MALIHINI | Visitor

I live on the North East Side of the island of Oahu. To give you a little insight, to get from where I live to Honolulu it takes about an hour. That's basically driving from one side of the island to the other through the middle. Of course with traffic it can take a little longer than that, but we will stick with the hour. To get to the very East side (Kailua) you drive from Laie and about thirty minutes away. But the west side is a lot different. Now when you think of a road trip, you probably think about sitting in the car for many hours at a time, or crossing boarders, but we don't have much of that out here. The reason we call this a road trip is because you have to drive down to Honolulu, and then back up to the west coast. (As you can see from the picture) This takes almost two hours. Not as long as you were probably thinking huh? It's about as long as a road trip can get around here. For some of you, that's crazy and would probably make you crazy. But for me and most of the people around me, we love how close we are to every part of this beautiful island.

We gathered a small group of friends and piled in the car at about 10:00 PM to go set up camp. The fact that we were going to be camping is part of the reason we decided to leave as late as we did. This and the fact that we are college students and always procrastinate everything. After a small pitstop at Foodland to get some snacks for the road, we started our trip west. The beach we camped at is called Makua Beach.

Believe it or we did not get much sleep. But it was all worth it for the view we got at 6:00 AM the next morning (pictured above). This was our view of the sunrise, can you believe that we weren't even on the same side that it was rising? This picture doesn't even do it justice. I wish I could describe all the colors, but you might feel like you're reading a Dr. Seuss story! We originally came to see the dolphins that will pass by this beach and some others along this side most mornings. Unfortunately that wasn't the case for us this time, but that only leaves me with more things to tell you about.

The water on the west side is much clearer than that on the east. I could go into an explanation of why that is, but I'm sure most of you don't want to hear me get all nerdy about water. What I will tell you, is how much fun swimming half a mile into the middle of the ocean and taking pictures with your mates is. That may sound sarcastic but I assure you I am very serious (though I am a distance swimmer and probably enjoy that more than most people). I'm sure you're wondering what we did see. We were lucky enough to see a sea turtle, and loads of fish. There were no dolphins, but the majority of us were still satisfied. I would also highly advise against fishtail braids when snorkeling. They look great in pictures, but if you have long, thick hair like mine, you can expect to have to spend a good amount of time and money paying your friends to untangle your mess.