A Day with a Car on Oahu

 There are a number of places to see on Oahu that are not in Honolulu or Waikiki, so we decided to try to rent a car and drive around the island.  We found and bought a paper road map of Oahu and used it to plan things out.  For example, my first idea was simply to drive all around the island.  I expected there was a road that would do that.  It’s only 227 miles, so seems do-able.  But it turns out that there is no road that goes all the way around.  The western-most part of Oahu is Kaela Point.  Highway 930 comes up from the South, but according to the map just stops.  There is something called a “Jeep Trial” that continues to the point but is labeled “unsafe conditions 4WD only”.  The same thing happens along the North shore.

So instead we decided to drive up the middle of the island, thru a valley between two mountain ranges.  Plus there was stuff to see in the valley.  Then from there around the island to the East, coming back to Waikiki and Honolulu.  It seemed the least expensive car rental was from the airport, so we started by going to the airport on the bus.

An 8AM bus got us to the airport by 9AM, followed by a short walk to the car rental counters.  We had reserved a small car, but when we got there they didn’t have any of those ready, so they gave us a Camero convertible.

It was in pretty poor shape.  There was litter left in the back, in the trunk, in the center console.  There was no fluid in the windshield washers.  Every time you turned the car on, the whole day, the car itself said that it needed a new oil filter, and a new air filter.  The car complained about low tire pressure.  Having all these computerized sensors and displays really does not help if you neglect your cars.  But we were able to get them to fix the low tire pressure, and we were off.

We took highway H1 north.  Our first stop was the Waialae Botanical Garden.  We wandered in all the plants.

Then it was on to the Dole Pineapple plantation. This turned out to be a complete tourist trap.  The actual growing of pineapples has mostly been move to the Philippines, we were told.  Thee was a small sample plot, and big signs saying how things used to be done.

We ate lunch at Waialua, on the North Shore.  Then we started driving along the North Shore on highway 83.  That took more attention than I expected.  It’s a two lane road — one lane in each direction — and very busy.  There were several places where they were working on, I think, the telephone pole wiring that ran along side the road, and when they did that they parked their equipment in one lane, and reduced the road to one lane with a flagman to alternate traffic in that lane.  Which, as you would expect, meant long lines of stopped cars waiting to get past.  

Plus the speed limit on the road was 35 mph, with stretches dropping to 25.  We saw one place where they lowered the speed limit to 25 followed immediately after it with a school zone and a “speed limit when light is flashing” of … 25 mph.

The next stop was the Polynesian Cultural Center which is a “Worlds Fair” sort of presentation of the life, history and culture of 6 Polynesian island groupings: Samoa, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii, Tahiti, and Tonga.

But we were stopped before entering for not having tickets.  Tickets were about $100.  Per person.  So we passed on that.  There was some sort of option of seeing something if we took a bus tour of the place with the Mormons.  Apparently the Mormons have a big presence with the Polynesian Cultural Center, but we didn’t think that would be worth the aggravation either.

So back on the road.  As we drove along, the terrain changed from the standard flat area along the coast and beach to these high, tree covered mountains that just dropped right down to the water.  We stopped at Kahana Bay, at the Kahana Valley State Park and just marveled at the scenery — the mountains, the ocean, the sand, the foliage,

It was so expansive, it takes two panorama photos to capture it all.

This was getting to be close to 3pm which was not that late, but we knew that the sun sets earlier than I would expect (certainly by 6pm),  and we wanted to see Koko head. So instead of continuing down 83, we took off on 63 which went up and over the Koolau Range of mountains (actually there was a tunnel, so we didn’t go completely up and over), and Koko head from that side.  Even so, by the time we got there it was too late to see the Koko crater (that requires some hiking), but we did get to see the Halona Blowhole.

Then it was back to Honolulu to return the car.  We ate dinner first, to let traffic die down.  Then I dropped Linda at the Ala Moana Mall, to let her take a bus back to the room while I continued on to return the car. (There was no reason for both of us to go back to the airport; she got back to the room just as I was returning the car at the airport.)