Hawaii

In a valley called Waipā, on the north shore of Kauaʻi, at five in the morning on a Thursday, a room of people who mostly do not know one another sit down over buckets of taro. The taro has soaked overnight. Everyone gets a folding metal chair, a bucket and a butter knife, and takes the warts and the bad patches off before the grinder gets to them. Catherine Toth Fox drove over before dawn, and the tables were already going when she walked in¹.

Aunty Honey Girl Hoʻomanawanui moves between the chairs and corrects whoever needs it. She does not soften it. Her family has been at Waipā for generations. "You not listening." "Here! Do it right next time." "Too much talk and not enough work. I like it quiet." Kawika Rogers works for the foundation that runs the valley. He puts the taro into your hand and teaches from that. This one is loli loli, no good; this part here, this is good².

The cleaned taro goes through the grinder three times, and volunteers weigh the paste that comes out — poi — into bags. Hundreds of pounds of it are out of the door and into the neighbourhood at $3 a pound before lunch².

Sherry Ott gave up a single Thursday morning to that table. She walked out of it with wrinkled, waterlogged fingers, a full stomach, a bag of fresh poi, and a stake in the islands she had not arrived with. "I don't have to be a resident to care about what happens to them³."

You cannot be at that table if you are standing in an airport.

Hawaii is eight volcanic islands in the middle of the North Pacific. Almost every visitor goes to the same four. Oʻahu carries Honolulu and Waikīkī. Then come Maui, Kauaʻi, and Hawaiʻi itself, which residents call the Big Island so that the name Hawaii can stay with the state. Hardly anybody goes to Molokaʻi or Lānaʻi. Niʻihau is privately owned, and nobody at all lives on Kahoʻolawe.

Each move between the four costs the better part of a day. You hand back the hire car, queue at a new counter, fly, and check in at the other end. Travellers who take all four in a fortnight come home saying they saw everything and met nobody. What is best here is a person willing to teach you something. The lifeguard has been reading the water in front of you all morning. The aunty has the bucket and the butter knife. The kumu who teaches hula will tell you what the dance is about. They work ordinary hours, in one place, so to be there when they do you have to stay put.

Carola, a Swiss writer, gave Hawaii three weeks and spent them on six islands. She hired four cars, took four flights and paid something near €1,500 (roughly $1,700) simply to keep moving, before a single night's accommodation⁴. She wrote afterwards that she had felt out of place from the first moment, and that between the Starbucks, the Cheesecake Factory and the ABC Stores she had searched in vain for the real Hawaii⁵. None of what she was looking for is seasonal. It was going on the whole three weeks she was there, most of it early in the morning, all of it in a fixed place. She never stayed still long enough to be standing in front of any of it.

Standing up in three feet of water

Hanauma Bay is a collapsed volcanic crater on the south-east corner of Oʻahu, its rim broken open to the sea so that the Pacific washes into a shallow bowl of coral. Josh Guerra lifeguards there, and on an ordinary day he pulls between two and six visitors out of it. Most of them are in two or three feet of water when he reaches them, 60 to 90 cm. It is shallow enough to stand up in, if only they could work out how. Alan Hong managed the bay for twenty-one years, and he names the fins: with that much extra length on the foot, standing up in very shallow water is hard⁶.

Tour operators tell people they need not know how to swim, Guerra says. "You actually need to be a pretty strong swimmer and very comfortable in the water to use a mask and snorkel⁶." Jim Howe ran Honolulu's ocean safety division until he retired. "This may be a 37-year-old adult, but if you look at their beach IQ, they're about a 2-year-old," he says⁷.

A rip is a river of water heading back out to sea. Kalani Vierra has lifeguarded on Kauaʻi since 1999 and now runs the island's ocean safety operations. Waves pile water up over the shallow reef, that water has to drain somewhere, and it drains back out through the deeper channels between the reefs. The bigger the surf, the harder the river runs⁹.

On 18 February 2026, at Waiʻoli Beach Park in Hanalei, about seventy people waded out and swam into one on purpose. Bruce Hopkins teaches ocean safety. He watched from the shallows and gave them one test. "If you can talk in a rip current, you're doing it right." Kyla Yoder lives up the coast at Kapaʻa, and she let it take her. It "felt like a lazy river ride," she said afterwards, and she could not tell she was moving at all until Hopkins told her to turn round and look at the beach¹⁰.

The reef is lava, black and pitted. Sea urchins wedge themselves into the cracks at ankle depth, where the water is barely enough to float in. Their spines go straight through a thin rubber sole, and you meet them at the lava-rock entries rather than the sandy ones¹¹. A German family keeping a travel diary called Abenteuer Hawaii went snorkelling at ʻĀhihi Cove on Maui. They found exactly the fish they had come for, and at precisely the same depth, masses of sea urchins. Their son got out and sat on the rocks for the rest of it¹².

Which shore you can swim off at all depends on the month. The north- and west-facing coasts take the North Pacific's winter swell, and the south-facing coasts get theirs in summer. The two seasons barely overlap.

• November to March. Large to very large surf on the north and west shores, small surf on the south shores, Waikīkī included. Humpbacks present.
• April and May. North and west easing, south building. Humpbacks leaving.
• June to August. North and west flat most days, south shores at the best of their year. Humpbacks absent.
• September and October. The first swells arrive on the north and west, south easing. Humpbacks absent.

Humpbacks come into that same water to calve, and in the deep of the season they are hard to miss. Olaf and Angie were in the islands in February 2025. They watched the whales breach off Maui and saw one inside the harbour itself. On a boat rigged with an underwater microphone they heard them through the hull, at a moment when not one was showing above the surface¹³.

Archie Kalepa spent thirty-one years as a Maui County lifeguard and now runs safety clinics for high-school surf coaches. He calls surfing "our gift to the world¹⁴."

A first lesson is four or five plain instructions and a great deal of paddling. Diogo Avila took one at Waikīkī on a February morning. His instructor Xavier told him to lie in the middle of the board, paddle hard, plant his hands and slide one foot forward. Avila boiled the whole two hours down to a phrase in his own Brazilian Portuguese: calm, and attention to detail. He stood up on a wave, and woke the following morning with his arms falling off and his back killing him¹⁵. Tomomi works as an editor in Honolulu and had never stood on a surfboard in her life. She took her board from her instructor Kaishō, and one instruction with it. The end with the leash on it is the back¹⁶.

The lifeguard in the tower has been watching that particular stretch of water since sunrise and will tell you what it is doing, for nothing. Sam Fisher was born in Haleʻiwa and has lifeguarded at Haleʻiwa Aliʻi Beach since 2005. "If you come and talk to us before you go in the water, we'll tell you all the information you need¹⁷." On the beaches with no tower on them, nobody has been watching at all.

Four cars and four flights

One passenger ferry runs between the Hawaiian islands. It goes from Māʻalaea on Maui to Mānele on Lānaʻi, three times a day, and takes an hour and ten minutes¹⁸. To reach any other island, you fly.

The flying itself is cheap. Janina has made the trip from Germany five times and writes up what it costs: each hop between $50 and $100 a person, plus about $15 a bag¹⁹. What it costs is the day wrapped around it. Two travellers wrote up a ten-day, three-island trip on the Polish site SmartTravels. They turned up at Kona in February for a nine o'clock flight to Maui and found the aircraft broken. The replacement left after four in the afternoon. Every earlier seat on the route had already gone, so they spent one of their ten days in a departure hall on the $12 each the airline handed them for lunch. On getting home they discovered that American carriers owe a delayed passenger nothing like what European rules require²⁰.

The car costs far more than the flight. Of the €1,500 Carola spent on moving, the four hire cars took €1,215⁴. Jen paid $133 a day for three days on Kauaʻi, in a vehicle she barely had time to drive anywhere²¹. Hire is cheaper per day the longer you keep it, so every island you add resets the clock. Katrin Lehr and her family did four islands in four weeks, and she advises a week an island²².

Parking is the hidden line on a Waikīkī bill, and a hotel charges $60 to $80 a night for it²³. A Korean traveller posting as Samnyangi Jipsa spent thirteen nights on Oʻahu with her parents, and brought the whole thing in at a little over $30 a day each, car included. She found the free street parking that runs the length of the Ala Wai canal²⁴.

Honolulu is the one part of Hawaii you can move around without a car at all. TheBus and the Skyline rail line share a single $3 fare, paid on a HOLO card, and the city caps a day's travel at $7.50²⁵. Since October 2025 Skyline has run into the airport at Lelepaua station. Malia Yoshioka rode it the fortnight it opened. She came off the flight, walked through the car park, went up onto the platform, changed once onto a bus, and was in Waikīkī in a little under an hour for $3²⁶.

Kevin Allen grew up on Oʻahu's North Shore and rode TheBus to school, and to his job at a shave-ice counter, before he was old enough to drive. He went back years later and did the long way round for the pleasure of it. Route 60 leaves Ala Moana Center, crosses the Likelike Highway and runs up the windward coast to Haleʻiwa, about two hours, with the sea filling the window all the way past Kāneʻohe. An elderly passenger spent a stretch of the ride naming the landmarks out loud for a German couple. He turned out to be a retired driver riding his own old route for fun²⁸.

Two scoops of rice

In the 1940s Aiko Hamura drove the sugar plantation camps of Kauaʻi in a black Ford sedan with the back seat taken out, selling fruit, vegetables and the saimin noodles she made herself. In 1952 she opened a shop in a converted army barracks on Kress Street in Līhuʻe. Her granddaughter Lori Tanigawa runs it today²⁹.

Kathy YL Chan was born and raised in Honolulu. She stops at Hamura Saimin on the way to the airport and on the way back from it. The shop has counter seating and nothing else. You queue, you seat yourself, and the queue is at its worst between eleven and half past twelve. The broth carries shrimp, chicken, pork and scallops, and you finish with a slice of lilikoi — passion fruit — chiffon pie³⁰.

Residents sort what they eat into two categories, and saimin sits firmly in the second. Hawaiian food is the food of the Native Hawaiians, Chan writes: poi, kālua pig baked underground, laulau steamed in taro leaf, haupia set from coconut milk. Local food belongs to a place rather than to a people. Planters brought Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, Korean, Okinawan and Filipino workers onto the same land and gave them all the same half-hour for lunch. Out of that half-hour came the plate lunch, saimin, the loco moco of rice and burger patty under an egg, Spam musubi, and shave ice³¹.

The Portuguese share of the plate is the malasada, a fried doughnut without a hole, rolled in sugar. Leonard Rego's grandparents came from São Miguel in the Azores under contract to cut cane. In 1952 he opened a bakery on Kapahulu Avenue in Honolulu. His grandson Lenny Rego III runs it now, and describes seventy-odd years of the recipe as "no major changes—just practical refinement³³."

The Okinawan share is andagi, a ball of dough fried at the summer temple dances. Guy Ujimori of Mililani has been making them for more than thirty years. He works a cauldron with his wife and his son, and flicks the batter into the oil by hand. "I'm the only one that drops," he says. "I'm the only one that's fast enough." One large dance gets through 350 pounds (160 kg) of batter and yields about eight thousand andagi³⁴.

Poke is the Hawaiian share, and the word means to cut crosswise into pieces. Long before restaurants on the mainland were building it into a bowl on rice, it was raw fish with limu, seaweed, and inamona, roasted kukui nut crushed with salt. Ligaya Mishan grew up in Hawaii, and she puts it "in a plastic tub from Foodland or Tamura's," bought at a supermarket counter, never the main event and always there³⁵. Judy Sakuma has run ʻOno Seafood in Kapahulu since 1995 with her daughter, and the queue reaches the car park. Asked what a newcomer ought to order, she names nothing. "These are my recipes. What's good for me is good for you³⁶."

Chan shops with her mother at Chow's Seafood, stall 121 in Kekaulike Market, in Honolulu's Chinatown. The women behind the counter cut the meat off the bones in front of you, and the fish paste comes in two grades, $6 and $8 a pound³⁷.

On Hawaiʻi Island the Hilo Farmers Market fills the corner of Mamo Street and Kamehameha Avenue every day of the week, with up to two hundred stallholders on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Brian Gibson trades there as Bearsong Studios. He prices a ceramic piece at $35, because you made the effort to get yourself to downtown Hilo³⁸.

Monday nights and fourth Saturdays

The poi table at Waipā runs every Thursday², and the foundation opens the valley again on the fourth Saturday of each month to anyone who sends an RSVP³⁹. Hui Makaʻāinana o Makana is the organisation of Hāʻena families further along the shore, and it works its own taro terraces on the same terms. You email, you say how many of you there are and what time you will get there, and the day ends in a potluck⁴⁰.

Carol Yotsuda has been filling the performing arts centre at Kauaʻi Community College on Monday evenings for forty-three seasons, from early February to late March, with an event called E Kanikapila Kākou — roughly, let's all play music together. She arrives at two in the afternoon to set up. She called the lobby on opening night a zoo, and then corrected herself. It was "a happy zoo; it was a meeting place for everyone who had not seen each other for a whole year⁴¹."

Four kumu hula spend the first hour teaching the audience to dance, and each leads a hālau, or hula school, of their own. Maka Herrod's Mālie Foundation presented the night, and Troy Hinano Lazaro worked as emcee. He called up onto the stage the one person in the hall who had asked him not to, Maka's mother Iwalani Herrod, and invited the rest of the family up alongside her, explaining himself to the room as they came. "Okay, audience, this is not part of the program, but if we stuck to the program, it would not be a Mālie event."

Peter Sterne has guarded the door at these evenings for years. He got up unasked and danced a month short of his ninety-sixth birthday, on two rebuilt knees, two rebuilt hips and two rebuilt shoulders, with his wife Janis beside him.

On the second Saturday of every month a hālau dances on the grass beside the Volcano Art Center gallery, inside Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, with no amplification of any kind. It costs nothing beyond the park entry fee, and the centre's page asks you to bring a mat, because ash falls there⁴². In Waikīkī a free hula show runs on the mound beside the Duke Kahanamoku statue on Kalākaua Avenue on Saturday evenings⁴³.

Waimea Valley, on Oʻahu's North Shore, runs from the ridge down to the sea⁴⁴. A paved path takes most people half an hour to walk, past taro terraces, a fishing shrine and temple platforms. It ends at a 45-foot (14 m) waterfall, and you may swim under it in a lifejacket on the days the lifeguards allow it⁴⁵. Entry is $26 for an adult and $10 for a resident⁴⁶.

Kaʻumealani Diamond has run the cultural programmes there for seventeen years and drives in forty minutes each way. "I sleep in Mililani, but I live in Waimea⁴⁴."

What the hands are saying

Every movement in hula points at something named in the mele, the chant being danced to, and nothing in it is decorative. In much hula a dancer keeps the arm soft and never straightens it entirely. Huihui Kanahele-Mossman directs the Edith Kanakaʻole Foundation in Hilo. Her aunt, the kumu hula Nālani Kanakaʻole, did the opposite. "Auntie was very rigid and straight," Kanahele-Mossman says⁴⁷.

Micah Kamohoaliʻi's hālau in Waimea dances only the old style, to drums and to the ipu, a gourd struck against the ground, rather than to the guitar and ʻukulele of the modern one. "Everything is pounding as hard as it could be," he says. "All the energy, the sweat is flying everywhere, and everybody's screaming and yelling⁴⁸."

Behind each dance is a text, and the people who chant it go back to the sources to work out what it says. Kīhei and Māpuana de Silva have been chanting one particular mele about Kailua, on Oʻahu, for close to forty years. When they wrote up its story they admitted that they had gone fuzzy on the details. Then they set three nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language newspaper versions side by side, and walked the ground the chant names — the pond, the hillside, the stream that now goes by a different name. The chant addresses Hauwahine, the lizard spirit who guards that pond, and it carries the sign that one of her kind is near: the plants around her turn yellow⁴⁹.

Most of the week costs nothing at all — the craft fair, the parade through town, and Wednesday's exhibition night, at which the judges score nobody⁵². Ema Wada studies in Honolulu and dances hula. She went over to Hilo with her mother and found the whole town flagged and decorated, restaurant staff greeting festival-goers as they came through the door. "I felt in my body that the local people were welcoming us," she said⁵³.

The language the chants are in

Those chants are in a language that lawmakers came within a generation of finishing off. In 1896 the government of the day made English the medium of instruction in every school, public and private. The number of Hawaiian speakers fell from around forty thousand at that point to some two thousand by 1978. Teachers founded ʻAha Pūnana Leo in 1983 and opened a Hawaiian-medium preschool on Kauaʻi the following year, while such teaching was still against the law. In 1986 they got the legislature to change it⁵⁴.

In Hāna, on Maui, Kaimana Cabebe coordinates the local Pūnana Leo site. Moani Aiona is a school counsellor, and her children went through the immersion stream. She watched the language come back through her front door. "It's brought Olelo Hawaii into our home, and quite quickly." Kea Gulino is white and teaches second grade in Hawaiian. "To me, it's about kuleana. It's not about if you're haole or Hawaiian."⁵⁵ Kuleana means a right, a duty and an authority all at once, and haole is the Hawaiian word for a white person.

Music moved the same way the language did, from one person to the next at home, by ear. Ledward Kaapana grew up in Kalapana on the Big Island, in a house with no electricity and eleven children in it. His mother taught him guitar and ʻukulele. "In Kalapana, nobody read music. Until today, I still don't read music," he says. He plays the bass line with his thumb while his fingers take the melody and the chords at the same time, "so it sounds like two or three guys playing⁵⁷."

The ʻukulele itself came ashore off a ship from Madeira in 1879, and in Honolulu the Kamaka family have been building them since 1916. Chris Kamaka Jr learned from his grandfather to read koa, the hardwood the instruments are made of, and no two come out the same. Every piece of wood has its own grain, density and colour, so he works to the piece in front of him⁵⁸.

The volcano nobody can promise

Kīlauea has been erupting in episodes since 23 December 2024. An episode is a lava fountain that runs for a matter of hours — one in August 2026 reached 500 feet (150 m) — and then stops for days or weeks⁵⁹. Between episodes there is usually a glow off the vent after dark, and the overlooks fill at dusk⁶⁰. The gaps have run from a few days to six weeks, so nobody can tell you in January whether it will be fountaining in February. The US Geological Survey posts an update each time an episode starts and stops.

Janice Wei photographs the crater for the park service whenever an episode starts. A big fountain sounds like a roaring jet engine, or like surf breaking, and she feels the heat of it on her face from more than a mile (1.6 km) away⁶¹.

A Japanese traveller writing as sooi checked the webcam over breakfast in May 2026, drove up to the Keanakākoʻi overlook and found people who had brought their own chairs and settled in to watch. Their companion said it looked like a chocolate fountain⁶². In July 2026 Reion, another Japanese traveller, drove up and saw smoke. An episode began twenty-three days later⁶³.

The park promises nothing. It stays open twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. Entry is $30 a vehicle for seven days, and there is no reservation to miss⁶⁴. You are buying access, not a performance.

Volcano village, below the vent, lives on that difference. Shannon Fisher has run Aloha Crater Lodge there for eighteen years, and says people from elsewhere on the island now book a night rather than drive home, because the lava has a habit of starting very late⁶⁵.

For the people who live under it, the eruption is also a chore that arrives on the roof. Ash and Pele's hair — fine strands of volcanic glass, spun out of molten lava by the wind and named for the volcano goddess — travel more than ten miles (16 km) and land on the roofs, where rain washes them down into the tanks that catch drinking water⁶⁶.

Some of the people at the overlook are working. Huihui Kanahele-Mossman has been up to the crater several times since the eruption began. She watches, then makes herself stop watching and take notes, so that she can set what she has seen against the lava described in chants her school has been performing for generations. She takes a chant she has prepared, and offerings — on one visit awa, a drink made from kava root, and a fern lei. "To be able to actually see that eruption that's described in the mele, that's always exciting to us⁶¹."

Forty-five minutes down the road, Hilo takes 140 inches (3,600 mm) of rain a year. The town is green for it, and the developers who wanted dependable sun built the big resorts on the dry side of the island instead. Gerrit van der Plas came to the island in 2008 and now lives in Volcano village. He could not find honest information about the place, so he started writing his own, and he calls rain-soaked Hilo his favourite city on the island⁶⁷.

Asked to wait, asked in

Presley Wann descends from the families of Hāʻena, at the end of the road on Kauaʻi's north shore. He watched what the traffic to the beach there did to a small place, until the floods of April 2018 washed the road out. "Can you imagine going home and finding hundreds of cars parked up and down the road and people walking in front of your house 24/7 and nobody asked you if it was okay or told you what they were doing?" Two to three thousand vehicles a day were coming down it in that last summer, and his cousin Pua Chin remembers them parked along both sides all the way up past the caves⁶⁸.

Then the road shut for more than a year, and the neighbourhood got something back. Moku Chandler is an elder in Hanalei. "Our rivers ran clear, our beaches were clean, and our families gathered in the road to eat together. For once, it felt like home again."

Hāʻena State Park reopened with a cap of 900 visitors a day, and the families' own organisation took over the bookings. Wann's daughter Lei Wann now directs the botanical garden next door. "We weren't asking for permission. We were asking for support to make our kuleana whole again."

Kainoa Horcajo is a cultural adviser on Molokaʻi, the island hardly anybody goes to, and he keeps places back. "I'm always cautious about what information I give and what places I take visitors. For far too long those special places here — and everywhere else in the world — have been prostituted and advertised in such a way that brings about their demise⁷⁰."

The exception on that island is Hālawa Valley, where the Solatorio family bring visitors in on terms they set themselves. The family gave Dalene and Pete Heck cloth to wear and offerings to carry, and walked them in through the mud behind a guide who blew a conch shell and waited each time for an answer before going on. At the entrance one of the party sang a request to come in, and Anakala Pilipo Solatorio sang back the names of the ancestors who granted it. Then everyone pressed foreheads and shared breath, took off their shoes and ate poi with their fingers. Both Anakala Pilipo and his son Greg said the same sentence that day. "Culture is sacred, not secret⁷¹."

On the road to Hāna, on Maui's eastern coast, visitors and the people driving to work meet on the same narrow tarmac every morning. Kawai Kimokeo has lived in East Maui his whole life. "They don't hesitate to park anywhere they please and wander into the unknown, forging paths to waterfalls in remote stream areas," he says⁷².

Further round the same island, Lahaina burned on 8 August 2023. Three years on, the houses are going up again on the cleared lots and the shops are not. Daryl Fujiwara went to school in the town and sits on the recovery commission. "This is our opportunity to go back to the town first and be there before they open it up to the world again⁷³." A Maui resident posting as Lei writes on the site Beat of Hawaii: "Most of us do appreciate visitors who come respectfully. But true it's still raw⁷⁴."

Holly Kaʻiakapu is an artist in Hanapēpē on Kauaʻi's west side, and her grandparents both came from the town. "I want curious visitors and people who ask how they can give back⁷⁵."

Nobody is going to adopt you. But the offer stands, most weeks of the year, at a particular hour and in one place. A lifeguard has two minutes before they go back to watching the water. Four kumu on a Monday night will pull the whole room up to dance. There is a bucket of taro and a butter knife and a folding metal chair with your name on it, at five in the morning, on Thursday.