Farmers World Tour: A full circuit of the island of Oahu

Today we spent the day touring round the whole of the island. It was a very long day (8am to 6pm) and non stop. We joined a group tour mainly full of Americans, we wanted to get out of the city and see the island as its not somewhere we would ever probably visit again.

First stop out of Waikiki was to Diamond Head where we saw hundreds of surfers trying to catch a good break. We then travelled to a beautiful beach called Hanauma Bay. This was where apparently Elvis filmed a famous scene from a film (forgotten the name – sorry Mum!). It did look gorgeous down there with loads of lucky people swimming and snorkelling. We then drove further around the coast stopping at various scenic locations (including the spot where the beach scene in “From Here to Eternity” was shot, (in fact we saw loads of filming locations such as Lost, Karate Kid, Jurassic Park & 50 First Dates).

We then visited the Byodo-In Temple which is a Japanese temple built by the local population there (for a while we felt like we were back in China). We also went to the north part of the island (called the North Shore) where the massive waves were with some brave surfers having a go. Along this coast we were lucky enough to see a green sea turtle who had come in to the beach for a rest.

The rest of the tour was a bit of a let down and consisted of visiting 4 different gift shops that all sold the same type of tat. The rest of the tour group were lapping it up and bought bag fulls. We did go to the Dole plantation (where they grow the pineapples that we have tinned). Unfortunately this turned out to be just a gift shop and we did not see many actual pineapples themselves (apart from in the ice cream). Our American fellow group members were purchasing bright yellow t shirts with “Dole” written on them (don’t think this word has quite the same meaning in the US as in the UK). We did drive back via the US naval base at Pearl Harbour.

So an interesting day all round. Tomorrow we are flying over to the more rural island of Kauai where we are hiring a car and hope to explore at a more leisurely pace.