Danielle hennessy

Oahu Adventures | 24 Hours What To Do

Travel

May 12, 2017

In March I had the opportunity to travel to Hawaii for a wedding photographer conference in Honolulu. I have never been to Hawaii but it was on my destination bucket list. For me budget is important so I connected online with a few photographers attending the conference to share a hotel room with me and crossed my fingers we would all get along. Thankfully for me my roomies were so awesome! As soon as I arrived my one roommate, Alyssa, asked if I wanted to rent a car for 24 hours and we could go see more of the island to which I obviously replied “heck yes!”.

So we GPS walked it to find the Budget car rental across the street from the Hilton then my fear set in…. would I the driver be able to see over the steering wheel in this rental car!!?? For real my biggest fear because I once rented a vehicle in San Diego and I had to use my pillow from the hotel to roll up and sit on to see and at this point lets be honest I wasn’t carrying my pillow through Hawaii just in case! We get in our little car and thankfully it adjusted enough for me! So off we set on an adventure with this shinny silver car for 24 hours.

We had zero plans/itinerary all we knew was we wanted to see the island as much as we could. We started driving on Pali Highway and saw a gorgeous interesting spot but didn’t have enough time to stop so we kept going until we saw a pullout spot which turned out to be Nu‘uanu Pali Lookout. You have to pay for parking here but thankfully it was busy with other tourists stopping and just recycling their parking pass to a new arrival. The views were gorgeous so we took some photos and carried on… the original place we missed turns out it was Manoa Falls which only means we need to go back one day!

Next stop was Kualoa Ranch. We didn’t have reservations but assumed we could just drive through ourselves, not the case. So we contemplated booking a tour but they just finished for the day so we opted to come back in the morning so we could to the movie scene tour. As we were leaving we saw a gorgeous rainbow and thought lets just chase rainbows for a while. So we headed up along Kaneohe Bay and literally just drove then turned around chasing the rainbows now this was Hawaii right!? We stopped along random beach spots on the side of the road and just took it all in wishing we had brought along our snorkel gear….oops forgot that!

Next we decided to venture back towards Waikiki and see what else we could find. We decided to take a different route back because why travel the same road twice? We took the H3 which is the most gorgeous freeway I have ever seen (photo below). We were afraid to pullover to get any photos even though there was no traffic around! This freeway goes through the Tetsuo Harano tunnels through the Koolau Range seriously stunning views! We were told that if it was raining enough we would see dozens of waterfalls along this route but unfortunately it wasn’t raining hard enough as we drove through!

oahu, hawaii photographer, destination photographer, los cabos wedding photographer, los cabos photographer, places to see in hawaii, must see in oahu

Photo credit used with permission and edited: Flickr/ChrisG

Next up was photographing the milky way at night out at Lanai Lookout out on the lava rock! I didn’t bring a tripod so I used a rolled up towel. It turned out to be cloudy but we still shot away anyways. We left as the rain started so that we could get a solid 3 hours sleep before heading out for the 4am hike!

Our morning hike goal was to get the sunrise so we started our hike in the dark at Makapu‘U Point. You have to get there early for good parking or you will be adding on a lot more time to hike and it will be busy. We got there around 4:45 am. It took us about 28 minutes to get to the top where we veered onto a dirt trail to get to the lighthouse. Along the hike up you could hear humpback whales, it was incredible! As the sun started to come up we were also greeted with rainbows and the sights of whales breaching below us… could it get any better? The rain started to come so we decided to head down and wow did it pour on us.
Next up was to go get rain coats and snorkel gear before heading to Kualoa Ranch for that movie scene tour. This time we decided to take a scenic route along the Kamehameha Highway however this road was not very scenic and quite rough and tight in spots so I wouldn’t recommend it.
I am not a tourist following person I prefer to do my own thing so the bus movie tour wasn’t really for me but they did give a lot of great information on the history of the place that I otherwise would not have known. Seeing where scenes from 50 First Dates was filmed and some Hawaii 5-O was so cool!
After this the weather did not cooperate. We went to Kuaola Regional Park and Beach however the water was a bit chilly and rough from the rain coming in. We wanted to see the view of where the Haiku stairs were so we drove around in the rain to see them from the freeway which took a few wrong turns but eventually we got to see the view of these crazy stairs from the highway since hiking them was definitely out of the question (the budget traveler in me didn’t want a $1000 fine).
That was the end of the 24 hour car rental which honestly was not enough time to see it all! I feel like another 24 hours and we would have gotten a lot more in! That night we opt’d on a sunset cruise with the hope we would see more whales which we heard 1 but weren’t quick enough with the camera. Till next time Hawaii….

 

 
Reply...