Sunday, October 31, 2010

Oahu - Waikiki Beach

Last week we had an opportunity to travel to Oahu for several days and visit this awesome island.
Our hotel was located a couple of blocks from the famous Waikiki Beach. 

The beach was really beautiful. The water was really calm compared to what we had left behind in Hanalei. The only issue I had was the crowds. People everywhere made it almost impossible to walk along the beach.

I guess I've become spoiled by Kauai's pristine beaches where I can roam among very few or no tourists at all.

It was strange to see sky scrapers so close to the beach. Just a block away from the water and I felt like I was in a big metropolitan area somewhere in the continental US. It seemed odd to see people dressed in high fashion business suits next to tourists in swimming attire carrying their surf board.

There were a lot of Japanese tourists visiting Honolulu. They have entire malls dedicated to them. I walked through one of them and could not understand the signage on the store's billboards because it was all in foreign language.

Waikiki Beach has a pier similar to the one in Hanalei Bay. Along it there are fish so accustomed to being fed by passer-byers that every time we leaned over to look into the water they would stick half of their head out of the water to catch food.