Honolulu

We spent a few days in Honolulu, and I thought it was a super interesting city. It has its pros and cons, but overall, I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. I thought it would be a lot more touristy than it actually was, and I don't know if this is a naive perspective but I thought the whole city functioned really well too.

The Neighborhoods

Honolulu's geography reminds me of San Diego's, but taken to an extreme. I love seeing cities that are built around some sort of geographical constraints, and Honolulu certainly has a lot of that to deal with. On one side, you have the Pacific Ocean, and on the other, you have a wall of mountains. Between the two lie various canals and hills and craters. There is a dynamism that makes the city very interesting to just be in.

We stayed in Waikiki, which is basically entirely bounded by the ocean and the Ala Wai canal. As a long thin strip, if you're in Waikiki then you're basically always within a few blocks of the ocean, which gives the entire area a very beachy feel. Obviously, it is super touristy with its resorts and luxury shopping, but it's not as annoying and in-your-face with a lot of places I've been to, and it was surprisingly easy to find affordable food and nice uncrowded spots on the beach.

Chinatown felt like more of a typical downtown area in terms of its regular grid layout. When we were there I was immediately skeptical of the Chinese on every street sign, because other Chinatowns around the country do things like this too but have absolutely no other semblance of actual Chinese culture left (Washington D.C. is a particularly egregious example). However, walking around a bit, it actually felt like this Chinatown might still be kind of a "real" Chinatown in the sense that there are actually Chinese stores that Chinese people go to.

One day we walked from Diamond Head all the way down to the central area of Kaimuki, because Rob wanted to go to a crack seed store (more on that later). This was an utterly residential neighborhood, but I enjoyed the walk because of the local topography. On one side, you have a crater, and on the other, you have this extremely intimidating residential hill rising straight up, extremely reminiscent of San Francisco. At the bottom of that hill, I saw that the street was aptly named "Wilhelmina Rise".

Overall I thought that Honolulu had a very organic feel to it. It's touristy, but very much holds up on its own outside of that. This was different from to other well-known vacation destinations I've been to, which seemed to have utterly succumbed to tourism with aggressive vendors everywhere who shove things in your face and feed you crappy overpriced food. I think that the "aloha spirit" that I saw referenced everywhere is alive and well.

The Food

Yum! I really loved the food in Honolulu and Hawaii in general. Spam musubi is cheap and ubiquitous, as is poke. In general I really loved the overwhelmingly Asian bent. All the food trucks we tried took a little longer than your typical mainland food truck, but in general the food ended up tasting much fresher than I'm used to.

The fruit was incredible too. One day we took a slight detour to go to Frankie's Nursery for some fresh fruit, and they had all sorts of really nice fruit like various varieties of mango and guava, and things like canistel and sapodilla which are pretty much impossible to find in the country otherwise. We were also there during lychee season; there were many roadside stands selling these, and they were absolutely delicious.

One thing I hadn't heard of before coming to Hawaii was Li Hing Mui powder, which is an Asian-rooted plum powder that is a super common coating for candies. There are these establishments called "crack seed stores" which are full of jars selling various dried fruits covered in this powder. We went to the one in Kaimuki one day on Waialae and Koko Head, and bought various salted plums and such. It was really unique and I thought it was super cool.

Besides those places, here is some other food in the greater Honolulu area that we really liked:

The Infrastructure

It's always a good sign that a city prioritizes good transportation when you walk out of an airport and see some sort of metro line. Unfortunately, Honolulu's version is rather new and doesn't make it from the airport to downtown yet, but supposedly it's under construction, and I think that's great.

Nevertheless, we found the bus system in Honolulu to be very useful and effective. Buses ran frequently between places we wanted to go, including an express line between the airport and Waikiki. Ridership was high amongst both locals and tourists, and with the Holo card that's reloadable online it was really easy to use as well. If a city has good public transportation then I have a strong preference to using it over taxis and rideshares, and Honolulu definitely hits the mark.

We did have a rental car to drive to Rob's aunt's home on the windward side, as well as my friend's wedding in Ko Olina. I found the whole driving experience to be pretty congested and slow everywhere. Part of this is probably due to the number of cars being much higher than the roads were intended for, but I think part of it is also very much by design: there were speed bumps absolutely everywhere, and the speed limit on many roads was half of what a similar road would be in New York. I'm not totally sure how I feel about this; maybe if I lived in Hawaii then I would feel the island time more and get used to it.

I also wanted to note how clean it was everywhere. Waikiki in particular was completely spotless all the time (including from plant matter like leaves), but everywhere we went just felt like it was taken care of.