On a bit of an overcast day, we went out to see Pearl Harbor which is, surprisingly for America, a free National Park site. They had a series of museums there talking about the attacks and subsequent war with Japan, and various monuments and memorials.

The most busy and poignant monument required a short boat ride out to the USS Arizona (we had to pre-book a ticket for this), which remains sunk at the bottom of the harbor and now has a floating monument building above where it lies, in honour of those who lost their lives on the ship and remain entombed there. Those who survived the attack and have since died have often had their ashes taken to the site and sunk to join their crewmates.

Manoa Falls

The next day we decided to catch an Uber out to a small town called Manoa, where we stopped first of all for a nice breakfast and coffee. We “shared” the Macadamia nut and banana pancakes to give us the energy for a hike afterwards:

From there we walked about 30 mins across town to get to a trail head (1.7 miles each way) which leads up through a lush rainforest-type area, before reaching a 100 foot waterfall.

It was quite different scenery to being in the city area and near Waikiki beach and it was a nice, but quite steep, hike there and back.

Our last evening on Oahu

Since this was our last evening on the island, we decided to go out for some happy hour drinks and a pizza at the Maui Brewing Co which had a nice rooftop bar overlooking the main boulevard of the Waikiki area.

We then moved on to a bar called “Deck.” (yes, with the full stop on it) which had a rooftop patio overlooking Diamond Head, which we’d hiked a couple of days before. This had amazing views and we had chance to try our first Mai Tai of the trip:

On the way back there was a brilliant sunset over Waikiki beach, so we had a wander down there, stopping to see some live Hawaiian music and hula dancing at a stage they had set up there

Oh and while we were in town we spotted a couple of places that reminded us of you, Dave Wright 🙂 An aptly named surf shop and coffee place, and a bar which had an “interesting” hula girl statue – a lot of people seemed to be posing for pics with her!

We have now moved on to our second Hawaiian island – Kauai. Lucy is going to post an update on our time here so far soon.

Si