Where everything else covers hiking, eating, volcanoes and surfing.
These posts have turned out to be much harder to write than I thought they would so this is going to be a summary of the highlights or I’ll be here until next year!
Hiking
We managed quite a lot of hiking in our two weeks (even on days that had previously been planned as sitting on the beach days).
One of the highlights was hiking on Kauai from Ke’e Beach to Hanakapi’ai Beach and then inland to Hanakapi’ai Falls. It started with scenery like this:
and ended with an amazing swim under the falls themselves. This was our first full day on Kauai, our first ‘proper’ day of honeymoon and we spent the next two weeks saying “Can you believe we swam under a waterfall?”
Eating
We were mainly too busy/tired to worry about going anywhere particular fancy for eating but there are a couple of places that stood out.
Eggs ‘n Things in Honolulu: Brilliant American breakfasts, pancakes, waffles, omelettes and plenty of other stuff. Perfect either before or after a surf lesson at Waikiki beach.
3660 On The Rise in Honolulu: Hawaiian fusion of Western and Oriental cooking at its finest. We had a taster menu complete with accompanying wines and it was the best meal of the holiday, if not the year.
I should also mention Ken’s House of Pancakes and the Garden Snack Club in Hilo. Both were brilliant, in very different ways!
Volcanoes and lava
We spent a couple of days exploring the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and could have spent much longer if we had had the time.
There was more hiking, this time down, across and back up a volcanic crater. The crater in the photo below is 2 miles across. To really appreciate the scale on this picture, take a look at the largest size that I uploaded to Flickr and see if you can spot the tiny little people.
We also did some volcano exploring outside of the park, including a lava tube cave (Steven included in picture for scale)
and a visit to see hot lava entering the ocean. This was fairly impressive even during daylight hours…
…but magical after sunset.
Surfing
There are deliberately no photographs of Steven and I surfing, despite the desperate efforts of the company we booked our lesson with to take some decent ones. We had our first (but definitely not last) lesson on our last full day in Hawaii and it was even more fun than we thought it was going to be. We weren’t brilliant but both managed to catch a couple of waves to the point of actually standing on the board. Now we just need to go back for long enough to learn to do it properly!
