If you’re planning a repeat visit to Hawaii, you’ll find several attractions and opportunities for exploration that weren’t around in the Aloha State last year.
Most of these are here on the island of Oahu. But Kauai, Maui and the Big Island also weigh in with a few new features too.
OAHU
The Battleship Missouri: At long last, the USS Missouri, the ship known as the “Mighty Mo,” has found a permanent home at Pearl Harbor, anchored near the floating USS Arizona Memorial. The Missouri was the stage for the signing of the peace treaty between the U.S. and Japan in Tokyo Bay 53 years ago.
The Arizona and the Missouri have recently been described here as “book ends,” symbolizing both the beginning and the end of World War II. The Arizona is arguably the most popular visitor attraction in the state, and members of the Missouri Memorial Association hope that much of that will rub off on her new neighbor.
You can get a good look at the Missouri from the Arizona Memorial now, but the formerly mothballed battleship won’t be open to the public on a regular basis until January, after considerable sprucing up.
– Tourist trap: The Dole Pineapple people have razed the riding stables next to their large pavilion in Wahiawa and planted enough well-trimmed hibiscus bushes to assure themselves an entry in the 1999 Guinness Book of World Records as the World’s Largest Maze.
Now’s the time to go, before the slow-growing hedge gets above adult eye level, and you’ve still got a shot at finding your way out without a map. Watch your kids for an idea of what things will be like for everyone in a year or so. Cost to get lost is $2.50 for the kids, $4.50 for grownups.
– The convention center: Waikiki’s most dramatic recent addition, a large multimillion-dollar construction just across the Kalakaua Avenue bridge on the other side of the Ala Wai canal, is locked up tighter than a Hawaiian pahu drum most of the time, as far as the individual traveler is concerned. That’s the large new Hawaii Convention Center, a gleaming glass and steel structure designed to attract more mass meetings to the state.
– Butterfly encounter: You can see the butterflies flutter by in the new facility for admirers of lepidopterans at the Waimea Valley & Adventure Park (formerly Waimea Falls Park) on Oahu’s North Shore. You walk right in among monarchs, swallowtails and other species in the main part of the cage, then admire the pupa and chrysalis stages of insect life in separate display cases.
The park is under new management, which has suffered some criticism for firing a few of its more scientific staff. (Also, you can no longer swim at the falls, apparently another one of those “liability” things.) But the commercial enterprise may reap some public relations rewards for this new ecological effort.
The butterfly house is most interesting on occasions when there is a friendly park employee hanging around to explain things. The park is also inaugurating a new Jungle Trek, a hike over rough terrain to a treehouse with a view over the valley. Admission to the park is $24 for adults, $12 for children 4-12.
– Seaplane sightseeing: In a shower of spray you’re away on aerial flightseeing tours that begin and end in Keehi Lagoon, where the floating China Clippers used to land and take off back in the 1930s.
Island Seaplane Tours is banking on this new and somewhat special thrill in half-hour and one-hour narrated tours over Oahu, at $79 and $129, respectively. The two-plane fleet consists of a six-passenger DeHavilland Beaver and a four-passenger Cessna 206.
– Midway flights: Nearby, Honolulu Airport is now the launching pad for new jet flights to Midway Islands, a former naval base northwest of Oahu. Formerly reached via slow prop fights from Kauai, a newly tourist-oriented Midway is now administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It welcomes as many as 100 visitors at a time who want to investigate military ruins, gooney birds and other wildlife on this tiny, once-inaccessible, two-island atoll.
Jet flights by Aloha Airlines make the 1,200-mile flight in just three hours. There are also fishing and diving programs. Accommodations are in former naval officers’ quarters.
KAUAI
Coffee country: Although most mainlanders are aware of the Kona coffee grown for years on the Big Island of Hawaii, the island of Kauai has gradually begun replacing some of its disappearing sugar and pineapple plantations with acres of coffee vines. Now a museum on that aromatic motif has been opened by the Kauai Coffee Co. on the Koloa Estate near Eleele.
The new visitor center is about 17 miles from the Lihue Airport, on Hawaii Highway 540, and will certainly be a coffee stop and shop for some on the way to or from Waimea Canyon.
– Also on Kauai, the National Tropical Botanical Garden has opened a free visitor center in a former plantation supervisor’s house, just across the road from Spouting Horn. It still costs $25, however, to tour the garden.
MAUI
Water world: The Valley Isle is proudest of the new Maui Ocean Center. Among other features, it includes a plexiglass tunnel that conceivably could give the fish the impression that you are the one in the aquarium.
There are plenty of turtles, sharks, rays and eels along with many colorful species you might not catch sight of while doing your own snorkeling. And, of course, there is Hawaii’s famous state fish with the long name, the humuhumunukunukuapua’a. Admission is $17.50 for adults; small fry 3-12 get in for $12.
BIG ISLAND OF HAWAII
Flume ride: Perhaps the most dramatic and original new thrill of 1998 in Hawaii is provided by the Kohala Mountain Kayak Cruise, a legacy of the decline of sugar production on the Big Island.
This is no up-the-lazy-river, Sunday afternoon excursion. Instead, it is an often fast-paced, three-hour guided ride through tunnels and over flumes along a portion of the historic Kohala ditch, which provided water for the plantations for 70 years. Cost for the unique and sometimes wet experience is $75 for adults, $55 for children aged 5-18.
