5 Days in Oahu

This is ʻIolani Palace, finished in November 1882 for King Kalākaua at a cost of more than 340,000 dollars. It is the only royal palace on US soil. Queen Liliʻuokalani was the last monarch to live in it. After the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893 it became the government building, and in 1895 she was held here for nine months in an upstairs room after a failed counter-uprising, where she sewed a quilt that is still on show. The state legislature met in the palace until 1969, and the restoration opened to the public in 1978.

Tickets are for either a guided tour with a docent or a self-led audio tour (60 minutes), covering the first and second floors and, when open, the basement galleries. You wear shoe covers over your shoes, and large bags and backpacks stay outside. The throne room and the Imprisonment Room are the two moments that matter.

Cross the road from the palace and you are at Aliʻiōlani Hale, the old government and courthouse building, with the gilded statue of Kamehameha I in front. The sculptor was Thomas Ridgeway Gould, and this cast was erected in 1883. Kamehameha is the chief who united the islands under one rule in the early 1800s.

A few minutes further is Kawaiahaʻo Church, built of coral stone and known as Hawaiʻi's Westminster Abbey. It was the church of the royal family, and it is the oldest church on Oʻahu. Parts of the Sunday services are still in Hawaiian. Step inside and look at the portraits of the monarchs.

Walk ten minutes northwest to Chinatown, one of the oldest Chinatowns in the United States. Chinese laborers came to work the sugar plantations in the 19th century, and many stayed and opened shops. The area burned in 1886, and again in January 1900, when a fire set to destroy plague-infected buildings jumped out of control in a wind shift. Most of the buildings you see date from the rebuilding of 1901, and almost none is taller than four floors.

Walk Maunakea Street for the lei makers, then go into the Oʻahu Market for the butchers and fish counters. Come in the daytime. After dark the district is quiet and rougher at the edges, so it works better as a lunch stop than an evening one.

Maunakea Marketplace is a covered market hall in the middle of Chinatown, and a cheap place to eat lunch. Look for the counters with a line of locals and point at what the person ahead of you ordered. For a sit-down meal, the noodle and dim sum spots on the surrounding blocks do the job.

Do not fill up completely, because the beach is next. The island's proper local plate comes on day three.

Waikīkī is a Hawaiian name meaning "spouting fresh water," from the springs and streams that once fed the wetlands behind the shore. The beach you see is almost entirely man-made, topped up with sand for a century, and it is divided into named sections: Kūhiō, Queen's, Gray's, Fort DeRussy and Kahanamoku. Walk to Kūhiō Beach near the Duke Kahanamoku statue. Duke, born in Honolulu in 1890, was a five-time Olympic medalist in swimming and the man who took surfing around the world.

The water is mostly calm and shallow, with a long gentle break out on the reef where beginners take lessons. The beach is crowded. That is the honest verdict: it is a city beach, and it is worth an afternoon for the people-watching, the warm water and Diamond Head at the end of the curve.

Hawaiʻi has no daylight saving time, so sunset is early in winter, around 5:50 to 6 pm, and as late as roughly 7:15 pm in June. Be on the sand 20 minutes before, as the sun drops into the ocean and the beachfront hotels switch on their lights.

Stay for the pau hana, the "end of work" hour, when people come down for a drink and a walk. Kalākaua Avenue behind the beach is the busiest stretch of the island at night, and an easy place for a first dinner.

On the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese aircraft sank the battleship USS Arizona in minutes, and 1,177 sailors and Marines died on board. The memorial, dedicated in 1962, is a white building that straddles the sunken hull without touching it. It is reached only by boat. Of the dead, 1,102 are still inside the ship.

The National Park Service program starts at the visitor center with a safety talk, then a boat ride of a few minutes and time on the memorial, with the shape of the hull visible just below the water. Look for the oil that still rises to the surface, which people call the "black tears" of the Arizona. Talking is hushed, shoes are on, and nobody is in a hurry. It is the most moving hour on the island.

The USS Missouri is where World War II ended: the Japanese surrender was signed on its deck in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945. Today it is a museum ship at Pearl Harbor, donated to the memorial association in 1998 and moored near the Arizona, so the war's first day and its last sit within sight of each other.

Walk the decks, find the plaque on the surrender deck and go below if you can. Honest advice: the Arizona is the emotional visit and the Missouri is the showpiece. If you only buy one ticket besides the Arizona, make it this one.

The museum covers the air war in the Pacific, from the attack on December 7 onward, with aircraft on display on Ford Island in the middle of the harbor. If you have energy left, it is the best of the secondary sites.

The alternative is the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum, a World War II submarine you can walk through. It costs about 26 USD (23 EUR), and you pick one, not both, unless you are a history enthusiast.

Helena's is a small, plain diner in Kalihi that has served traditional Hawaiian food since 1946, and it is one of the few restaurants where you can eat the way a Hawaiian family does. Order a combination plate: kalua pig (cooked in an underground oven, or imu), laulau (pork wrapped in taro leaves and steamed), poi (pounded taro paste) and haupia (coconut pudding) for dessert.

Poi is an acquired taste and a staple. It is mildly sour, and people eat it with salty food like the pork.

Ala Moana Beach Park is the city's own beach, a long strip of grass and sand west of Waikīkī with Honolulu's skyline behind it. This is where people who live here swim, jog and picnic, and it feels less like a resort than Waikīkī. Swim where a lifeguard tower is staffed and the water is marked.

Spend an hour in the water, then walk out to Magic Island, the grassy peninsula at the western end.

Pick up a pound of poke on the way, from the fish counter of a supermarket such as Foodland, or from a small shop that sells it by weight. Poke is raw fish cut into cubes and tossed in a sauce, and it came out of Hawaiian fishing households long before it spread across the mainland. Order ahi (tuna) with shoyu and onion, which is the classic, and add a scoop of rice.

Take it to Magic Island and watch the sky change over the water. It is the cheapest good dinner on the island.

Diamond Head, called Lēʻahi in Hawaiian, is a volcanic tuff cone, and the name probably refers to the ridge line, which looks like the dorsal fin of a tuna. British sailors in the 19th century gave it the English name after calcite crystals they took for diamonds on the nearby beach. It is the shape you see at the end of every Waikīkī postcard.

The summit trail is 0.8 miles one way and gains 560 feet, with a steep stretch and a final flight of stairs. It is not accessible by wheelchair. Allow 1.5 to 2 hours in total. The view from the top takes in the whole south shore, from the Waiʻanae mountains to Koko Head.

Portuguese laborers from Madeira and the Azores came to work the sugar plantations in the late 1800s, and they brought the malasada, a fried doughnut with no hole and no filling by default. Leonard's, a family bakery on Kapahulu Avenue, opened in 1952, and it is still the name people give first. It makes them to order, rolled in sugar.

Order two plain, still warm, and eat them on the curb. Custard, coconut and haupia fillings are the usual extras. The line moves fast.

Hanauma Bay is a crater drowned by the sea, a curved bay with a fringing reef and fish you can see from the sand. It was set aside in 1967 as the first Marine Life Conservation District in the state. By the late 1980s up to 13,000 people a day trampled the coral, and the reef closest to the beach died. Today visits are capped, the park is closed two days a week, and every visitor watches a short educational video before going down.

The rules matter. Do not stand on the coral, do not feed the fish, and use mineral sunscreen or a rash guard, because sunscreen from one day takes about two days to cycle out of the bay. Snorkel gear is for rent at the beach. The early entry slots are the clearest and emptiest, so book the first one you can.

The Kalanianaʻole Highway runs along the edge of a lava coastline. At Halona, a lookout above the sea cliffs, waves push through a lava shelf and spray out of the Halona Blowhole, higher when the swell is up. Stay behind the railing: the rocks are slippery and the lava is sharp.

A few minutes on, Makapuʻu Lookout looks over Makapuʻu Point and the Windward coast. For a longer walk, the paved Makapuʻu Point Lighthouse Trail is about two miles round trip, with a steady climb and no shade. On the way is Sandy Beach, known for a hard shorebreak. Look at it, but do not swim unless you are an experienced bodysurfer and the lifeguard says it's fine.

Rainbow Drive-In, on the corner of Kanaina and Kapahulu, has been serving plate lunches since 1961 from a window with picnic tables beside it. A plate lunch is the island's everyday meal: two scoops of rice, macaroni salad and a main course, a descendant of the Japanese bento lunches plantation workers carried into the fields. Order the loco moco or a mixed plate.

Loco moco is rice, a hamburger patty, brown gravy and a fried egg, supposedly invented in 1949 at the Lincoln Grill in Hilo. Honest verdict: it looks like an unfashionable plate and it is better than it looks. Eat it hot.

Back in Waikīkī, check whether a free hula show is on at the Kūhiō Beach hula mound this week. Shows have run on some early evenings, but the schedule changes.

Hula is not a tourist invention. It tells stories and keeps genealogy, and it is taught in schools called hālau.

Fifteen minutes from Waikīkī, the road climbs into Nuʻuanu Valley and stops at a lookout on the edge of the Koʻolau range, about 1,200 feet up. The wind through the notch is usually strong enough to lean on. Below is the whole Windward coast: Kāneʻohe Bay, Kailua and the ocean.

This is also a battlefield. In 1795 Kamehameha I's army drove the defenders of Oʻahu up the valley and off the cliff, ending the fight for the island, and in 1898 road workers found about 800 skulls here. Read the signs, take your photos and hold on to your hat.

Kailua means "two seas" or "two currents," and its beach is a crescent about 2.5 miles long with soft white sand and a gentle slope, with no coral heads close to shore. Steady trade winds make it a top spot for windsurfing and kitesurfing. At its southern end is Lanikai, once called Kaʻōhao and renamed in the 1920s, with two little islands, Nā Mokulua, offshore. The islets are seabird sanctuaries, so do not land on them.

Kailua Beach Park has a parking lot. Lanikai has no public lot and a quiet residential street grid where parking is a permanent argument with the neighbors. The city bans it on holiday weekends and has been moving to ban it on the Lanikai loop for good, so read the signs. Park at Kailua Beach Park and walk.

Lunch in Kailua town is Spam musubi: a slice of fried Spam on a block of rice wrapped in a strip of nori. It is the island's best-known snack, found at the register of every convenience store and supermarket, and it started when canned Spam became a staple during and after World War II.

Two people claim to have invented it, a Honolulu shop owner and a restaurant cook on Kauaʻi, and nobody can prove which. Eat one cold, from a store, for the full effect. Add a shave ice from any stand on the main street, and head for Kualoa.

Kualoa is a working cattle ranch of about 4,000 acres in the shadow of steep green ridges, and it is the film set you have already seen. More than 200 movies and television shows were shot here, including Jurassic Park, Jurassic World, Lost, Kong: Skull Island and 50 First Dates. The land was sacred in Hawaiian history long before that. The islet offshore is Mokoliʻi.

Tours start from the ranch center: the Movie Sites & Ranch Tour (1.5 hours), the Jungle Expedition, the Ocean Voyage, and UTV and zipline options that cost much more. The movie tour suits most visitors. It is touristy by design, but the valley is real.

Be honest about what a luau is. A real lūʻau is a family party for a birth, a wedding or a graduation, with the same food and no tickets. What visitors buy is a staged version: a buffet with kalua pig, a show and a dance. It is not a lie, but it is theatre. The Polynesian Cultural Center in Lāʻie, opened in 1963, is the biggest of them. It is a nonprofit owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and it employs students of the neighboring BYU-Hawaiʻi.

Its six villages present the cultures of Polynesia, not only Hawaiʻi: Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Aotearoa and Tahiti. If you want a simpler, free look at Hawaiian culture, skip it. If you want one organized evening with food, fire dancers and Polynesia in one place, it's the best of the options.

Haleʻiwa is the North Shore's main town. Benjamin Dillingham opened a hotel here in 1898 and named it Haleʻiwa, "house of the frigatebird," and built a railway from Honolulu that ended at its front door. The railway is gone, but the plantation-era wooden buildings along Kamehameha Highway are still used as surf shops, galleries and cafes.

Park behind the main street and walk it end to end in half an hour. It is a surf town, not a resort.

Shave ice is not a snow cone. A block of ice is shaved into fine powder, so the syrup soaks in instead of sinking, and it came to Hawaiʻi with Japanese immigrants, who brought kakigōri. Matsumoto has served it in Haleʻiwa since 1951 from a general store, and the line wraps along the front.

Order a small with three flavors, such as guava, lilikoi (passion fruit) and lychee, and add a scoop of ice cream or azuki beans at the bottom. It is the one thing on the island worth waiting in a queue for.

Waimea Bay is a crescent of sand and the best-known big-wave beach in the world. In winter, waves of 20 feet or more are needed for the invitational Eddie Aikau contest, and it is not held every year. On those days stay out of the water and watch from the sand. In summer the bay is often flat and clear enough to swim.

Across the road is Waimea Valley, a botanical garden with a paved trail through themed gardens to a waterfall. Entry starts at 26 USD. The waterfall swim has lifeguards when open, and the trail is shady, a good break from the sun.

Shark's Cove, in Pūpūkea, is a lava rock cove and one of the island's best snorkeling places in summer, with clear water, fish and small tide pools. In winter the swell reaches the cove and it is no place to swim. Sunset Beach, a few miles northeast past Pipeline, is a long sandy beach with strong rip currents when the swell is up.

Your plan depends on the season. In summer, snorkel at Shark's Cove or swim at Sunset Beach. In winter, walk the sand and watch the surfers. Pipeline is next on the way to Sunset Beach.

The Banzai Pipeline breaks over a shallow reef off Ehukai Beach Park, and it is consistently ranked among the world's top surf spots. The name comes from December 1961, when a film-maker saw surfers ride the hollow waves next to a pipeline under construction along the highway. Every December the Triple Crown of Surfing ends with the Pipeline Masters.

In winter, the beach is a gallery: surfers take off a few yards from the sand and the waves break like thunder. In summer it is a calm beach. Stand back from the water line, as winter sets can run far up the sand.

Kahuku is a former sugar town on the northeast tip of the island, and it is known for its shrimp trucks: shrimp fried in butter and garlic and served with two scoops of rice. Giovanni's Shrimp Truck is the best known, with trucks in Kahuku and Haleʻiwa, and you will see the painted vans along the highway.

Eat at a picnic table and peel the shells with your fingers. Honest verdict: it's not subtle food, and it works.