Hawaii Trip: Part II

Part II of this trip’s post will be a little simpler.  More pictures, less details.  (Yay pictures!)

Here’s what we did:

Sunday:  Went to church in a local Honolulu Latter-day Saint ward, hiked up to Manoa Falls, watched Lilo and Stitch in our room (very appropriate for Hawaii), ended the night with a walk around Waikiki area.

Mosaic of Christ on Latter-day Saint Tabernacle in Honolulu.

Monday:  Visited Pearl Harbor and the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial, visited the Dole Plantation, hiked the Haiku Stairs, ate malasadas, apparently a  Portuguese donut.

Fuel still bubbling up from the USS Arizona.

Remains of USS Arizona

Dole Whip!

Eric cheating in the Dole Plantation maze.

Creme-filled malasadas.

This day needs a little bit more explanation with the Haiku Stairs.  Technically we broke the law doing this hike…let me explain myself before you start judging us so harshly! Sheesh.  Due to problems with noise and parking from inconsiderate tourists going on this hike, the stairs have been shut down to the public.  They have guards at the entrance of the stairs to keep people from going up, but it doesn’t keep hardcore hikers (like us…well, we try to be) away.  Everywhere online are instructions on how to safely do the hike and especially on how to get around the guard.  Most say to get there when he/she wasn’t on duty.  The guard would typically began his/her day at the entrance around 4:00am, so hikers arrive before then to start the hike.  The deal is they usually only stop you from going up the stairs, but if a guard is there when you come back down, he/she is usually chill about it even asking how the hike is. 

Just now when talking about the guard hours, I used past tense because the hours recently changed from 4:00am to 12:00pm to 24/7.  Very recently, so recently, Eric and I didn’t know about it.  We arrive at the stairs around 3:00pm to find a guard in his vehicle.  We waited around for an hour, checked the entrance again, and saw that a different guard was on duty.  Discouraged, we began heading back to our car until we came across two girls heading up towards the entrance.  Thinking there might be strength in numbers and hoping the guard would be nice, we went back to the entrance.  We approached the guards vehicle together.  She asked us if we planned to go up the stairs.  Yes, of course.  Instead of turning us away, like we thought she would, she told us to find a way around her and then we’d be fine.  We weren’t allowed to use that entrance, but if we somehow found another way to the stairs, we could do the hike.  Ten or twenty minutes later, after climbing through a patch of bamboo, we came across another path to the stairs and began our hike.

This hike is called the “Stairway to Heaven.”  It used to be a path for going up the mountain towards a radio station that was set up during World War II.  It deteriorated over time but was fixed just a few years ago.  The hike is completely made of up stairs going up one of the tallest mountains in Oahu.  It’s an elevation of 2,800 feet and has 3,922 steps.

It was tiring.  The base of the hike is
below the highway.

Tuesday:  Visited a beach on north shore and the residents of that beach (sea turtles!), ate musubi, ate more malasadas and bought a few extra for Wednesday morning (because they’re that good).

Random kid trying to be a sea turtle.

A Hawaiian specialty:  spam musubi.