view the statues of the King and Queen, the Royal Palace (the monarchy was overthrown in 1893) and the beautiful churches and an old mission houses.

The coach then returned us to the ship for a very late lunch, after which John wanted to return to town to take photos, since he hadn’t been able to get off the coach earlier.  He eventually went off on his own and explored more streets whilst I returned to the ship, not feeling very well.  We were all “done” for the day by then, although we were not due to leave until midnight.

Aloma Tower

Our table mates, Anne and Ted had been invited to a special dinner on shore, guests of Cunard.  Apparently all cruisers who had done a world tour with Cunard were invited, and there were eight coachloads! About 400 people.  They had a thoroughly good night, everything laid on, and Ted was somewhat worse for wear the next day.

This island was one where we’d rather spend at least a week, maybe more – there was so much to see and do, with most of the local buses wheelchair accessible.  We missed Waikiki, just a short bus trip away and more especially the rest of the island – so beautiful and with such a great temperate climate.

And I had no chance to do any shopping at all!